Both female and male Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women from Gaza and the occupied West Bank – and Israeli citizens were allowed to watch and film the humiliation of stripped prisoners as a ‘zoo’-like form of entertainment – according to testimonies presented during the UN Commission of Inquiry’s public hearing on earlier this month.

Kifaya Khraim, International Advocacy Officer at the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, and ‘Witness 3’, a Palestinian woman human rights activist, gave the UN detailed accounts of sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender-based violence committed by Israeli security forces and settlers. The testimony was part of the Commission’s third round of hearings documenting violations against Palestinians, particularly crimes targeting women’s bodies:

Israel has claimed that Israeli women have suffered sexual violence at the hands of Palestinians on 7 October 2023 and since, but these claims have been shown to be either without foundation or proven untrue, both by independent examination of evidence and by United Nations investigators. As the saying goes, it seems that Israeli accusations are a form of confession, exposing the dark mind of settler-colonialism, Zionism and occupation.