Many people have become so numb to the genocide in Gaza that martyrs have turned to numbers on a tally and images of charred bodies of children have become a daily expectance. Meanwhile, people seem to be losing count of those entering Israeli prisons and those leaving them. 

Outside Gaza, we see it, we do not live it. We are not prisoners to its scars, but those who fall victim to sexual violence by Israeli forces remain tied to the wound that still holds them prisoners.

Sexual violence is not limited to rape. It includes indecent exposure to the victim, sexual abuse, assault, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancies, forced sterilization, mutilation, and sexual intimidation. 

We often tend to focus on women when we speak of sexual assault, neglecting, albeit involuntarily, the sexual violence enforced upon men as well. It is also not publicly discussed as much. If it is a hard task for a woman or a girl to speak in public about being raped or sexually assaulted, imagine how degrading and dehumanizing it is for a man to speak of it.

For 76 years and counting, since the Nakba, Palestinian women and girls have been kidnapped, detained, tortured, and sexually assaulted by Israeli forces in their prisons, and Sde Teiman is one infamous example of these notorious facilities – many times with their families forced to watch. 

Rape and sexual violence have been a widely used tool at times of war or conflict by aggressors and occupying forces against the native peoples and those seeking refuge as a mechanism of power and pressure against a certain government, ethnicity, or entity. 

After "Israel" unleashed its campaign of rage and genocide on Gaza in October 2023, photos of imprisoned Palestinian women and men being stripped naked by Israeli forces began to surface. Months later, testimonies by Palestinian men began to spread worldwide, as they relayed falling victim to extreme and some of the vilest forms of sexual torture and assault at the hands of Israeli forces – with some instances involving dogs.

Why is no one so quick to be furious with this tragic reality as they were when they jumped on the bandwagon to believe Western media’s claims against Hamas, which international legal experts have shut down and proven completely and utterly wrong? Why are uncensored and verified photos of sexual assaults against Palestinians swept right under the rug?

This is a clear and right-in-your-face package of international law violations against prisoners of war – undeniably protected by international humanitarian law – but no one in the world is batting an eye.

No, sexual violence against citizens does not justify any act of so-called "self-defense" that “Israel” has been using for the past 76 years. 

Customary international law stipulates the rules of warfare, setting in stone actions that violate these rules and laws, which, in turn, would constitute war crimes. I know stating what international law entails in this context is the obvious, but forget "Israel" at this point... if world governments abided by the law (given that they are obliged to prosecute those violating it), the genocide would have been stopped before it reached the now 39,000 deaths. 

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The Statute of the International Criminal Court states that “committing rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy … enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence” constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions in international armed conflicts and a serious violation of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in non-international armed conflicts. 

The ICC has also revealed that sexual assault “may, depending on the evidence, be an integral component of the pattern of destruction inflicted upon a particular group of people, and in such circumstances, may be charged as genocide.”

Now that we’ve established the grounds of how rape and sexual violence as weapons of war are crimes against humanity (which the world seems to have lost touch with), we can also establish that Palestinian detainees are prisoners of war (POW). 

Prisoners of war are given a status that is protected by international humanitarian law under the Geneva Conventions and the subsequent Additional Protocols. 

Additional Protocol I sets rules for jus in bello (wartime conduct) during international armed conflict. Its Article 75(2)(b), called the Fundamental Guarantees, prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, enforced prostitution and any form of indecent assault” against POWs. The Third Geneva Convention enshrines that POWs, regardless of circumstance, are entitled to “respect for their persons and their honour."

POWs must be treated humanely in all circumstances. They are protected against any act of violence, as well as against intimidation, insults, and public curiosity. IHL also defines the minimum acceptable conditions of detention, covering such issues as accommodation, food, clothing, hygiene, and medical care as protected needs. Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention, an essential article for the protection of POWs, particularly protects prisoners in Palestine against these assaults by "Israel". 

Sde Teiman in occupied al-Naqab is the mere replica of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in the US. Israeli forces are stripping men naked, electrocuting them, assaulting them with sticks and rods, and unleashing dogs at them.

With that being said, all parties to an armed conflict must prohibit the use of sexual violence while all states are obliged to prosecute the perpetrators, by international law standards. Still, evidence of genocide, besides the intentional killing of Palestinians, is mounting, and not one government seems to bat an eye and stand in a court to stop it other than South Africa. 

For instance, international organization experts expressed concern that an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have reportedly gone missing after contact with the Israeli occupation in Gaza. “There are disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by the Israeli army into 'Israel,' and of children being separated from their parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown."

The forcible transfer of children, many of whom are sold into sexual slavery or stripped of their identities, is a crime against humanity punishable by the International Criminal Court and is a crime per Article 2, section (e), in the Genocide Convention. 

Sexual violence not only destroys communities and rips apart families, but it shatters the psychological health of the victim and their family members and, most importantly, achieves a primary war goal for the perpetrator: imprint the damage into the memory of the victim and its community, which will be carried down for generations. 

The memory of genocide is sewn onto the body of the survivor, which becomes part of the cultural traumatic memory (Erll 2011), written down in history and forgotten by the very legal system created to protect from it.