Israel’s Weaponization of Sexual Violence to Uproot Palestinians and Deter All Who Resist
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has escalated its use of sexual violence against Palestinians. Rape, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, sexual torture, and genital violence — in detention, at checkpoints, and during home raids — are forms of a systematic policy Israel pursues against Palestinians.
The most exposed of these crimes was the assault on a Gaza detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman camp in July 2024: leaked footage reported to show soldiers forming a human wall around the detainee and gang-raping him, while medical reports confirmed a torn rectum, broken ribs, and lung injury.
Accountability and an end to complicity now!
Numerous Palestinian, international and UN reports have detailed the systematic, ongoing use of sexual and gender violence.
Already in March 2025 the UN issued a harrowing report “More than a human can bear” concluding that Israel uses sexual and gender violence “as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people. The Commission documented a pattern of sexual violence, including cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and other inhumane acts that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
In May 2026, the UN Secretary General has finally added the Israeli armed forces to the list designating armed forces as implementing patterns of sexual violence in conflict zones.
Not the Body Alone
Sexual violence is a tool within Israel’s broader colonial project. Through it, Israel seeks to strip Palestinians of their humanity, violate their dignity, and spread terror across Palestinian society until its collective will is broken.
It is a policy aimed, as the martyred prisoner Walid Daqqa theorized, at the “molding of consciousness” (ṣahr al-waʿy): targeting Palestinians not only through their bodies, but through their sense of self, safety, dignity, and collective will — in order to deter every impulse to resist.
Emptying the Land Through Fear
In Area C of the occupied West Bank, settlers and soldiers wield sexual violence as a weapon to uproot Palestinians from their land. In a report released in April 2026, the West Bank Protection Consortium — led by the Norwegian Refugee Council — documented that more than 70% of displaced families named sexual threats against women and children as the decisive reason they left their homes.
After these families were driven out, 92% lost their land, 88% lost their homes, and 84% lost their essential assets.
This Is How They Drove Us Out
Across several communities, residents described settlers exposing their genitals before women and children, stalking women on their way to toilets and water points, and threatening them openly with rape — until grazing animals, fetching water, and walking to school all became dangerous.
A woman from one community recalled:
“We left not by our own will… We left after long patience and long suffering. They tried to drive us out in every way. In the end, they resorted to targeting women and terrorizing them. They confined a woman in a room and placed a settler at the door while she was alone inside. That was the last incident before we left — the straw that broke the camel’s back. This method is what forced us to leave our land, in exchange for protecting the women.”
Stop the Wall’s We Will Return report (2024) has documented how settler militias target particularly women and children in their attempt to force them from their communities and land. They would use violence or humiliation, such as bathing naked in Palestinian water tanks in full view of women and children.
An Old Tool of Uprooting
Israel has used sexual violence and rape since the Nakba of 1948, as part of the massacres that emptied the land of its people. Through his work within the Israeli military archives, historian Benny Morris, a Zionist and fervent defender of Israel’s crimes during the Nakba, documented some twelve cases of rape in 1948 alone—most of which ended in murder—and explained that the true number is much higher, because victims do not report the crimes and perpetrators do not confess.
These crimes spanned the country—from Acre and Jaffa on the coast to the Galilee villages of Hunin and Safsaf, to Tantura, Qula, and Abu Shusha. At Safsaf, Zionist forces raped Palestinian women—among them a fourteen-year-old girl—after tying up and shooting the village’s men. These are not the whole story, only the fragments that survived- and Israel is now concealing the very documents that prove it.
The Same Weapon, Against All Who Stand With the Palestinians
Sexual violence does not target Palestinians alone, but everyone who stands beside them. With every attempt to break the siege on Gaza, the same pattern returns: when Israel intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in May 2026, the flotilla’s organizers documented at least fifteen cases of sexual assault against detainees — twelve of them aboard a single Israeli vessel the forces had turned into a makeshift prison, including rape, forcible penetration with a handgun, and filming during forced strip searches.
The same abuses were reported after the earlier interception in October 2025 — a method, repeated. One weapon, one aim: to humiliate every body that stands in the way of uprooting.
Israel’s use of sexual and gender violence aimed at dehumanizing us has not destroyed our dignity nor broken our will to resist.
Resisting their efforts of dehumanization, we Palestinians find our humanity.
Humanity has to end Israel’s colonial and genocidal project for the sake of its own survival.
End complicity – Impose accountability. Now.