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German journalist says she was sexually assaulted in Israeli custody

ILKA | December 26, 2025

A German journalist detained by Israeli forces following the interception of a Gaza-bound aid vessel has accused Israeli prison authorities of sexually assaulting her while in custody, triggering renewed outrage over Israel’s treatment of international activists and detainees.

Anna Liedtke, who was aboard the humanitarian ship Conscience as part of the Freedom Flotilla initiative, said she was raped during a strip search while being transferred between Israeli detention facilities. The flotilla was attempting to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, which human rights groups have long described as illegal and collectively punitive.

Liedtke was held for five days after Israeli forces seized the vessel in late 2025. In her first public testimony, she said the alleged assault did not occur in isolation but was part of repeated abuses during multiple prison transfers.

“We were transferred from one prison to another, and during the strip searches I was raped,” Liedtke said, describing the experience as deeply traumatic and humiliating.

Her account has sparked condemnation from prisoner rights organisations and human rights advocates, who say the allegations fit a long-established pattern of abuse, sexual violence, and mistreatment within Israel’s detention system. Advocacy groups argue that such practices have been systematically used to intimidate, degrade, and silence Palestinians and international solidarity activists alike.

Rights organisations stressed that while Palestinians have for years reported sexual violence, invasive searches, and torture in Israeli prisons, cases involving foreign nationals underscore that Israel’s abusive detention practices extend beyond occupied populations to anyone who challenges its policies.

“The testimony of Anna Liedtke reinforces what Palestinian prisoners, especially women, have been saying for decades,” one rights advocate said. “Israeli detention facilities operate with near-total impunity.”

Calls are now growing for an independent international investigation into the allegations, with activists urging the United Nations and international human rights bodies to intervene. They argue that Israel’s internal investigative mechanisms lack credibility and routinely fail to hold perpetrators accountable.

The Freedom Flotilla coalition said the assault allegation highlights the risks faced by activists attempting to break the siege on Gaza and accused Israel of using violence and sexual abuse as tools of repression. The coalition renewed its demand for an end to the blockade, which has devastated Gaza’s civilian population for more than a decade.

Human rights groups say the case exposes the broader reality of Israel’s detention regime, where activists, journalists, and Palestinians are subjected to violence with little oversight. They warn that without sustained international pressure, such abuses will continue unchecked, further eroding international law and basic human dignity.

December 26, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Lebanese Detainees in Israeli Prisons: When Silence Becomes Surrender

Al-Manar | December 18, 2025

This is no longer a humanitarian file delayed by bureaucracy. It is a national test that Lebanon is failing in slow motion. Lebanese detainees remain locked inside Israeli prisons while their names circulate in press statements, their families count months without news, and the state responds with restraint that borders on abdication. When citizens are taken, hidden, denied Red Cross visits, and subjected to abuse, silence is not prudence. It is complicity by omission.

For an audience that understands the cost of confrontation and the meaning of deterrence, the facts are unmistakable: “Israel” is not holding detainees because it must, but because it can—because the political cost remains low.

File That Refuses to Close

The number of Lebanese detainees currently held by the occupation stands at 19 to 20, based on the latest confirmations from released Palestinian prisoners who encountered Lebanese captives previously listed as missing. The uncertainty itself is revealing. It is the result of deliberate Israeli obstruction, including the ongoing ban on Red Cross visits and the refusal to provide any official accounting. A large group of civilians—fishermen, a shepherd, and workers arrested in their fields—some of whom were detained after the ceasefire was declared.

These are not arrests justified by war. They are acts of abduction, carried out under the cover of “security,” and sustained by international inaction and local hesitation.

The ceasefire of November 27, 2024, was supposed to mark an end. Instead, it marked a shift in method.

Ali Younes was detained after the so-called cessation of hostilities.

Ali Tarhini was arrested inside the Lebanese town of Odeisseh on January 28, 2025.

Mohammad Ali Jheir—a fisherman from Naqoura—was shot with a rubber bullet and taken from his boat by Israeli naval forces, then transferred to Ofer Prison and placed in solitary confinement.

These are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern: ‘Israel’ exploits calm to seize civilians, converting ceasefires into opportunities for leverage. Months later, families still have no official information. The International Committee of the Red Cross has confirmed that Israeli authorities are blocking access to Lebanese detainees. This is not procedural delay—it is policy.

Testimonies from released prisoners speak of severe beatings, humiliation, and sexual abuse—violations that meet the definition of war crimes. The denial of visits is meant to do one thing: keep these crimes out of sight. A prison without witnesses is not detention. It is a black site.

Families Carrying What the State Will Not

With the state moving cautiously, families stepped forward forcefully. From protests outside ESCWA to meetings in Baabda, they have said what officials have not: This is not a humanitarian appeal. It is a demand.

Former detainee Abbas Qabalan spoke of civilians arrested while farming their land.

The mother of Mohammad Abdul Karim Jawad—a civilian nurse—has waited more than a year without a single official update. The wife of Ali Younes called for action “through every legal, diplomatic, and political means.” The mother of Ali Tarhini named the date and place of her son’s arrest—inside Lebanon.

These families are not guessing. They are documenting publicly because the file has been left on their shoulders. Officials have called the detainee file a “priority.” But priorities are measured by action, not vocabulary. So far, the issue has been confined to the so-called mechanism committee, a framework chaired and constrained by U.S. oversight—hardly a venue known for pressuring ‘Israel.’ Rather than securing releases, it has allowed the occupation to freeze the issue while continuing violations.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which should have escalated the file internationally, remains largely absent. No sustained UN campaign. No legal offensive. No international naming and shaming.

This is not incapacity. It is a political choice.

Human rights researcher Ghina Ribaai was direct: Lebanese detainees are paying the price for a state that wasted leverage. The handover of an Israeli detainee without any reciprocal release sent a dangerous message—that ‘Israel’ can detain Lebanese citizens without consequence. That message still stands.

