How Israel uses sexual violence as a tool of genocide

In Axis Rules in Occupied Europe, the book in which he coined the term “genocide,” Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin explains that this crime does not necessarily involve killing the entirety of the targeted people, but the killing of their identity, their soul, through attacks on their dignity, their leaders, and their culture. Lemkin cites systematic attacks on the political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral institutions, which allow the country committing genocide to “win the peace even though the war itself is lost.”

Such attacks, which have given us terms like domicide, scholasticide, urbicide, ecocide, and reproductive genocide, have been the daily fare of Palestinians since 7 October 2023, along with the manufactured famine and the harrowing accounts of sexual violence by Israeli soldiers, police, and corrections officers against Palestinian prisoners.

And sexual violence, sexual assault, and rape, as is widely acknowledged, have lifelong consequences. It is no accident that Israel has engaged in these attacks in its desire to jeopardise Palestinian life for generations, so as to “win the peace” once the active military assaults are over.

It is in this context that, on 30 June 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) released the meticulously researched, painstakingly documented report ‘A Predatory State: Israeli Systematic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians’, about the decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men. Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it constitutes necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice.

One important aspect of this report is its historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorised Palestinians, to the present-day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons. The continuity of Israeli systematic sexual violence is staggering, and should lay to rest any attempt to rationalise the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens. Instead, it must be understood for the purpose it serves: the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Killing the spirit of the colonised

Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler-colonial states in their attempt to disrupt and destroy Indigenous culture, which is viewed as a threat to their existence. We all know about the sexual violence that Indigenous children endured in the residential schools here on Turtle Island (US), where almost all kidnapped children were raped by the school staff, in most cases, Christian priests and nuns who imposed strict discipline to suppress native culture.

Indigenous communities are still grappling with the devastation these assaults wreaked. The motto of these “schools” was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” The European colonisers knew they were crushing the soul of the children – that is, of the future generations – by sexually abusing them.

Today, Israel is also attacking the very soul of Palestinians through its sexual abuse of men, women, and children. The photos of dozens of men stripped to their underwear, the gang rape of prisoners, the torture of the most respected and loved members of society, such as Dr. Abu Safiya, as well as the nightmarish testimonies shared by survivors, are a spiritual blow to all Palestinians.

This is an accelerated phenomenon, but by no means a new development. It started with the Zionist militia attacks before May 1948, when rape was used as a tool to terrorise the Palestinian people into fleeing. Later, it is Israeli “security forces,” that is, soldiers and prison guards, who have historically engaged in sexualised and gendered violence, including rape, against Palestinians.

The Israeli state has always known about the pattern of violence and condoned it. Beginning in 1948, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, kept a diary in which he recorded many instances of rape and gang rape of Palestinian women and girls, many of which go into graphic detail. In one instance, in 1949, for example, he writes that a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, described as “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, they 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.”

Brutal cleansing

Indeed, Zionism as an ideology necessitates the “removal” of Palestinians from this world. In the 1980s, Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoaned the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough, was reading through the Israeli state archives and noted many reported instances of rape. He added that “[b]ecause 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 rapes were used to terrorise the Indigenous population into leaving their towns and villages.  Moreover, the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these rapes, as they entered them into the official records of the Zionist entity. Again, this is fully in keeping with settler colonial regimes’ desire to shatter social cohesion in the communities they want to erase.

The Predatory State report traces this history from before the birth of the Israeli state, into the occupation of the entire homeland in 1967, all the way to the present intensified genocide in Gaza, as it documents how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In Part One, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention, as well as the aftermath of the 1967 War, the rape of grassroots organisers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023, that is, before the 7 October. Part Two focuses on the intensified use of rape post 7 October, as Israel intensified its genocidal war on the starved, dispossessed, endlessly displaced refugees in the world’s largest torture camp.

From being used as a method to expel Palestinians from their land in 1948 to the use of 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 an ongoing systematic tool of settler-colonial displacement and oppression.

It is time we acknowledge that Israel has used sexual torture as an inherent tool of genocide, and it is our duty to act upon this knowledge and hold the predatory state accountable for its crimes against the very humanity of the Indigenous Palestinian people. The harm that Israel has done is unfathomable, but we cannot let Israel win the peace once the ongoing military assault is over.

Nada Elia is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington University, and author of Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine.

Follow her on X: @nadaelia48

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.