Chicago – December 11, 2023
After a lull, Israel’s allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas have returned to international headlines with a vengeance. As the UN faces heightened pressure to condemn Hamas’s alleged sexual violence, the sudden onslaught of media and international attention nearly two months after October 7 begs the question, why now?
Indeed, narratives of sexual violence have not only resurged, but they have done so with vim. Lurid stories of gang rape, mutilation, and even necrophilia, have been disseminated by the media. This has occurred despite there being no substantive developments in evidence of sexual assaults from the Israeli occupation forces. Israel has repeatedly failed to provide forensic evidence, concrete photographic evidence, or victim testimonies to news organizations beyond inferences made by Israel’s forensic teams. Indeed, the Times of Israel alleges that the IOF will never provide forensic evidence because “physical evidence of sexual assault was not collected from corpses by Israel’s overtaxed morgue facilities,” and it is now, reportedly, too late to collect conclusive evidence.
On the other hand, there have been reports that a number of journalists have resigned because BBC published a fabricated news regarding the gang rape of Israeli women on October 7.
Israeli propaganda along with mainstream media is a far cry from the persistent efforts of the Palestinians, forced to film their murdered relatives, their burnt and mutilated children, and their friends and families in their most vulnerable moments of grief, all in a desperate attempt to show the world what is being inflicted upon them. Perhaps that is what privilege looks like, where the dignity of Israeli victims is preserved, and the dignity of Palestinian victims must be discarded in a desperate voyeuristic attempt to publicize their suffering, starkly aware that the survival of the Palestinian people depends on this.
Whereas, Israel’s secrecy remains deafening; the IOF exclusively screened a 47-minute compilation of “raw footage” to invited journalists, as opposed to sharing the footage with news agencies to report on and verify independently