Detainees as Bargaining Chips ‘Israel’ has made its strategy clear. Lebanese detainees are not prisoners—they are hostages, to be traded against unrelated political files: borders, negotiations, “working groups.” Lebanon has rejected this logic rhetorically. But rejection without pressure is empty. ‘Israel’ responds only to cost—political, legal, and strategic.

What Must Change—Now

This file cannot remain seasonal. It requires:

• A clear sovereign decision
• An aggressive diplomatic and legal campaign
• International escalation, not quiet mediation
• Continuous media pressure that keeps the issue alive

For an audience that understands resistance, this truth is familiar: rights are not returned through patience alone. The detainee file is not a test of sympathy. It is a test of statehood.

‘Israel’ does not release prisoners because it is reminded of morality. It releases them when detention becomes expensive. As long as Lebanese detainees remain an afterthought—raised in speeches but not imposed as a cost—’Israel’ will continue to detain, abuse, and bargain.

The families have said it plainly, and history confirms it:

A nation that does not fight for its detainees forfeits a core element of its sovereignty.

In a country whose modern identity was shaped by the principle that prisoners are never abandoned, failure here is not neutrality. It is surrender by silence.

December 20, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Who gets to be a hostage? The language that legitimises Palestinian captivity

By Jwan Zreiq | MEMO | December 17, 2025

The answer lies deeply entangled within global biases in how violence and captivity are framed. Consider two seemingly similar terms: “hostage” and “prisoner.” Hostage evokes an image of innocence violated; a life unjustly taken. Prisoner implies process, legality, perhaps even guilt. A prisoner, after all, tells us less about the person held captive than about the system that confines them. But what happens when the system itself is one of oppression and racial apartheid? Should we blindly adopt these terms without questioning the power structures that deploy them?

The answer here lies within the global biases in how violence and captivity are framed. For instance, consider Israeli soldiers like Matan Angrest, who were captured from his tank following October 2023. International media outlets, such as The New York Times, consistently describe these incidents like Matan as being “kidnapped from his tank,” a phrase that emphasises personal vulnerability while intentionally sidestepping the soldier’s combatant status. This framing shifts focus, drawing on narratives of personal suffering rather than the broader political and military context. As these soldiers are released, they are often publicly reintegrated as civilians and family figures, and some, like Edan Alexander, announced their intent to resume his service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). These statements and the media’s celebration of their return shape perceptions of their humanity, painting IDF prisoners of war as victims of violence rather than active participants in the system of oppression and apartheid against Palestinians.

In contrast, the media reduces Palestinians to the category of “prisoners,” a term that pretends to give legality while erasing the reality of their captivity. Across the West Bank, Israeli forces routinely conduct raids targeting men, women, children and the elderly with neither charges nor trials, a process that is at once arbitrary and normalised. Israeli forces take these individuals hostage through a system designed to make indefinite imprisonment routine under the legal label of “security measures” and “administrative detention.” Violence, home demolitions and the deliberate cultivation of fear accompany these operations, while Israel systematically takes over the surrounding lands to expand its settler colonies.

Right now, thousands of Palestinians remain hostages in Israeli prisons, where they endure systematic torture. The numbers speak for themselves. Prior to recent releases, more than 10,000 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisons, including at least 3,500 in administrative detention without trial. The number of political prisoners had doubled, rising from 5,250 to nearly 10,000. From rape and torture to electric shocks and the full range of degradation that no human being should ever endure, this constant assault on the Palestinian body and soul is inseparable from the system that detains them. Yet, despite overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces arbitrarily hold many Palestinians, the world calls them merely “prisoners.”

One might wonder why Israel bothers with even putting up with the terms of legality; after all, this is a regime whose very logic is apartheid and colonisation. Each raid, each detention, is a small yet indispensable step in the relentless machinery of land seizure. Israel maintains the fiction of legality because international law requires it. The label “prisoner” thus functions to sanitise violations of international law that are, in reality, structural and deliberate. This terminology transforms oppression into procedure, erases the moral weight of captivity and normalises systemic violence. It governs not only how we perceive the victims of violence but whose pain we deem worthy of recognition.

In this discourse, the Palestinian experience is characterised by collective endurance, an abstract suffering with little room for individual human stories. By contrast, Israeli suffering is personalised, humanised and sanctified. Such language, which distinguishes between “hostage” and “prisoner,” produces profound inequalities in empathy and legitimacy, reinforcing power imbalances and shaping international opinion and perception.

The Red Ribbon Movement rejects the sanitised language that permits this violence to continue. The red ribbon is visible refusal, a refusal to accept the terms “administrative detention” and “security measures” for what amounts to collective hostage-taking designed to terrorise an entire population and facilitate ongoing dispossession.

Dr Mustafa Barghouti calls on people worldwide to join the Red Ribbon Movement to wear red ribbons in solidarity with Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons. This visible act of refusal demands that we interrogate the language that permits this violence to continue.

The urgency of this moment demands immediate action and solidarity. We return to the question the labels themselves preserve: who is deemed human enough to be a hostage, and who is simply a statistic?

The red ribbon answers: Palestinians held in Israeli prisons are hostages of apartheid, and the world must recognise this truth now, not later, not eventually, but in this moment of ongoing violence and captivity.

December 17, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli navy arrests 4 fishermen, blows up their boat

Palestinian Information Center – December 14, 2025

GAZA – The Israeli naval forces arrested four Palestinian fishermen off the coast of Gaza’s main port and later blew up their boat, in yet another attack in the ongoing series of violations against Gaza’s fishing community since the start of the war of extermination.

Zakaria Bakr, head of Gaza’s Fishermen’s Union, confirmed the arrests and the destruction of the boat, adding that the Israeli navy has killed around 230 fishermen since the war began. He also noted that 28 fishermen remain in Israeli detention.

According to Bakr, Israel has banned the entry of engines and fishing equipment into Gaza since the beginning of the assault, effectively crippling the fishing sector and depriving roughly 5,000 families who depend on it for their livelihood.

He estimated that the fishing industry is losing $5 million monthly, with total losses exceeding $70 million since the start of the war, due to the destruction of ports, boats, and fishing tools.

