[News] Understanding the mindset behind Israel’s usage of rape as a weapon of genocide
Anti-Imperialist News
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Tue Nov 18 10:36:27 EST 2025
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Understanding the mindset behind Israel’s usage of rape as a weapon of
genocide
Adam Horowitz
November 17, 2025
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Screenshot-2025-11-17-at-3.02.59-PM-1024x576.png
Israelis cheer two of the five Israeli soldiers accused of raping a
Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention center, during a court
hearing in Jerusalem on November 10, 2025 (Photo: Middle East Eye
screenshot via X/Twitter)
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) recently released a
report
<https://pchrgaza.org/pchr-documents-testimonies-of-systematic-rape-and-sexual-torture-in-israeli-detention-against-released-palestinian-detainees/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOCczNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFNeUJWdVVvRVFwVDNFOFp2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHg4WB7HEQbMpZSVyuqoDE-aox5Gr7CbnzYGlY8GjIcvPVEiiBw3shn9M0I7K_aem_A5kJbiatRoC0UD5Skg98yg>
documenting the testimonies of Palestinian rape victims who were
recently released from Israeli torture camps and returned to Gaza. The
testimonies are beyond horrific. They include stories of the repeated
rape of women and men, the penetration of victims’ anuses, vaginas, and
mouths with human sexual organs, as well as the repeated insertion of
items like sticks and bottles, and even the use of dogs trained to
sexually penetrate humans.
The testimonies are shocking and nearly impossible to read, but
essential for us to understand. Both so that we can honor the victims of
Israel’s horrible crimes, but also so we can understand the Israeli
mindset that leads to such actions.
“PCHR affirms that the testimonies do not reflect isolated incidents but
constitute a systematic policy practiced in the context of the ongoing
crime of genocide against more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza
Strip, including thousands of detainees held in prisons and military
camps closed to international monitoring bodies, including the
International Committee of the Red Cross,” the report reads.
The victims in the PCHR report tell of being photographed and filmed
while being raped and while fully naked, with threats of this material
being uploaded to social media. The testimonies themselves are extremely
graphic and violent. Here are just some brief passages to give you an idea.
N.A., a 42-year-old Palestinian woman and mother who was arrested while
passing through an Israeli checkpoint set up in northern Gaza in
November 2024 says:
I cannot describe what I felt; I wished for death every moment.
After they raped me, I was left alone in the same room, hands still
cuffed to the bed and without clothes for many hours. I could hear
the soldiers outside speaking Hebrew and laughing. Later, I was
raped again vaginally. I screamed, but they beat me whenever I tried
to resist. After more than an hour, I’m not sure about the time, a
masked soldier entered, removed my blindfold, lifted his face
covering; he had white skin and was tall. He asked if I spoke
English; I said no. He said he was Russian and ordered me to
masturbate his penis. I refused, and he hit me in the face after
raping me.
That day I was raped twice. I was left naked the whole day in the
room where I spent three days. On the first day I was raped twice;
on the second day I was raped twice; on the third day I remained
without clothes while they looked at me through the door slit and
filmed me. One soldier said they would post my photos on social
media. While I was in the room, my period started; then they told me
to put on clothes and transferred me to another room.”
In another incident documented in the PCHR report, A.A., a 35-year-old
Palestinian man and father who was arrested while at Al-Shifa Hospital
in Gaza City in March 2024, testified about his rape by a trained dog
inside the Sde Teiman camp:
“I was moved to a section I didn’t know inside Sde Teiman. During
the first weeks there, amid repeated suppression operations, I was
taken with a group of detainees in a degrading manner to a place far
from the cameras—a passage between sections. We were stripped
completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on
me. Then one of the dogs raped me—the dog did it deliberately,
knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my
anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying
pepper spray in our faces. The dog’s assault lasted about three
minutes; the overall suppression lasted about three hours. Because
of the severe beating, all of us sustained injuries across our
bodies. I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep
humiliation; I lost control because I could never have imagined
experiencing such a thing.”
These testimonies give more detail to Israel’s system of torture. And of
course, there is a separate gang-rape case
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/outrage-over-video-leak-of-israeli-soldiers-gang-rape-of-palestinian-exposes-rot-in-israeli-society/>
rocking Israel these days, involving the leak of a surveillance-camera
tape over a year ago, showing a group of soldiers raping a Palestinian
hostage at the Sde Teiman prison. But the only reason that has become a
controversy in Israel is because the tape was leaked. The rapists
themselves are being celebrated as heroes societally, even inside the
halls of the Israeli Supreme Court <https://fb.watch/Dlk4H5rKlo/>. The
rapes described in the PCHR report, as well as what took place at Sde
Teiman, were part of a network of torture camps, as revealed in
B’tselem’s report
<https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell> last year,
“Welcome to Hell.”
