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MAHMOOD SANGLAY
From March 11 to 12, 2025, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) held hearings that exposed one of the most disturbing dimensions of Israel’s military occupation: the use of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as an instrument of control and destruction.
Two Palestinian women, Kifaya Khraim of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling and another unnamed advocate (Witness #3), provided harrowing testimonies about the systematic abuse endured by Palestinian women, particularly since the war on Gaza intensified after October 7, 2023.
Just one day later, the UN released its landmark report, ’More Than a Human Can Bear,’ which concluded that Israel’s SGBV tactics—including rape, enforced nudity, genital assaults, and the destruction of reproductive healthcare—are not isolated excesses of war but part of a deliberate, policy-driven strategy. Together, these testimonies and the report expose an evolving war doctrine in which gendered violence serves as a calculated mechanism of oppression and genocide.
Sexual violence as a tool of occupation and genocide
The UN report makes a compelling case showing how Israel’s sexual and reproductive violence is not incidental, but systemic. It arises from a broader matrix of structural violence designed to subjugate Palestinians and undermine their right to self-determination.
The testimonies shared by Khraim and Witness #3 illuminate patterns replicated across checkpoints, detention centres and home raids. These patterns—female detainees stripped and raped, schoolgirls molested at checkpoints, and female prisoners violated with inspection devices—are consistent regardless of geography or facility. That uniformity points to institutionalised violence. The violence is not random but directive, emerging from a military culture where humiliation is operationalised as a form of control.
The Commission’s report confirms this conclusion, asserting that the Israeli military’s use of sexual violence serves ‘to dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part.’ This meets the legal threshold for crimes against humanity—and potentially genocide—under the Rome Statute.
A particularly insidious dimension of Israel’s tactics is its exploitation of Palestinian cultural norms around honour and shame. The testimonies confirm that Israeli forces are acutely aware of the social stigma that sexual violence carries in Palestinian society—and they weaponise that knowledge.
Women are threatened not just with rape but with social ostracisation. The implication is not only physical harm but permanent social exclusion. Families may prevent victims from attending university or marrying. Entire communities are destabilised by the psychological warfare of sexual shame, amplifying the impact of a single assault across generations.
This mirrors other historical instances of ‘honour-targeting’ in conflict zones, where rapes were used not merely to harm but to humiliate communities into submission. In the Palestinian case, this tactic becomes genocidal in intent, aiming to fracture the intergenerational continuity of Palestinian life.
What elevates these violations to genocidal acts is the strategic targeting of reproductive autonomy. The UN report documents the deliberate destruction of maternity wards, the blockade of reproductive healthcare and the starvation of pregnant women. These are not collateral damages. They are precise blows aimed at the biological and social reproduction of the Palestinian people.
One midwife told the Commission: ‘The number of women and girls who have died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth remains unknown.’ But the implication is chilling: Israel is waging war not just on the living, but on the unborn.
The Commission’s findings also underscore how gender-based violence intersects with other identities. Girls, especially adolescents in hijab, face violations that combine Islamophobia with misogyny. The most vulnerable—young, poor, displaced women—are often left without protection or access to redress. As one fieldworker recounted, a teenage girl was forced to undress a stranger at a checkpoint after he refused, a grotesque inversion of gender roles used to degrade both.
Moreover, male detainees also suffer sexualised torture, such as genital beatings and forced nudity, indicating that gendered violence extends beyond women. This confirms that the Israeli state employs sexual violence not only as misogyny, but as a tool of domination over all Palestinians.
Systemic impunity and international complicity
Perhaps most damning is the absolute impunity with which these crimes occur. Despite multiple UN requests, Israel has refused to cooperate with the Commission or initiate any internal investigations. Meanwhile, countries that profess commitment to human rights—such as the United States, Germany, and the UK—continue to arm and diplomatically shield Israel.
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The Commission notes that accountability cannot come solely from within Palestine. It must be enforced by the international community, especially those states enabling the occupation through military and economic support. Without such accountability, international law becomes a hollow promise, and “never again” becomes a slogan without substance.
The testimonies and findings presented by the UN Commission are indictments of a settler-colonial regime that uses gendered terror to destroy a people’s future. The violation of Palestinian women’s bodies is part of the war itself. To ignore this is to condone a system in which rape becomes routine, humiliation policy and motherhood a threat to be eliminated.
In both the hearings and the report, the evidence is overwhelming, the testimonies are chilling and the patterns are deliberate. Israel’s use of sexual and reproductive violence is a strategy of domination and erasure. Yet these crimes persist because they are shielded by the silence and complicity of powerful states. The United States, Britain, Germany and others continue to supply weapons, veto justice and legitimise apartheid. Their hands are not clean. Until Israel is held accountable—not just by human rights advocates, but by the governments that fund its violence—the rape of Palestine will continue, with the West as its enabler.