The Fishermen’s Union said the sector has suffered systematic destruction, with over 90% of fishing infrastructure, equipment, and private property wiped out in what it described as a campaign to eliminate this vital economic sector and starve thousands of Palestinian families.

Meanwhile, on Sunday morning, Israeli air and artillery strikes targeted areas inside the ceasefire zones in Gaza. Witnesses reported heavy bombardment, especially in the eastern parts of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza and eastern Gaza City.

Israeli naval forces also opened fire indiscriminately off the coast of Khan Yunis, sparking panic among fishermen and local residents.

These attacks are part of continued violations of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Since October 11, these breaches have resulted in 391 Palestinians killed and 1,063 injured.

December 14, 2025 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Indiscriminate killings: New footage refutes Israel’s pretext for Palestinian teen’s killing

17-year-old Palestinian, Ahmed Khalil Rajabi, who was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank
Press TV – December 12, 2025

New footage has emerged that challenges Israel’s justification for the killing of a Palestinian teenager last week in the occupied West Bank, which Israeli troops described as a car-ramming attack.

The footage shows 17-year-old Ahmed Khalil Rajabi approaching Israeli soldiers who signaled for him to stop. His car paused briefly, but as the occupation soldiers advanced, one aimed a gun at his vehicle.

In a bid to save his life, Rajabi reversed and made contact with one of the soldiers. And they reportedly chased him and shot him dead.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah, said, “The teenager was injured and fled towards Hebron. He was later found and killed inside a car. The body is now being withheld by Israeli forces in what is now standard operating procedure.”

The Israeli forces also shot dead a 55-year-old municipal sanitation worker, Ziad Na’im Jabara Abu Dawud, who was in the area during the incident.

Child rights group Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) also questioned Israel’s narrative and quoted Ahmed’s father as saying his son was “visiting a patient at the hospital and was on his way home” when he was shot.

Israeli forces have withheld the body of Rajabi, refusing to allow his family to bury him.

The Israeli regime has escalated its West Bank violence since October 7, 2023, when it launched a genocidal war on Gaza. Since then, Israeli forces and settlers have killed hundreds of Palestinians in the occupied territory.

December 12, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

10 injured as Israeli occupation escalates raids across West Bank

Al Mayadeen | November 26, 2025

Ten Palestinians were injured on Wednesday after Israeli occupation forces violently beat them during a large-scale military raid in the governorate of Tubas, marking a new escalation in ongoing operations throughout the occupied West Bank.

According to Kamel Bani Odeh, Director of the Prisoners Club in Tubas, the occupation forces detained 34 Palestinians during raids in Tubas, the towns of Aqaba and Tammun, and the village of Tayaseer. Several homes were turned into military posts used for field interrogations and searches, he added.

Meanwhile, in al-Khalil, Israeli settlers assaulted three Palestinians in the town of Yatta, under the protection of occupation soldiers. The attack is another example of the growing settler violence targeting Palestinian residents and their property.

Further north, the Israeli occupation forces’ bulldozers and heavy machinery advanced toward the Nur Shams refugee camp, east of Tulkarem. The camp has been under a strict siege for 291 days, with most of its residents still prevented from returning to their homes after being forcibly displaced.

In addition, occupation forces continued uprooting olive trees and bulldozing agricultural land in Turmusayya, north of Ramallah, as part of a wider expansionist policy aimed at seizing more Palestinian land.

Large-scale aggression hits West Bank

The Israeli occupation army, in cooperation with the Shin Bet security service, initiated a large-scale “military operation” in the northern occupied West Bank around midnight on Tuesday-Wednesday.

Palestinian locals reported that some of their homes had been turned into military positions.

The governor of Tubas, southeast of Jenin, said that the occupation army had erected earthen barriers around the area, explaining that these barriers had paralyzed traffic in the city. He estimated that the operation would last several days.

According to the Israeli Public Broadcasting Authority, three brigades are participating in the operation, working in parallel with support from the police aerial unit and the air force.

The campaign involves search operations and detentions, as well as the seizure of weapons and the monitoring of weapons-manufacturing workshops, in an attempt to thwart the formation of Resistance cells and gather intelligence, according to Israeli media.

November 26, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian leader Barghouti subjected to brutal torture in Israeli prison, says advocacy group

Jailed Palestinian leader Abdullah Barghouti
Press TV – November 18, 2025

A Palestinian prisoners’ advocacy group says jailed Hamas leader Abdullah Barghouti has faced extreme physical and psychological torture at the maximum-security Gilboa Prison in the northern part of the Israeli-occupied territories since his abduction more than two decades ago.

The Asra Media Office (AMO) announced in a statement on Monday that 53-year-old Barghouti is currently enduring conditions that have been described as “a form of slow execution,” aimed at one of the leading figures of the Palestinian Captive Movement. Concerns have been raised that his life could be at risk at any moment.

The statement disclosed that the prison administration has been systematically and repeatedly targeting Barghouti with assaults for more than 25 months.

Prison guards storm his cell relentlessly, day and night, often accompanied by dogs. They taunt him, claiming they missed assaulting him, before three of them restrain him and viciously attack him with batons. The beating leaves him with severe injuries, including bleeding and deep wounds.

His fellow inmates are left to care for him, using torn fabric and rudimentary cleaning supplies to tend to his wounds.

Barghouti, currently serving 67 life sentences, is enduring severe, untreated injuries. These include fractures in his right elbow and hand that have persisted for more than three months, a broken pinky finger on his left hand, two fractured ribs, torn tendons, and a drastic weight loss of approximately 35 kilograms caused by starvation and inadequate nutrition.

The rights group added that guards have doused him with water before subjecting him to electrocution and confined him to a cell infested with scabies, resulting in painful boils all over his body. To minimize the risk of further infection, he now resorts to sleeping on the floor.

Barghouti currently struggles with significant difficulty in moving his hands, with one almost completely paralyzed. Despite his condition, Israeli prison authorities deny him any form of medical treatment, including pain relief, and block human rights organizations from reaching out to him.

