What follows is an excerpt from “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” a new report by the Palestinian Feminist Collective, with support from the Progressive International. Released on June 30, 2026, the report documents Israel’s systemic, calculated, and institutionalized use of sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. The excerpt has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Download the full 187-page report at predatorystate.org.
There have been an estimated “three million life-years” of Palestinians lost in Gaza, mostly women and children, since October 2023. Israel continues to commit mass murder with the openly stated intention to eradicate Palestine. It also restricts movement, confining and obstructing the movement of Palestinians living under its military occupation, and engaging in 24/7 surveillance of our communities. The denial of Palestinian sovereignty, safety, and freedom of movement has impacted the regeneration of our communities, with Palestinian elders, women, children, and men all targeted for extermination. Our research has documented systematic and institutional practices of gendered and sexualized violence against Palestinians since October 2023. Through the process of documenting and analyzing these practices, we have also identified consistent patterns and methods that make this violence possible at every level: discursive, representational, spiritual, psychological, corporeal, environmental, and collective. These patterns and methods include colonial constructions of Palestinian men, the reliance on security theology, mass rape accusations with genocidal intent, the use of liberal feminist discourses of sexualized violence, and racialized and sexualized violence against Palestinian men.
The racialized constructions of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim men as other, violent, aggressive, and sexually deviant mirror the colonial histories and patterns across colonial projects where Indigenous and Black men have been imagined as threats, primarily to white women. The fact that fabricated graphic accounts of the rape of some 300 Israeli women on October 7, 2023 immediately circulated before and even without independent, thorough investigations points to the weaponization of such allegations to construct Palestinians as barbaric and depraved. For decades, the international community and Israel have remained silent about the rape of Palestinian women. Yet, after October 7, Israeli settler women have been positioned as the ultimate victims. This double standard replicates a historical pattern: the feminine fragility of white — and in this case, Jewish — women is weaponized to construct the image of the dangerous Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim man.
On November 18, 2023, Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor, produced a segment with alleged testimonies about “rape crimes” on October 7. One of the testimonies came from a video of an IOF soldier, claiming to be a paramedic who was among the first to respond at the Be’eri Kibbutz. With his back turned to the camera, he states that two young sisters (ages thirteen and fifteen) were found killed in a house, one of them naked, with semen on her. A December 1, 2023, Mondoweiss investigative piece into the Tapper story found that “every single witness and expert in the CNN report proves to either be lacking in credibility or have ties to Israeli government officials and institutions.” The story’s holes were largely due to the lack of evidence documenting two young girls matching that description at that site. Within weeks of Tapper’s report, Israeli state spokesmen and affiliated groups launched a major campaign alleging mass rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters on October 7. Feminist scholars and activists were subsequently criminalized and punished for pointing to the lack of forensic evidence for these alleged rapes. About a month after the CNN report, The New York Times (NYT) published the infamous “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” article. The piece was perhaps the first from a mainstream news source to claim a thorough, independent journalistic investigation into the allegations against Hamas had been conducted. NYT reportedly examined “video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and [conducted] interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors.”
