In December 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.
Since then, multiple Palestinian testimonies have emerged, enough to fill the pages of reports by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Among the most harrowing incidents was a leaked video of five Israeli officers gang raping a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison. An Israeli court not only acquitted the officers, but Israeli society celebrated them as heroes and protested their trial in infamous “right-to-rape” rallies. Still, when American journalist Nicholas Kristof published his opinion essay bemoaning impunity for the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity in The New York Times, he insisted that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” (The Israeli government threatened to sue the paper of record for blood libel nonetheless.)
While Kristof, the UN, and human rights organizations are right to scrutinize the lack of concern and accountability for the sexual abuse of Palestinians, they have rarely asked how sexualized violence has functioned within Israel’s wider system of conquest, occupation and domination.
On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation. A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men. Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”
Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler colonialism and is not unique to Israel. Here in the United States, another settler colonial state, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has highlighted the impunity surrounding the sexual assault of indigenous women on reservations where overlapping US and native criminal jurisdictions have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. That it remains a significantly under-resourced and unaddressed crisis is not an accident.
Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction. Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.
Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety. Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses. The PFC report traces this history from before the establishment of Israel, into the present and intensified genocide in Gaza, to illustrate how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In it, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War, and the rape of grassroots organizers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023–that is, before the October 7, 2023. The report also provides an analysis of the unfounded mass rape accusations against Hamas militants to demonstrate how such narratives work to further racialize Palestinian society as uncivilized and unworthy of life.
From being used as a method to expel Palestinians from their land in 1948 to the use of gendered sexualized violence to torture Palestinian detainees and prisoners in the wake of the 1967 War, and beyond, the report shows that while sexualized violence has changed frequency and form, it has remained a feature of settler-colonial displacement and oppression.
The United States cannot treat this as someone else’s crime. US officials have been told about these abuses. US weapons and diplomatic support continue to shield the system in which they occur. Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.
Nada Elia
Nada Elia is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, specializing in transnational, decolonial, and gender struggles, with a focus on Arab America and Palestine. A scholar-activist, Elia is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She is the author of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine (Pluto, 2023), and has contributed chapters to numerous anthologies, including The Case for Sanctions Against Israel (Haymarket, 2020).
Noura Erakat
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the co-author, with John Reynolds, of the upcoming book Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew from Haymarket Books.
Re: “….showing it isn’t incidental abuse but a deliberate tool of ethnic cleansing and control.”
The New Yorker just posted a long article on what was going on inside the Biden administration in the early months of the war; buy it, borrow it or steal it if you must, it’s impossible to read this and not grasp that Israel is using the excuse of getting rid of Hamas as a cover up for getting rid of Palestinians. One paragraph will have to do, emphasis mine:
The Israel Defense Forces say that they always follow the laws of armed conflict and try to minimize civilian harm. But alarms about potential war crimes began ringing inside the Biden Administration soon after Israel began its counterattack on Gaza. By November 1, 2023, the Palestinian death toll was at least eighty-eight hundred, including more than fifty-eight hundred women and children. Israeli jets were conducting as many as eight hundred strikes a day on northern Gaza, and Administration officials who were closely tracking the war told me that Israeli military planners could not possibly have preselected or so quickly identified that many legitimate military targets, such as tunnel entrances, rocket launchers, and Hamas leaders. Nor could the Israelis have carefully weighed whether the risk to civilian lives and infrastructure was proportionate to the military value of each target. Startlingly, the strikes appeared to move in a geographical line from the northeast to the southwest, flattening whole neighborhoods in a way that suggested little differentiation between civilian and military structures. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, anxiously asked his staff how Israel could justify this scale of destruction. A senior State Department official told me, “We were all shocked at how aggressive and deadly it was, and asking, ‘What the fuck are they doing?’ ”
How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—and Iran | The New Yorker
Max Blumenthal wrote about the systemic sexual violence Israel uses in his old classic “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel”. Blumenthal has this comment on X:
Max Blumenthal on X: “Israel has been viciously raping and sexually abusing Palestinians since its foundation This is from Alfred Lilienthal’s 1978 “The Zionist Connection,” citing reports on Israel’s torture of Rasmea Odeh (After moving to the US in 1994, Rasmea became a community leader in Chicago https://t.co/KUcv6MWg4w” / X
“Israel has been viciously raping and sexually abusing Palestinians since its foundation. This is from Alfred Lilienthal’s 1978 “The Zionist Connection”, citing reports on Israel’s torture of Rasmeah Odeh”.
Nicholas Kristof responds below Blumenthal’s post.