The AMO asserted that Barghouti’s suffering is part of a broader campaign against the leadership of the Captive Movement.

It emphasized that the mistreatment he endures surpasses mere punishment, amounting to a calculated effort to end his life, underscoring the urgent need for international intervention.

The circumstances surrounding the detention of Palestinian inmates by Israel are unacceptable and characterized by inadequate hygiene standards. Moreover, Palestinian detainees have endured persistent torture, harassment, and oppression.

Palestinian detainees have consistently participated in indefinite hunger strikes to express their frustration over their unjust imprisonment.

Human rights organizations say that Israel continues to violate the rights and freedoms granted to abductees as stipulated by the Fourth Geneva Convention and international laws.

According to the Palestine Detainees Studies Center, around 60 percent of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons suffer from chronic illnesses, with many having passed away either during their incarceration or after their release due to the seriousness of their health issues.

November 18, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Red ribbons in London: A silent uprising bringing Palestinian hostages back into view

By Adnan Hmidan | MEMO | November 16, 2025 

Walking through Westminster, in the quiet rush of central London, flashes of red caught my attention — ribbons tied to lampposts, railings, and street fixtures. They were not adverts or campaign posters, but dense, symbolic gestures: spontaneous in form, unmistakable in meaning. They returned to public sight faces that have long been hidden behind prison walls — Palestinian hostages abducted by the occupation from homes and hospitals, held without trial under a system that resembles nothing but the law of the jungle.

These ribbons seemed like individual efforts, small and uncoordinated, yet unified in what they were trying to say: that the Palestinian hostage file remains locked in darkness, despite being one of the most devastating human crises. Thousands have been torn from their lives with no charges, no legal process, no daylight.

Of the nearly 9,100 Palestinians currently detained, it is estimated that almost a third are effectively treated as hostages; abducted and denied even the bare minimum of legal rights or guarantees.

A language that must reclaim its meaning

For years, the word “prisoner” has been used broadly. But what the occupation practises is not detention — it is abduction. People are taken from their beds or hospital rooms and disappear for indefinite periods, without charges, court hearings, or the most basic procedural rights.

The figures alone reveal the scale of the crisis:

3,544 held under administrative detention without trial

400 children

53 women

16 doctors

117 Palestinian hostages killed in the past two years alone during the genocide in Gaza

These individuals cannot honestly be called “prisoners.” They are hostages in every legal and moral sense — seized outside any legitimate framework by a state whose own foundations rest on dispossession and violation.

Red… a colour that bears witness, not beauty

The choice of red is self-explanatory. It is the colour of spilled blood, of injustice endured, of wounds that never fully heal.

These ribbons may hang quietly across London, but the question they raise is anything but quiet:

How can thousands of people be abducted in this way, while the world remains unable — or unwilling — to see them?

No one is asked to lead a campaign or become an activist. What is needed is recognition, a wider awakening to a file packed with human lives, daily suffering, families searching, and children growing up in absence.

Stories hanging from lampposts… so memory does not fade

Seeing the ribbons brought back the painful stories that fill this file:

The child pulled from his bed because soldiers deemed him a “threat,”

The woman taken from her home in front of her children,

The doctor who vanished from an operating room and never returned,

Those subjected to torture and enforced disappearance,

And the testimonies of rape and sexual abuse recently documented by international organisations.

These stories need no embellishment; their truth is weight enough. They also echo Steve Biko’s famous line:

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

These red ribbons feel like a modest attempt to unsettle that weapon.

Catherine Connolly’s victory: Europe’s moral rebellion against the Israeli occupation

When execution becomes a celebration

It is difficult to grasp that the occupation’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, celebrated inside the Knesset after passing a law permitting the execution of Palestinian detainees.

More troubling still is how easily such a moment can pass as a routine political step — as though it were merely another debate rather than a descent into deeper, institutionalised brutality.

When a state legalises killing those it has abducted without trial, imprisonment ceases to resemble detention. It becomes just one point on a chain that runs from abduction to torture to death.

The rising number of Palestinians dying inside Israeli prisons is not an exaggeration — it is an expanding reality.

Preserving memory before preserving the body

Red ribbons do not claim to liberate anyone, nor do they replace political or legal work. But they accomplish something essential: they return faces to public view and stop stories from being buried in darkness.

The Palestinian hostage file needs wider adoption and genuine engagement. It is a file overflowing with pain and heavy with violations, yet among the least addressed internationally.

Ribbons cannot break iron bars.

But they can remind the world that behind every statistic is a human being waiting to be rescued from disappearance.

Justice begins when we choose to see.

And sometimes, the first step toward that justice is nothing more than a small red thread tied to a lamppost in a distant city.

November 16, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape!

Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity

By Ilana Mercer • Unz Review • November 15, 2025

There’s a reason I purposefully avoided mention of the fracas in Israel over the leaked Sde Teiman video, in the companion column to this one: “Rectal Raping of Palestinian Men Is Habitual In the Sexually Deviant, Serial-Killer State.”

You see, the Hasbara herd seems to have one gift, in Israel and stateside. They live in a self-reverential and self-referential world: They talk from under wet cement about … themselves. And, they are training you to do the same: talk about them.

As hard as it is for this lot to compute; the genocide, however, is about their victims, Israel’s victims, the Palestinians.

About the Sde Teima leaked rape tape, suffice it to say the following: Like the Hostage Square demonstrators in Tel Aviv, whose concern was exclusively for only their hostages; the same Israeli society is not unhappy about crimes against Palestinians; but that one such crime had been made public to the detriment of their criminally complicit countrymen.

More so than mere publicity—after all, Israel is conducting genocide to a packed house, the world—Israel’s military advocate general worries that the leaked Sde Teiman footage will undermine Israel’s international legal impunity.

The case of the rectal-rape-with-objects of a Palestinian hostage, one among thousands held in the legal limbo of detention-without-trial, was leaked by the Military Advocate General’s office (MAG), whose apparatchiks had heretofore never expressed—nor acted to convey—regret, remorse, contrition, or penitence over the genocide ongoing. (So you know, Israel has merely shifted to “genocide lite” and to the “ghettoization” of the Strip.)

