Understanding the mindset behind Israel’s usage of rape as a weapon of genocide

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) recently released a report 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 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. 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 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. 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 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, 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 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” 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. 

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, Israel responded 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.