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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Understanding the mindset
behind Israel\u2019s usage of rape as a weapon of genocide</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Adam Horowitz</div>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">November
17, 2025</div>
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<div> <img
src="cid:part1.OF00iLd0.4Xv33tJ0@freedomarchives.org"
alt="Screenshot-2025-11-17-at-3.02.59-PM-1024x576.png"
width="394" height="222" class=""><br>
<font size="1">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) </font><br>
<p>The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR)
recently released <a
href="https://pchrgaza.org/pchr-documents-testimonies-of-systematic-rape-and-sexual-torture-in-israeli-detention-against-released-palestinian-detainees/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOCczNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFNeUJWdVVvRVFwVDNFOFp2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHg4WB7HEQbMpZSVyuqoDE-aox5Gr7CbnzYGlY8GjIcvPVEiiBw3shn9M0I7K_aem_A5kJbiatRoC0UD5Skg98yg"
moz-do-not-send="true">a report</a> 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\u2019 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. </p>
<p>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\u2019s horrible crimes,
but also so we can understand the Israeli mindset that
leads to such actions.</p>
<p>\u201cPCHR 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,\u201d the report reads.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>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\u2019m 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.</p>
<p>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.\u201d</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>\u201cI was moved to a section I didn\u2019t 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\u2014a 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\u2014the 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\u2019s 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.\u201d</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These testimonies give more detail to Israel\u2019s system
of torture. And of course, there is a separate <a
href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/outrage-over-video-leak-of-israeli-soldiers-gang-rape-of-palestinian-exposes-rot-in-israeli-society/"
moz-do-not-send="true">gang-rape case</a> 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 <a href="https://fb.watch/Dlk4H5rKlo/"
moz-do-not-send="true">Supreme Court</a>. 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\u2019tselem\u2019s <a
href="https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell"
moz-do-not-send="true">report</a> last year,
\u201cWelcome to Hell.\u201d</p>
<p>\u201cThese 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\u201d,
PCHR writes. </p>
<p>So, what is in the minds of these soldiers when they
perform these acts? What leads them, on a more
systemic level?</p>
<p>The answer comes down to the Israeli desire to
dehumanize and dominate the Palestinians.</p>
<p>The dehumanization of Palestinians has been systemic
throughout Israel\u2019s 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 <a
href="https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/kibbutz-leader-confirms-movements-role-in-establishing-and-maintaining-israeli-apartheid/"
moz-do-not-send="true">embraced Zionism\u2019s genocidal
thinking much more explicitly</a>. This gave the
right wing the green light, and impunity, to unleash
the genocide in Gaza, where there have been hardly any
restraints. </p>
<p>In a recent <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFoHXuhq9mU"
moz-do-not-send="true">lecture</a> at UMass Amherst,
Prof. Norman Finkelstein discussed the three main
goals for Israel\u2019s 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 \u201cthe Arab world\u2019s fear\u201d of
Israel, and finally to solve the Gaza problem once and
for all \u2013 probably through eventual ethnic cleansing
by making Gaza uninhabitable. </p>
<p>It is clear that the systematic use of rape is a
strategy to carry these out. </p>
<p>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 \u201chuman animals.\u201d There
has been no evidence to back this up Israel\u2019s
allegations, but as they say, every accusation is a
confession.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6153"
moz-do-not-send="true">watch nude Palestinian
hostages being tortured</a>, like in some insane
zoo, the soldiers reportedly said: \u201cThese are Hamas
terrorists who killed you and raped your women on 7
October,\u201d as Omar Abu Mudallah testified to Euro-Med
Human Rights Monitor (he experienced this five times).
<a
href="https://x.com/PixieOfDeath/status/1944667372205310424?s=20"
moz-do-not-send="true">Mosab Abu Toha told Ryan Grim</a>
at Drop Site News how, under his abduction, he was
forced to strip naked, where one of the Israeli
soldiers who \u201cspoke good Arabic\u201d said: \u201cyou raped our
women\u2026 We are going to show you.\u201d It is clear that to
Israeli soldiers, raping Palestinians \u2013 men and women
alike \u2013 was a means of exacting revenge. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the term \u201c<a
href="https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/israeli-rape-of-detainees-is-the-result-of-a-society-that-sees-palestinians-as-human-animals/"
moz-do-not-send="true">human animals</a>\u201d 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 \u2013 dogs \u2013 to rape Palestinian hostages
with is a manifestation of this <a
href="https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/israeli-rape-of-detainees-is-the-result-of-a-society-that-sees-palestinians-as-human-animals/"
moz-do-not-send="true">view</a>. </p>
<p>Although it is important to note that Israel\u2019s use of
rape and degrading treatment against Palestinians is
not new, in Gaza or even against children.</p>
<p>The UN Fact-finding mission <a
moz-do-not-send="true">report</a> of 2009, following
Israel\u2019s 2008-9 \u2018Cast Lead\u2019 onslaught (also known as
the \u2018Goldstone report\u2019), noted that \u201cthe 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\u201d (p. 243), reemphasizing
that \u201cwhat 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\u201d
(p. 408). </p>
<p>And Israel\u2019s 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 <a
href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-ngo-shut-down-reporting-sexual-assault-ex-us"
moz-do-not-send="true">2021</a>, Israel <a
href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/08/the-gantz-doctrine-declares-war-on-palestinian-society-itself/"
moz-do-not-send="true">responded</a> by declaring
DCIP a \u201cterrorist organisation.\u201d 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. </p>
<p>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 \u2013 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. </p>
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