A demonstrator protests outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City, calling attention to sexual violence against women during Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, December 4, 2023. (Yakov Binyamin/Flash90)

Last month, a report for the UN Human Rights Council affirmed — as Palestinians have long asserted — that Israel has systematically employed sexual violence and gender-based crimes against Palestinian women, men, and children since October 7.

The investigation, released alongside harrowing testimonies from survivors and witnesses, civil society representatives, academics, lawyers, and medical experts during a two-day hearing in Geneva, reached several key conclusions that, in my view, demand immediate global attention and action.

First, Israeli forces’ use of gender-based violence has escalated dramatically in both scale and intensity since October 7, becoming “systematic.” These crimes have become a tool of collective oppression to dismantle Palestinian families and communities from within — a tactic borrowed from other campaigns of ethnic violence and genocide in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Iraq, where women’s bodies became battlegrounds.

Second, Israeli military detention facilities have become the epicenters of the most egregious kinds of gender-based violence. Beyond the widely circulated images of stripped Palestinian prisoners in Gaza, the report recorded testimonies from facilities like Sde Teiman, where prisoners, stripped of legal protections and far from the view of the media, have faced rape, sexual degradation, and torture. In some cases, like that of the doctor Adnan Al-Bursh, the prisoners died reportedly as a direct result of the sexual abuse they suffered while in custody.

Third, the report documents the proliferation of gender-based violence against Palestinians in the digital realm. Vulnerable groups, particularly women and youth, have faced shaming, doxing and exploitation of their sexual orientation or private behavior as tools of coercion and intimidation.

Palestinian men are detained by Israeli forces in the streets of Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023. (Social media; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Fourth, the report noted that the use of gender-based violence wasn’t limited to soldiers; Israeli settlers, often acting under the protection of the army, sexually harassed Palestinian women in the West Bank, exploiting traditional gender roles within Palestinian society as a method of oppression.

The findings of the report, which was conducted by the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, drew not only from survivor accounts but also from Israeli soldiers’ own social media posts. Perpetrators proudly documented their “heroic” acts of masculine vengeance — rummaging through Palestinians women’s drawers, posing in their underwear, and scrawling misogynistic graffiti inside occupied homes in Gaza. Though much of this content was later scrubbed from social platforms, it remains archived in the UN report for posterity.

But while such videos and images are undeniably reprehensible and criminal, they pale in comparison to the more extreme sexual violence documented in the report. Forced public stripping and invasive searches, forcible removal of women’s hijabs, the filming of sexual degradation under threat of further violence, threats and acts of rape as a form of torture — all of these constitute not just violations of dignity, but profound physical and sexual assault.

The report affirms that both women and men have been the targets of these crimes, and implicates Israeli media outlets in normalizing them by hosting commentators and presenters who discussed using sexual violence as a legitimate tool in the war. For example, it highlights comments that Eliyahu Yosian from the Misgav Institute made on the far-right Channel 14, saying: “The woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, and the pregnant woman is an enemy” (after Channel 14 posted the clip online, it received over 1.6 million views).

According to the testimonies presented to the commission, female victims often find it extremely difficult to report their abuse. One notable example is that of an Israeli military checkpoint near Hebron, where a soldier would routinely expose himself to passing Palestinian women. A female student who must go through the checkpoint on her way to school would likely choose to remain silent about the abuse, since speaking out would almost certainly mean she would have to stop her studies.

Palestinians make their way through an Israeli checkpoint near the West Bank city of Bethlehem, to attend the Friday prayers of the Ramadan in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, March 21, 2025. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

Attacks on reproductive health facilities in Gaza forms another aspect of Israel’s gender-based war crimes. According to the report, Israeli forces systematically targeted Gaza’s maternal health infrastructure, fertility treatment facilities, and indeed any institution related to reproductive health. The findings also include instances of snipers shooting at pregnant and elderly women, and doctors having to perform C-sections without disinfectants or anesthesia.

Based on the report’s findings, Navi Pillay, head of the Commission of Inquiry, stated: “There is no avoiding the conclusion that Israel used sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to instill fear and perpetuate a system of oppression undermining their right to self-determination.”

A rude awakening

In contrast to the parallel UN report published in March 2024, which investigated the gender-based crimes committed by Hamas militants against Israeli women on October 7, the current report hardly received any mainstream media coverage at all — whether in Israel or around the world.

As it turns out, even a dramatic escalation in gender-based crimes against women and girls during the war, and the unequivocal determination that Israel’s use of these methods was systematic, rather than merely isolated acts by individual soldiers, wasn’t enough to drive Israeli or international women’s organizations to oppose, condemn, or even call for an urgent examination of the issue. Even the fact that the report was released just days before International Women’s Day didn’t suffice to spark webinars, symposiums, or conferences at universities around the world, nor emergency discussions in parliamentary committees for the advancement of women’s rights.

Here in Israel, reactions have ranged from silence to outright denial. “The UN supports the Nukhba terrorists and Hamas,” said Hagit Pe’er, chairwoman of Na’amat, Israel’s largest women’s organization. “This is a report with a strong stench of antisemitism. This is an attempt to create an alternative and inverted reality in response to the sexual massacre carried out by Hamas against Israeli women and men — while international institutions, including women’s organizations worldwide, remain conspicuously silent. These are the same organizations that condemn any sexual violence, unless the victims are Israeli and Jewish women.”

The premature babies section at the Al-Aqsa Hospital after it was evacuated, in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, August 27, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

I also put the report’s findings to Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari and former chief military prosecutor Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas of the Dina Project, an initiative tasked with documenting Hamas’ sexual violence. They, too, dismissed it as “another step in the campaign to delegitimize Israel.”

“Since its establishment in 2020, the [UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory] has taken a one-sided and anti-Israel bias in the vast majority of its actions, which is clearly reflected in the current report,” Halperin-Kaddari and Zagagi-Pinhas said in response to my inquiry.

“How can the claims made in this report possibly be compared to the brutal crimes of violence systematically and deliberately perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 — horrific acts of rape, genital mutilation, and sexual violence inflicted even on corpses?” they continued. “It is deeply regrettable that, instead of taking action to include Hamas on the blacklist of organizations that commit sexual violence as a weapon of war, the Commission has chosen a different path.

“As to the allegations themselves,” they added, “unlike Hamas — which systematically denies its crimes — if there is basis to any of these claims, Israeli authorities are obliged to duly investigate them.”

Like many women in Israel, I have also experienced a rude feminist awakening during this war. I’ve lost Palestinian comrades who did not like my condemnation of Hamas’ violence against Israeli women on October 7, and I’ve lost Jewish friends who regarded women in Gaza as legitimate targets.

After some painful reflection, I’ve come to learn the strength and courage we women must cultivate to unequivocally denounce any violence against a woman’s body as abhorrent, whether she is Palestinian or Israeli. It should need no explanation that no mother — whether her child has red hair or dark skin, green eyes or brown — should be killed, and that no baby should be fed to the insatiable war machine of power and wealth-hungry men.

We women — young and old, mothers and daughters, feminists and even those who don’t define themselves as such — must raise our voices and say: Enough of this war. This homeland will not be liberated on our bodies, and no future is worth building from the wreckage of our wombs.

Samah Salaime