There are no nettles of conscience in the genocidal society. The on-camera rape has just become a PR (public relations) problem. Unless the world’s yelling can be quelled, Israel’s legal representatives fear for the country’s legal impunity, which is meant to last in perpetuity.

Like all shouting scraps in Israel, this one is entirely without an ethical or moral dimension. The leak of the filmed rape is but a procedural, administrative annoyance, the “Minister of Defense and many others in the political sphere and public discourse,” even claiming that any criminal proceedings constitute a “blood libel.

At about this time, Israeli think-tank residents are fretting. As the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) put it (in all sincerity), it is imperative to preserve “Israel’s legal and diplomatic ‘resilience’ internationally, and thus … our ability to protect IDF (Israel Defense Forces) service members from legal risks around the world.”

If the IDF justice system, headed by the [aforementioned] MAG [Military Advocate General], is not perceived as professionally independent, Israel will struggle to argue that there is no place to advance overseas legal proceedings against soldiers and commanders alleged to have violated the law of armed conflict, and that the Israeli justice system should be given primacy in handling suspects. (IDI)

Cloaking themselves in the raiment of decency, the code-word for “impunity” in Israeli think tanks is “resilience.” The country must remain “resilient” internationally. Bathed in blood though it is; Israel and its military advocate general still want continued carte-blanche from the international community for their crimes. Hence the Brownian motion over the public rape of a Palestinian hostage.

Again, the leaked Sde Teiman tape threatens Israel’s legal impunity which is meant to last in perpetuity.

Let us, then, end forthwith conversation about Israel’s two-bit Kabuki players. We who inhabit the Global Genocidal Western Woke matrix have a responsibility to help pilot Palestinians through these dangerous shoals. Or, support those who are doing that work. Let’s, then, return to the resilient victims of the genocidal entity, the Palestinians.

Early in the genocide, in essays that provide a comprehensive chronology of the signal events, the people violated and the first principles flouted, I had picked up on—and postulated about—the seemingly systematic nature of the sexual sadism evinced by Israel’s army and security forces.

Palestinians are “living alongside serial-killing sexual sadists,” I remarked in a subsection of the essay, “Why The Israel-Occupied Levant Must be Liberated, S.O.S.,” further noting that “the pairing of sexual arousal and violence toward Palestinians, in the practices of the IDF and Israeli Security Forces, makes for a particularly irremediable pathology, the stuff of serial killers.”

As though Israel was not already outside all moral gravitational pull—the evidence for my deductions is now in. What we’ve known to be deductively true has been empirically confirmed. The social science is in: Palestinians are sexually brutalized by Israeli occupation forces!

If you had lingering doubts that sexual perversion and predation by the Israeli military and security forces is systemic and statistically significant—new social science nixes that naïve notion.

Incidents of sexual torture are not outlier cases. The Israel Occupation Forces are indeed a festering cauldron of serial-killing sadists and sexual deviants. Helpless Palestinians are the repository of this rot.

Having investigated the phenomenon and tabulated the results; the UN International Commission of Inquiry has revealed that rape, genital mutilation—of men, women, boys and girls—exhibitionism (public flashing); all the sexual perversions and paraphilias I had picked up on—are systemic, pervasive, carried out happily, seemingly ordained from above. No crime is a “one-off.”

“Israel uses sexual violence as a weapon of war,” concludes the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, writing, on March 13, 2025, that,

The frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory leads the Commission to conclude that sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people. The Commission documented a pattern of sexual violence, including cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and other inhumane acts that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Section number 222 of the report’s summary states that, “Israeli detention is characterized by widespread and systematic abuse and sexual and gender-based violence. These practices have increased significantly in severity and frequency since 7 October 2023, following orders and statements of the Minister for National Security Ben Gvir who is in charge of prisons. The mistreatment of Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities is a result of an intentional policy that utilizes sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence to humiliate and degrade Palestinians in detention. This was observed across several facilities, temporary holding locations, during interrogation and while in transit.”

These Israelis are men and women of cold violence. Their hearts are as black as boot polish. The brutalized bodies of Palestinian men, women, and children; their pets and livestock bear this out. But broad-brush statements aggregating their practices are not enough.

Daily, the Palestinians’ closest neighbors, the settlers, make manifest their red-hot hatred toward them, stealing private Palestinian property, vandalizing installations on this land, regularly slaughtering helpless livestock with biblical cruelty (watch settlers gouge the eyes out of helpless lambs), and generally menacing Palestinian property owners. Most disturbing is the overt, perverted threat of sexual violence from settlers and their soldier helpers.

Indeed, the poisonous cabal of Israeli settlers and soldiers works cheek by jowl.

In “Holy Redemption: Stealing Palestinian Land,” a TRT World exclusive documentary, there is no editorializing. The videographers plainly followed and recorded these settlers in character. Twenty-nine minutes and 20 seconds into this TRT settler odysseyTurkish TV captures a uniformed IDF, in cahoots with settlers, publicly manhandling himself on camera, in a manner not fit to print.

Said IDF soldier hisses:

“I spit on Palestine. F-ck your mother. I’m the Israeli Army.” He is not done. Just as I imagined this breed of Cain could not expose itself as more indecent, the same soldier comes close to indecent exposure. At the said timestamp, the atavistic, low-brow individual shows himself to be lacking the inhibitions to keep his perversion private. Reflexively. Quite obviously, this IDF had been aroused by threatening a helpless group of Palestinian homesteaders. He had likely imbibed a pornographic sensibility and had not been taught propriety and shame in public.

Right there on film is that pathological pairing of violence and sexual arousal, the stuff of serial killers!

In another unremarkable vignette, filmed by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, an armed settler threatens a Palestinian farmer in the South Hebron Hills with rape. “Rape in the name of God,” a la SdeTeiman, promises settler Shem Tov Luski, to a mortified, modest Palestinian man. “No officers were dispatched, and the residents were advised to file a complaint at the Kiryat Arba police station,” reports Wikipedia.

At one point, the “Halachic right to rape” (See “Sde Teiman: Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-Judicial Assassinations & Rape Are De Facto Legal in Israel”) had been issued from the very top of Israeli moral precincts.

His flesh softer than sin, the delightful Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had instructed, in 2016, that, essentially, any carnal demands of the flesh be allowed: “As part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to … satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .’ News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s own YnetNews.com.

Before Rabbi Karim, there was Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safad, who “urged a genocide in Gaza and excused rape by soldiers.” (Via Electronic Intifada.)

Israel’s female soldiers are as sadistic and malevolent. In a clip, “Israel’s ‘Sick’ Female Guards,” young Israeli uniformed IDF females and security police terrorize Palestinian men as they shuttle from one check point to the next.

We zoom out again to the abstraction of the aggregated data:

214. “Israel has targeted civilian women and girls directly, acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder and the war crime of willful killing. Women and girls have also died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities impacting access to reproductive health care, acts that amount to the crime against humanity of extermination. …”

221. “Palestinian men and boys have been subjected to specific persecutory acts intended to punish them collectively. The way in which these often-sexual acts are committed, including their filming, photographing and dissemination online, in conjunction with similar cases being documented in several locations, shows that forced public stripping and nudity, as well as sexualized torture and ill-treatment, are part of the persecutory attack against men and boys committed to punish, humiliate and intimidate Palestinian men and boys into subjugation. …”

224. “Specific forms of sexual and gender-based violence such as forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault, de facto form part of the Israel Security Forces (ISF) standard operating procedures towards Palestinians. The Commission concludes that these and other forms of sexualized torture, including rape and violence targeting the genitals, are committed with either explicit orders or an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership. The Commission found that all its documented incidents of sexual and gender-based violence committed by members of the ISF were met with impunity. Under these circumstances, the civilian and military leaders are as responsible for these crimes, as are the direct perpetrators. …”

In the “widespread use of sexualized violence against men and boys,” the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has [too] identified several specific patterns of sexualized violence that are indicative of a genocidal process, not all overlapping the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory:

Life-force atrocities (including ritualized humiliations); separation of families and other reproductive violence; and possible elitocide through the use of sexualized violence.

By “elitocide,” the Lemkin Institute is probably referring to sexual violence to whittle at the finest and noblest; the people we most rely on: altruistic aid and rescue workers, healers in their clinics ministering to their patients, peace activists, writers, reporters and intellectuals recording the crimes for posterity.

Dr. Adnan Al Bursh, for example. The 50-year-old renowned orthopedic surgeon headed the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “A doctor. a stellar surgeon. The embodiment of Palestinian ethics, Dr. Al Bursh was likely raped to death.”

To genocide, snuff films, the torture and torching of animals, and the rape and robbery of their Palestinian owners; to bombings, boobytrapping and extra-judicial assassinations the world over—add “elitocide.”

Another new term to add to Israel’s lexicon of crime. All this, remember, is customary, informal law in the Genocidal Society.

***

* Image of Lebanese boys disfigured by Israeli boobytraps courtesy of Rania Khalekhttps://raniakhalek.com/israeli-terror-in-lebanon-inside-the-pager-attacks-bt-documentary-exclusive/

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide (because that is our obligation). A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

November 15, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | 1 Comment

Torture and Rape Are All in A Day’s Work for Israel’s Defenders

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 6, 2025

A couple of recent stories relating to the utter bestiality of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have exposed the criminality of successive US governments in supporting the Jewish state no matter what it does. Observers of the lopsided relationship understand very clearly that Israel’s lobby in the United States, backed up by Jewish billionaires who are willing to spend whatever it takes to corrupt the political system and buy up the media, has succeeded in making Washington a totally controlled client state manipulated by extreme war criminals like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is rewarded by the near complete loyalty of Congress and the White House. The one sided relationship dominates both Republicans and Democrats and has been most evident in the Presidencies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have chosen to ignore the reality of the Israeli slaughter of some hundreds of thousands of Palestinians using US weapons and Washington’s political protection in international fora.

The irony of it all is that Washington’s subjugation by Israel, far from being politically neutral, does terrible damage to the United States, both in terms of actual costs and the fact that the US is now reviled by much of the world as it continues to protect and enable Israel as it continues it program to turn the Middle East into a region that it dominates by dint of perpetual slaughter of the original inhabitants. Beyond that, one of the costs of loving Israel so much is the lack of any consequences when it comes to protection of American citizens who find themselves on the wrong end of the Israeli police state. Citizens like Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli Army sniper in May 2022, but the US Embassy did nothing to establish responsibility for the murder, leaving it up the Israeli judiciary, which did nothing and may even have rewarded the soldier. Abu Akleh was one of 276 journalists targeted deliberately and murdered by Israeli forces in the past two years.

Going back a bit, the most egregious case of the US abandoning its own to Israeli connivance was the attack on the USS Liberty intelligence ship in international waters in June 1967. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 174 more wounded and the clear intention was to sink the ship using planes and torpedo boats with their identifications covered to blame the incident on the Egyptians. A cover-up engineered by President Lyndon B Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara followed and repeated attempts by surviving crewmen to open an investigation have been blocked in Congress, most notably by Senator John McCain, whose father was the Admiral that chaired the inquiry held in Malta that decided that it was all a case of mistaken identity, which was a lie. LBJ called back planes that were sent to aid the stricken Liberty and was heard to explain that he would be satisfied if all those “sailor-boys were to go to the bottom of the sea” rather than offend “our good friend” Israel.

Last week, there surfaced a bizarre tale involving the Chief Legal Officer of the Israeli Army, a Major General named Yifat Tomer-Yeralshami. Yeralshami is a woman who was highly respected by her peers though it should be assumed that she was constrained by the policies towards the Israel Defense Force (IDF) as dictated by the Netanyahu regime and its extreme right winger chief National Security officer Itamar Ben-Gvir. Tomer-Yeralshami had been involved in the case of a Palestinian prisoner who had been serially raped in the notorious Sde Terman prison.