Fabricating accusations of sexual assault not only serves to legitimize oppression, violence, and even genocide, but it also functions to elevate and exaggerate incidental claims of sexualized violence while obscuring systematic and institutional forms of colonial sexualized violence, including the sexual torture and rape of Palestinian detainees and prisoners, reproductive violence, and sexualized humiliation that Palestinians have been subjected to for decades. The “Me Too” catchphrase, for example, was refashioned in a campaign called “Me Too Unless You Are a Jew.” The campaign founders sought to create an emergency international call to “be the voice of all Israeli women who were brutally raped, abused, burned, beheaded and murdered.” These paradigms invert and obscure power relations. When the “Me Too” movement first appeared, its goal was to empower survivors to speak out against men in power and the patriarchal structures of industries and the state that protect and enable perpetrators of sexualized violence. In the context of Palestine, the alleged victims identify with the structure of power, not as victims of it. Israeli and Zionist politicians weaponized the allegations of mass rape to justify genocide and provide cover for Israel’s sexualized violence against Palestinians. High-profile, white, colonial feminists weighed in, perpetuating the lies about mass rape. The colonial and imperialist feminist strategy of co-opting feminist movement catchphrases to serve state power was evidenced by the fact that in December 2023, the primary architects of the genocide, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden, condemned international organizations for their silence on the alleged rapes of Israeli women on October 7. Meanwhile, these figures have never spoken of or denounced the sexualized violence enacted upon Palestinian men, women, and children, despite ample documentation. When Bret Stephens wrote in the NYT that “silence is violence, but not when it comes to Israeli rape victims,” it was a clear example of an appropriation of a catchphrase, initially meant to address structures of patriarchal power, to obfuscate structural power and colonial domination in the context of Palestine. Without the impediments to documentation that Palestinians face, the Israeli state was able to supply virtually no evidence for its claims, expecting instead that the allegations would be taken as fact and that no questions would be raised pertaining to the structural power relation between Israelis and Palestinians: the former an occupying military force and the latter a colonized, deprived, and subjugated people.
In the context of military occupation, normative patriarchal relations inscribed in power must be reconsidered. Scholars of gender studies have extensively researched how systemic sexualized violence, for instance, has been perpetrated against Arab and Muslim men alongside U.S. military invasions and occupations. In the case of Abu Ghraib, a U.S. prison camp in Iraq, evidence of U.S. female soldiers sexually abusing Iraqi men highlights the ways in which imperial and colonial material conditions can alter the power dynamics traditionally associated with sexualized violence. Dr. Jasbir Puar writes about the specific role that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism has in these cases of militarized, sexualized violence. She highlights the fact that it is the external perception of gendered dynamics, roles, and expectations in Arab/Muslim cultures that informs the kinds of violence Arab men and boys are subjected to. Identifying patterns of sexualized violence in other military occupations is essential to understanding why so many of the documented reports of sexualized violence in this report are from Palestinian men and boys. Over the course of many years, there have been numerous videos, photographs, and testimonies of the IOF beating, laughing at, and physically dragging Palestinian men who are either stripped nude or in their underwear. These events occur in public places, in front of other men, with the explicit goal of sexualized humiliation. The racialized portrayal of Arab/Muslim/Palestinian men as savage rapists not only distorts perceptions of relations inscribed in colonial and imperial power but also obscures the way they, too, are subjected to systematic sexualized violence by occupation forces.
When Israel uses falsified allegations of sexualized violence supposedly perpetrated by Palestinians to establish moral justification for genocide, it is reversing the realities of power, repositioning Israeli settlers as victims and Indigenous Palestinians as perpetrators. And while this reality-bending is a form of epistemic violence, even worse is the way it manufactures consent for mass extermination through genocide. While currently focused on the now largely debunked allegations that Hamas systematically sexually assaulted settler women on October 7, it is important to consider why such allegations became so widely disseminated and upheld even when admittedly fabricated. Understanding that racially colonized and Indigenous men are portrayed by colonial and imperial regimes as hyper-violent, culturally backward, and politically antithetical to modernity and progress is paramount to exposing the ways accusations of sexualized violence have been weaponized by Israel to justify genocide in Gaza and renewed wars across the region. Such gendered stereotypes position the colonial and white or Western culture, women, and men as the progressive and morally superior counterpart, greenlighting any actions taken by the dominant group as aligned with progress and modernity for the greater good. However, beyond this othering, these depictions work to activate and justify colonial violence. As we have seen with the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its forever so-called “War on Terror,” racist constructions of Arab and Muslim men as terrorists and uncivilized savages are intentionally manufactured to solicit consent for imperialist warfare. These racial and colonial conjurings are central to understanding the contemporary accusations of sexualized violence leveled against Palestinian men in the wake of October 7, 2023.
This piece appears in the twenty-third issue of The New York War Crimes.