Juan Cole
Informed Comment / March 14, 2025
Ann Arbor – An independent UN commission has found that “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities.”
The commission notes that some 59% of those killed in Gaza whose bodies have been identified are women and children. They note that this percentage is astronomically high: “the Israeli attacks in Gaza are characterised by an extremely high civilian casualty ratio in comparison with other armed conflicts in the last decades.”
Navi Pillay, the Chairperson of the Commission, said, “The evidence collected by the Commission reveals a deplorable increase in sexual and gender-based violence. There is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.”
The report points out that the Israeli army makes exaggerated claims about how many members of the militant Al-Qassam Brigades paramilitary of Hamas it has killed, suggesting that the actual number by last summer could have been as few as 6,000 out of the 30,000 to 40,000 guerrillas. Believing the Israeli estimate of 17,000 militants killed would require believing that all adult males killed in the conflict were Al-Qassam Brigades or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is absurd.
The reason this analysis is important is that if the Israeli military killed 24,000 women, children and old people to get at 6,000 or 8,000 militants, then it is full of people who aren’t very good shots or it is demonstrating a reckless disregard for civilian life, or it is deliberately targeting women and children. About a third of those killed by Israel’s Gaza campaign have been female, whether little girls or teenagers or mothers and grandmothers.
One reason for the large proportion of dead females is that Israeli fighter pilots dropped one-ton bombs on inhabited apartment complexes with the families still inside. Often there appear to have been no military targets associated with these bombings, or they aimed to get at a handful of militants by wiping out entire civilian apartment blocks. The report observes, “Entire families in Gaza have been killed together in their homes in unprecedented numbers; experts have found that, during the first month of the war, more than nine out of ten women and children killed were in residential buildings, and 95 percent of women were killed together with at least one child.”
An aid worker told the UN in August 2024, ““One of my patients had just given birth to twins when her apartment was attacked. The attack happened while the father was at a local government office to register the birth. The woman and her newborns were killed instantly in the attack. The grief following her death was amplified by the fact that there was no militant in sight.”
Although a lot of girls and women were killed by bombs that collapsed their apartments on them, some were also killed by snipers. The Israeli military made arbitrary rules that disallowed the movement of any Palestinians outside, and they ruthlessly shot down people in the street– even people who showed up in their scopes as female noncombatants, In short, Israeli troops deliberately killed a lot of women. Those killed included Christians. The Commission reports, “On 16 December 2023 at around noon, Nahida and Samar Anton, a mother and her adult daughter, were shot and killed by an ISF sniper at the Holy Family Parish, a Catholic church in Gaza City. A witness interviewed by the Commission stated that the two women were shot while on their way to the bathroom, situated in another building that is part of the same compound. According to the witness, Israeli soldiers were deployed in the street behind the church complex and shouted in Arabic that it was forbidden to move outside. The two women left the building to go to the bathroom inside the church complex when they were shot.”
The Israeli military also deliberately destroyed health care facilities for women, including for pregnant women. We know from health studies in the US that doctor visits have a significant impact on cutting down on maternal mortality and mothers dying in childbirth. The Israelis made doctor visits impossible for large numbers of women in Gaza: “Direct attacks on healthcare facilities offering sexual and reproductive healthcare services have impacted about 540,000 women and girls of reproductive age in Gaza … In April 2024, reportedly only two of the 12 partially functioning hospitals previously offering sexual and reproductive healthcare were able to actually provide such services.”
They add, “The situation is still dire. As of January 2025, emergency obstetric and newborn care was available at seven out of 18 partially functional hospitals across Gaza according to OCHA, as well as four out of 11 field hospitals, and a community health centre.”
The UN concludes that “Facilities specifically designated to provide sexual and reproductive healthcare were directly targeted or forced to cease operations, including al-Emirati Maternity Hospital …” It lists many such institutions destroyed by the Israeli army and air force.
The Commission correctly observes that female honour is often an element in modern nationalism, and humiliating women is a way of attacking another nation. Likewise emasculating enemy males or feminizing them is part of psychological warfare. The Commission says, “Israeli soldiers’ aggression and violence increasingly includes sexual acts intended to “feminize” or shame, not only the victim but the Palestinian community as a whole, and an increasing trend to photograph or film these acts. Such acts have a clear link with entrenched gender stereotypes that continue to be intentionally used in attempts to break the sense of community and harm social cohesion, whether the victim is male or female.”
Israeli soldiers in Gaza appear to have been sexually obsessed if their social media postings are any guide. For instance, “a video shows a soldier filming himself while going through underwear and other private belongings in a house in the Gaza Strip, directing gendered and sexualized insults to Palestinian women, stating: “I’ve always said Arabs [female pronouns used] are the biggest sluts out there … There you go, here are the sets [of lingerie] here, inside, another new one in the package, they haven’t opened it yet, look at these sets, who wants elastic bodysuits?”
Then there were the attacks on institutions trying to help abused women, attacks that abused them all over again: “The Commission also documented a deliberate attack in mid-November 2023 on a women’s rights centre working with survivors of gender-based violence in Gaza City. The attack against the centre appeared to have a clear gendered dimension, with soldiers leaving gendered and sexualised insults directed against the Palestinian women in graffiti in Hebrew on the walls of the centre, for example: ‘You sons of bitches, we came here to fuck you, you and your mothers, you bitches’ and ‘The dirty pussies of your prostitutes, you ugly Arab you ugly, you sons of bitches, we will burn you alive you dogs.’” They then bombed the center to smithereens.
Israeli troops also sexually humiliated boys and men, making them strip to their underwear and photographing them.
When Israeli soldiers arrested women they often beat and abused them and photographed them in their underwear. Making detainees strip was common: “The victim stated that women, men, girls and boys were all told to undress at gunpoint at a makeshift checkpoint, create a ball with their clothes and throw their clothes to the ISF personnel. They were told to hold their identity documents high in the air and continue walking while undressed. The ISF said that anyone who did not follow orders would be shot. The men were completely naked while walking and the women were in their underwear.” This was early on in the war.
Thousands of Palestinians were arrested and taken to Israel, where some were sexually abused, with broomsticks inserted into their anuses. One prisoner at Sde Teiman prison camp was sent to hospital with severe anal tearing. “The Commission documented cases of rape and sexual assault of male detainees, including the use of an electrical probe to cause burns to the anus, and the insertion of objects, such as fingers, sticks, broomsticks and vegetables, into the anus and rectum.” Metal objects were also inserted into the penis during such prison rape procedures.
Although the Israeli troops appear to have been creepily obsessed with keeping male prisoners naked and humiliating them sexually and even raping them, they did not leave the women alone either. Torturers seemed to swing both ways: “Female detainees were also subjected to sexual assault and harassment in military and Israel Prison Service facilities, as well as threats to their lives. The sexual assault and harassment included kicking the women’s genitals, touching their breasts, attempting to kiss them, and threats of rape. One female detainee interviewed by the Commission said that a soldier threatened to gang rape her, kill her and burn her children. The soldier asked her: “How do you want us to rape you? one by one or all together?”
The focus on what the Israeli military did to damage maternal health and that of embryos and infants is important because according to the Rome Statute, genocide is defined this way:
“Article 6: Genocide For the purpose of this Statute, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
“‘More than a human can bear’: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023” is the new report on Israeli treatment of Palestinians issued by The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel of the UN Human Rights Council.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan
