Palestinian Hostages in Israeli Custody Report Sexual Violence as Israeli Genocide Weapon

Twenty-five Palestinian women and seven Palestinin men who survived captivity in Israel's notorious prisons said they experienced or witnessed sexual violence while held prisoner-hostage by Israeli security and armed foces, according to a new report by a group of Palestinian-American researchers known as the Ahed Tamimi Project.

The Ahed Tamimi Project experts gathered first-hand testimonies from the 32 Palestinian hostages that were released by the Zionist settler army as part of a ceasefire deal earlier this year. The ceasefire was broken by Israel in March and the ethnic cleansing and starvation resumed.    

These testimonies, coupled with forensic reports and photographs and videos from the attacks, led them to conclude that Israel systematically used sexual threats and violence  as a “tactical weapon of war.” By dehumanizing the Palestinian prisoner-hostages, Israel supplements its barbarity on the ground - 65,000 have so far been killed in savage blind bombings of refugee camps and so-called "safe zones" into which Israel pushes the Palestinians before bombing innocent families, including children. It is estimated that 75% of all Gaza Palestinians murdered by ISrael are women and children.

In its latest version, Isdrael's genocidal campaign has used starvation as a weapon of war. By withholding the delivery of food to the Gaza concentration camp, then evicting the United Nations Relief Agency from the territory and pretending to set up its own armed American mercenary-run food distribution centers, Israel adds yet another element to its campaign of causing some much despair among the Palestinian population (2.3 million) that they will "voluntarily relocate" when given the opportunity.

One Palestinian female hostage was beaten and sexually assaulted at gunpoint while in captivity. Men have been sodomized with broom sticks and other implements.The woman hostage said she was tied and chained by the neck for three weeks and was repeatedly teased about the timing of her menstrual cycle. Almost all of the Palestinian prisoner-hostages said they sustained continous verbal and physical sexual harassment, including unwanted touching of private parts. Some of the female prisoner-hostages report threats to photograph them naked and in compromising sexual situations and releasing the photographs on the Internet and in social media.

Israel has in the past been accused by hundreds of international organizations of ignoring widespread sexual violence perpetrated by its soldiers and by the ultra-religious fundamentalist Jewish settler movement.

The Ahed Tamimi Project is a Palestinian-American group that was established after the Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi confronted violent Israeli soldiers on several occasions when the soldiers were dispatched to protect violent Jewish settlers who were attacking her village and other Palestinian villages in the illegally-occupied West Bank of Palestine.

The UN has consistently decried the use of torture and sexual violence by ISrael which has detained more than 15,000 Palestinians over the past 2-3 years without due process, supposedly under an Ottoman law dating back to before the artificial creation of Israel, that allows Israel to indefinitely hold anyone prisoner without any charges. Experts have equated this kidnapping and imprisonment of Palestinians as hostage-holding aiming at using them in negotiations with Palestinian authorities.

Israel continues to deny such reports and claims to conduct investigations, but not one Israeli soldier has ever been held responsible. Spokespersons for the Israeli army and the radical right-wing Jewish supremacist government of Netanyahu continue to deny these reports of sexual violence in Israeli concentration-camp-like prisons as “unfounded lies and allegations.” Israel illegally occupies the Palestinian territories and has responsibilities in regard to international law on human rights and the protection of people under foreign military occupation. But Israel has consistently ignored and violated those charters to which it is a signatory.

The Ahed Tamimi Project researchers have called for Israel to be prosecuted by international courts of justice as the violence, sexual or otherwise, perpetrated in its prisons ought to be recognized as crimes against humanity. But over the decades of Israeli occupation and barbarity, not one soldier or Israeli official has ever been prosecuted and found guilty. The world knows this phenomenon as the "ISraeli exception" which, according to historians and experts, makes Israel the only country in the world to escape adequate and equal treatment before the law on matters of international law. The reason essentially is that the world has been brainwashed to assume that Israelis, as Jews, are by definition victims and therefore must be given sufficient leeway to abuse, torture and genocide other people without suffering any consequences. Evidence to this includes the savagery with which Israel claims to defend itself, the reluctance of European Holocaust perpetrators to condemn their former Jewish victims, and the "groupthink" that has metastatized across the world to never hold "victim" Israel responsible for raping Palestine and its people.