Terman was the best known IDF torture center. In October 2024, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel issued a report examining the treatment of thousands of Palestinian detainees after October 7th, 2023. In the report, the commission determined that detainees from Gaza held in Israeli military prisons, including children, were “subjected to widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence amounting to the war crime and crime against humanity of torture and the war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence.”

Israeli soldiers were reportedly creative in their rape techniques. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish-American orthopedic surgeon who was a volunteer medic in Gaza last year, reported how one Palestinian prisoner was treated. “He was raped by female IDF soldiers with a zucchini placed up his rectum and the zucchini was soaked in pork blood” the pork used specifically because pork is forbidden to Muslims, as it is to Jews.

The rape in question being investigated by Tomer-Yeralshami had been carried out by five Israeli soldiers. The incident occurred in July 2024 and the soldiers had been detained after the Palestinian proved to be so seriously injured that he had to be hospitalized. The IDF soldiers raped the man so violently, using in one instance a knife in his rectum, that his intestines exploded and his rectum was ruptured. He has undergone 20 surgeries since what happened to him. The facility where the soldiers were detained was subsequently stormed by a group consisting mostly of Israeli armed settlers led by Ben-Gvir and the men were later released and have reportedly been waiting on a military hearing to determine their possible guilt. They not only claim to be innocent, they believe that they should be rewarded and have even appeared before the press wearing black uniforms and head covers to make their case that comes down to soldiers not being held accountable if they torture or kill Palestinian prisoners.

Recent stories relating to the utter bestiality of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have exposed the criminality of successive US governments in supporting the Jewish state no matter what it does. Observers of the lopsided relationship understand very clearly that Israel’s lobby in the United States, backed up by Jewish billionaires who are willing to spend whatever it takes to corrupt the political system and buy up the media, has succeeded in making Washington a totally controlled client state manipulated by extreme war criminals like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is rewarded by the near complete loyalty of Congress and the White House. The one sided relationship dominates both Republicans and Democrats and has been most evident in the Presidencies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have chosen to ignore the reality of the Israeli slaughter of some hundreds of thousands of Palestinians using US weapons and political protection in international fora. For what it is worth, neither Biden nor Trump has spoken out effectively on the murder and torture of the Palestinians by Israel.

The irony of it all is that Washington’s subjugation by Israel, far from being politically neutral, does terrible damage to the United States, both in terms of actual costs and the fact that the US is now reviled by much of the world as it continues to protect and enable Israel as it pursues its program to turn the Middle East into a region that it dominates by dint of perpetual slaughter of the original inhabitants.

Inevitably, stories about Israeli inhumanity are either completely suppressed or substantially modified to make the Jews involved appear to be victims of whatever takes place, what one might refer to as the “holocaust syndrome,” but sometimes the reality is just so horrific that it manages to leak through the damage control and censorship. In this case, the story of the savage rape in the prison would have died in an Israel court but for the fact that the rape was videoed and was leaked to Israeli news network Channel 12, apparently by the General and possibly others in her office, and the story subsequently developed that she had resigned her commission and disappeared. In her resignation letter, she apparently admitted that she had approved the release of a video revealing institutionalized acts of torture committed by the IDF against Palestinian prisoners of war that took place in the Sde Teiman detention camp in July 2024.

Shortly after the footage was aired, Tomer-Yerushalmi was placed on forced leave by the Israeli Defense Ministry after a criminal probe was launched to investigate the origins of the leak. In the months that followed her being placed on leave, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Tomer-Yerushalmi would not be permitted to return to her post, forcing her resignation. In her resignation letter, Tomer-Yerushalmi stated that “To my regret, this basic understanding—that there are acts to which even the most vile of detainees must not be subjected—is no longer convincing to all,” a tacit admission of the institutionalized abuse sanctioned by Israeli officials within the IDF and Netanyahu government.

Tomer-Yerushalmi disappeared from sight and it was subsequently rumored that she might have killed herself, but she was found and subsequently arrested. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing supporters have tried to benefit from the developing story, claiming that the general’s arrest confirms that the soldiers were “innocent” and that the leaked videos were “fake.” However, the trial of the soldiers is reportedly proceeding, and the videos have been confirmed as genuine. General Tomer-Yerushalmi is now being accused of “treason” for her role in the leak.

This affair could have been a classic case of silencing the messenger who was bearing bad news but it has become clear that the General was not operating alone. The Israeli police claim to possess WhatsApp group communications involving other high-ranking officers connected to the leaked information. The Israeli press has cited eight top officers within the IDF prosecution command headed by Tomer-Yerushalmi. The video and related documents were reportedly actually physically leaked by a junior officer within the military prosecutor’s command, who also confessed to his behavior before the Israeli General Security Organization (Shabak). Some believe that it is unconceivable that General Tomer-Yerushalmi would have made the decision to expose the IDF’s conduct without a green light from up above. Who could give such a green light? Her direct commander, the Israeli chief of staff (Herzi Halevi), or even the defense minister (Yoav Gallant), which would place them at odds with Netanyahu.

Some suspect that the actual objective by the army high command may have been to prove that Israel “has the legal means to prosecute its war criminals”—a message to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague that it should stay away from the case. If this theory is correct, General Tomer-Yerushalmi and those who authorized her were driven by “patriotic sentiments” to protect the behavior of the army soldiers. It may have been an attempt to defuse possible court cases by presenting a false image of ethical accountability. In short, the image of “ethical behavior” replaces any actual concern for ethical conduct, something that is absent from the nation that calls itself the Jewish State with an army that calls itself the world’s “most moral.”

Predictably, as a response to Tomer-Yerushalmi’s admitting she was behind the release of the video from Sde Teiman, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to shift the blame. He characterized the leak as the worst public relations disaster that Israel has ever faced saying “It is perhaps the most serious public relations attack Israel has experienced since its founding—I cannot recall one so concentrated and intense. This requires an independent and impartial inquiry, and I expect that such an investigation will indeed take place.” What Netanyahu was really demanding was a cover-up of what crimes have become systematic in Israel’s torture and killing of Palestinian prisoners.