“These testimonies indicate that arrests were carried out without any
legal justification other than the victims being residents of the Gaza
Strip, as part of a policy of collective punishment designed to
humiliate Palestinians and inflict maximum psychological and physical
harm on them. These practices are part and parcel of the ongoing crime
of genocide against the Palestinian people in the Strip”, PCHR writes.
So, what is in the minds of these soldiers when they perform these acts?
What leads them, on a more systemic level?
The answer comes down to the Israeli desire to dehumanize and dominate
the Palestinians.
The dehumanization of Palestinians has been systemic throughout Israel’s
Apartheid regime, and this gets manifested in those tasked with
enforcing that system. That system has existed for as long as Israel has
existed, but it certainly intensified following October 7, 2023, as the
more liberal kibbutz society fully embraced Zionism’s genocidal thinking
much more explicitly
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/kibbutz-leader-confirms-movements-role-in-establishing-and-maintaining-israeli-apartheid/>.
This gave the right wing the green light, and impunity, to unleash the
genocide in Gaza, where there have been hardly any restraints.
In a recent lecture <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFoHXuhq9mU> at
UMass Amherst, Prof. Norman Finkelstein discussed the three main goals
for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and these can be used to understand how
the systematic Israeli rape of Palestinians has been used as a tool of
domination. Finkelstein lays out the three goals as: revenge and
bloodlust for the October 7 attack, restoring deterrence capacity, or
“the Arab world’s fear” of Israel, and finally to solve the Gaza problem
once and for all – probably through eventual ethnic cleansing by making
Gaza uninhabitable.
It is clear that the systematic use of rape is a strategy to carry these
out.
This is where it is also instructive to remember how Israel used false
stories of Hamas carrying out systemic rapes as persistent propaganda
piece to justify its genocide, as well as the ways that Israeli
leadership demonized Palestinians right after October 7, especially by
calling them “human animals.” There has been no evidence to back this up
Israel’s allegations, but as they say, every accusation is a confession.
The widespread Israeli belief that Gazans are rapists clearly played a
part in the mass Israeli raping of Palestinian detainees. When Israeli
citizens were brought to watch nude Palestinian hostages being tortured
<https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6153>, like in some insane zoo,
the soldiers reportedly said: “These are Hamas terrorists who killed you
and raped your women on 7 October,” as Omar Abu Mudallah testified to
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (he experienced this five times). Mosab
Abu Toha told Ryan Grim
<https://x.com/PixieOfDeath/status/1944667372205310424?s=20> at Drop
Site News how, under his abduction, he was forced to strip naked, where
one of the Israeli soldiers who “spoke good Arabic” said: “you raped our
women… We are going to show you.” It is clear that to Israeli soldiers,
raping Palestinians – men and women alike – was a means of exacting
revenge.
Meanwhile, the term “human animals
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/israeli-rape-of-detainees-is-the-result-of-a-society-that-sees-palestinians-as-human-animals/>”
was first used by the former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on
October 9, 2023, and repeated both on that day and later by other
Israeli officials. The usage of actual animals – dogs – to rape
Palestinian hostages with is a manifestation of this view
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/israeli-rape-of-detainees-is-the-result-of-a-society-that-sees-palestinians-as-human-animals/>.
Although it is important to note that Israel’s use of rape and degrading
treatment against Palestinians is not new, in Gaza or even against children.
The UN Fact-finding mission report of 2009, following Israel’s 2008-9
‘Cast Lead’ onslaught (also known as the ‘Goldstone report’), noted that
“the soldiers deliberately subjected civilians, including women and
children, to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment throughout their
ordeal in order to terrorize, intimidate and humiliate them” (p. 243),
reemphasizing that “what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of
2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate
attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian
population” (p. 408).
And Israel’s history of raping Palestinian detainees goes back well
before October 2023. When Defense for Children International Palestine
(DCIP) reported in the rape of a teenage Palestinian detainee in 2021
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-ngo-shut-down-reporting-sexual-assault-ex-us>,
Israel responded
<https://mondoweiss.net/2022/08/the-gantz-doctrine-declares-war-on-palestinian-society-itself/>
by declaring DCIP a “terrorist organisation.” Israel obviously tried to
silence the matter, but since the genocide has unleashed this avalanche
of violence, including sexual violence, it has become a matter that can
no longer be silenced. The only aspect that seems to be new, however, is
the Israeli projection of sexual violence on Palestinians.
In the end, it is useful to analyze what goes on in the heads of
genocidal rapists, but this can risk obscuring the operative necessity –
to stop it. There are currently no actual forces that seem capable of
doing so, since it is doubtful that even the perpetrators of the
recorded gang rape at Sde Teiman are going to receive a semblance of
accountability in the Israeli legal system. This level of violence and
impunity requires massive international intervention. A ceasefire will
not solve it.
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