Another story, equally hideous, concerns the activity of the so-called Israeli settlers, who have been armed by the Israeli government and have been systematically attacking the Palestinians remaining on the West Bank by beating and even killing the Arabs and destroying their livelihoods. It was again a case of a video having surfaced that showed a raid on a Palestinian farm, revealing how the settlers raided a barn containing the farmer’s sheep and lambs. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone describes the scene and what it means: “Israeli settlers were filmed torturing lambs which belonged to Palestinians in the West Bank. Gouged their eyes outSmashed them with cinder blocks. Beat them to death in front of their mothers. Lambs. It’s not the most evil thing the Israelis have done. Not by a long shot. Hell, all of human civilization subjects animals to cruel abuses every minute of every day through the horrors of factory farming. But this particular incident shines a special sort of light into exactly what’s going on behind Israeli eyes over there in that sadistic society. Think about the hatred and savagery you’d need to summon up within yourself to gouge the eyes out of a living baby sheep. Think about the kind of person you’d have to become to do something like that to an innocent creature. Those lambs didn’t know they were Palestinian. They didn’t know anything about Hamas or October 7 or the Nazi Holocaust, or any of the other reasons Israelis generally cite for their abuses of human beings. They were just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing that could possibly be construed as harmful by even the most talented hasbarist. And those settlers went in there and inflicted completely gratuitous suffering upon them. This, to me anyway, just says so much about the level of vitriolic hatred by which the state of Israel is sustained. It’s baked in to the way the whole state.”

I rest my case about what is wrong with Israel to include its criminal relationship with the United States. So Mr. Trump, I already know you hate animals just as you hate and seek revenge on anyone who does not agree with you, but what is your response to the murders of children and rapes of prisoners as well as the torture of baby creatures who have done no wrong? Just what is your justification for making the United States a partner and even enabler in the crimes?

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

November 6, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s ‘Right To Rape’: Leaked Video Investigated and Labeled Blood Libel

By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | October 31, 2025

Israelis are, again, furious about the infamous gang rape of a Palestinian hostage in Sde Teiman concentration camp, but not at the rapists themselves. Instead, they are demanding the prosecution of those responsible for leaking the video.

On July 29, 2024, ten Israeli soldiers from its Unit 100 were reported to have been involved in a brutal gang rape incident against a Palestinian hostage, who was being held without charge in the Sde Teiman detention facility. Outrage immediately erupted in Israeli society when the soldiers were subsequently detained by the relevant authorities, but not for the reasons most would expect.

Instead of an Israeli public outcry condemning the incident, thousands of Israeli protesters, accompanied by elected officials, broke into the military facilities, demonstrated outside the jail where the ten soldiers were being held and advocated for the right to rape Palestinian detainees.

Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir referred to the accused gang rapists as “heroes” and argued that any action is permissible against Palestinian detainees. Likud Party elected official, Hanoch Milwidsky, even passionately defended the rape of Palestinians with a stick, simply upon the accusation that they are Hamas fighters.

During a heated debate in the Israeli Knesset, MK Ahmad Tibi, from the Ta’al Party, asked, “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is that legitimate?” to which Milwidsky responded, “Yes! If he is a Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do to him!”

Meir Ben Shatrit, one of the released accused Israeli gang rapists, later stated on video that his arrest was a sham and proceeded to frame himself as receiving Israeli popular support. This soldier was later brought on Israeli broadcast media, where he was treated well, given softball interviews and defended his actions.

It was also not long before Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, chimed in, asserting that “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them”.

On Wednesday, Smotrich’s demands were finally fulfilled, as the Israeli military launched a criminal probe into the leaking of the video, which showed the gang-rape incident. The full video itself was officially broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12 in August of 2024, despite a shorter clip having been verified by Al-Jazeera at an earlier date.

Meanwhile, five of the accused soldiers were set free, while the remaining five were charged with “aggravated abuse and serious bodily harm” and are not being charged with rape, despite the incident being documented on video and the controversy surrounding it being centered on the issue of rape.

Initially, only two of the detained soldiers were released, after which Israel’s Honenu legal aid organization stepped in to represent four of the remaining eight accused gang rapists. Honenu reportedly argued that their clients were acting in self-defense.

What makes this case even more disturbing is that this is the most high-profile case of rape against a Palestinian hostage, yet this incident is turning into a witch-hunt against those who were potentially involved in leaking evidence of the horrific assault.

Copious evidence has emerged over the past two years, supporting the notion of mass weaponized sexual violence against Palestinians, held with no charges, both in Israeli prisons and in detention facilities. Countless cases of gang rape, rape using dogs, metal poles, sticks, and other objects, in addition to sexual humiliation and assault, are not only ignored by the Western media, but there is no accountability for those responsible.

Now, the Israeli Military Prosecutor, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi has gone on leave, as investigators examine whether top legal officers and even the Prosecutor may have been involved in leaking the video of the gang-rape incident. A development applauded by Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, who referred to the video’s release as one of the biggest “blood libels” against the occupation army’s soldiers.

Despite there being UN and Human Rights reports, along with investigative pieces published by distinguished media outlets, in addition to video and photographic evidence, on top of countless individual and even lawyer testimonies, there is little in the way of an international outcry over the issue.

When this is compared to the coordinated campaign, which could not produce a single victim or reputable witness testimony, let alone photographic or video evidence, to argue that Hamas had carried out a coordinated mass rape campaign on October 7, 2023, it demonstrates the clear double standards of not only Western media but also its political elites and institutions.

There must be an immediate push for an international investigation into Israel’s weaponization of sexual violence against Palestinian men, women, and children. This should be impartial and seek to find answers as to whether Israel’s leadership simply allowed it to happen, or whether they were directly implicated in ordering what can be reasonably assumed to be a premeditated mass rape campaign against Palestinians.

November 2, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment