Why Israel Rapes with Impunity

Content Warning: This essay includes descriptions of a strip search at an occupation check point, postpartum, sexual abuse cases, institutional violence, sexualized torture in detention, and trauma. Reader discretion is advised.

When my second daughter arrived and my first was barely one, I felt like I was raising twins. The work didn’t just double, it exploded. Within months, they were like two tiny wrestlers, stealing each other’s sleep, doubling every mess, and conspiring at the very wrong moments. The world often sells women the glow of new motherhood. Soft Instagram moments, perfect babies, flat tummies, no eye bags, mashallah! Nobody warnes us about the rest. I used to joke there should be a book called The Shit They Don’t Tell You About Having a Baby: night feeds that leave you trembling at 3 a.m., tantrums that turn the house into a war zone, and two kids who will inevitably spit up on your last clean shirt right before you have to leave.

I had once wanted four kids. That wish looked nice on paper until reality hit and my body ballooned from 50 to 70 kilos. At 160 cm tall, I felt like a whale stuck on the couch. I spent months on bed rest, staring at the ceiling while my skin stretched and my ankles disappeared. Postpartum depression settled over me like a heavy, wet blanket. I didn’t know how to nurse my babies, and by the time I finally learned, my body couldn’t. In Gaza, pain doesn’t come as a single blow. It arrives in a long line, each new hurt picking up the weight of the old ones and carrying it forward.

On my first trip out without the girls, I headed to Jerusalem for an appointment at the American embassy. After four years of marriage to a U.S. citizen, with two American babies, I just needed the paperwork to make our daily crossings a little easier. The permit to travel to Jerusalem, a city only an hour away from Gaza, had taken seven months to secure.

Passing through Erez felt like walking through a horror movie. The hallway was long and sterile under harsh lights. Steel doors slammed shut behind me with a loud clang. A red light glowed, turned green with a buzz, and another door opened. And another. I counted them as I passed. There were no chairs, no human voices, just the echo of my own footsteps and the mechanical click of lights. It reminded me of those old childhood game shows I watched on TV, like Al Hisn (the Arab version of Takeshi’s Castle), where contestants waited in suspense for doors to open and reveal prizes or traps. But this was all traps.

At the sixth door, I walked into a cold room with a scanner. A soldier barked orders in Hebrew about my clothes. I was wearing a hijab then, religious and terrified. They mocked me with a fake New York accent and snapped, “Take off your clothes.”

I stripped piece by piece, my hands shaking as I folded my shirt, my denim pants, and finally my underwear. As I peeled off my socks, a completely ridiculous thought popped into my head. My mom had spent my entire life drilling into me the ultimate rule of growing up: always wear clean underwear, always wear clean socks, you never know when you’ll end up at the doctor. Standing there in a freezing concrete room, carefully folding my freshly laundered cotton socks while an Israeli soldier glared at me, I couldn’t help but think, doing the right thing really doesn’t help when you are just living in the wrong life.

It was a silly, desperate thought to keep from crying, but reality crashed right back in. My postpartum body was still soft and marked from pregnancy. I already felt heavy and exposed, and under their eyes, my body became something to laugh at. Naked and stripped of dignity, I stood there as soldiers gathered. I wasn’t being searched by just one or two men, the entire unit was watching and taking turns. The sound of their laughter cut deep. After forty five minutes or so, another door opened. Someone finally shoved my clothes back through a narrow slot, throwing them at me like I was trash.

I wanted nothing more than to go home, crawl into bed, and let my kids misplace my glasses and make me laugh. But I felt so gross and numb. I remember little after that. Only the cold on my skin, the laughter in my ears, and a call from the American embassy telling me my interview was postponed. The humiliation sank deep into a system of violence I had already learned to survive.

That day wasn’t just a bad day. It was a reflection of a system where our bodies are treated as open targets. For years, Palestinians have whispered about sexual abuse by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Stories of forced nudity, beatings targeting the most private parts of our bodies, and military dogs used to threaten and assault. But the world often looked away. They called it “unverified” even when victims came forward to testify. They said we were exaggerating, and the accumulating violations were met with silence.

My humiliation wasn’t an anomaly. It was exactly how the system is designed to work. So when CCTV footage leaked showing Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman, I didn’t feel relief. How could I? I knew this world wasn’t lacking information, confirmation, or evidence. The world simply didn’t care. I never doubted my people’s accounts of the occupation. I knew it was fluent in sexual violence, and yet the world continued to look the other way.

Then came the Global Sumud Flotilla. In May 2026, when Israeli occupation forces intercepted 50 ships in international waters and kidnapped 430 people, the veil finally slipped. When the participants were released, the stories they told shattered the world’s ability to pretend. Organizers documented at least 15 cases of sexual assault, including rape, alongside accounts of people being stripped, Tasered, and beaten until their bones broke.

Italian activist Luca Poggi described being stripped, thrown to the ground, and kicked, while many others were Tasered and assaulted. Australian filmmaker Juliet Lamont recounted being beaten and assaulted by multiple men in a shipping container on what she called an Israeli “prison boat.” Others, including French citizens, returned with broken ribs and fractured vertebrae. Some detailed targeted sexual violence. These foreign nationals, many of them European citizens, described the exact same forms of violation long reported by Palestinians.

But the most powerful admission came from the flotilla organizers themselves. They noted that while the world’s eyes were trained on the suffering of their participants, this was merely a glimpse of the brutality Israel imposes daily on Palestinian captives. These weren’t just Palestinians suffering in the shadows. These were foreign nationals, European citizens, whose bodies were violated in the exact same way by the same perpetrator.

And how did the world respond to this full-blown confirmation of what we’ve known for years? With jokes and mockery. Just weeks later at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, American Zionist comedian Elon Gold and pro-Israel influencer Lizzy Savetsky were filmed on the red carpet mocking these exact atrocities, joking about Palestinians being raped by Israeli dogs in concentration camps. The festival condemned them, but the damage was done. The joke proved that to them, our violation is a punchline.

Historians will tell you that using sexual violence and animals to humiliate people is a tool oppressors have used throughout history. From Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners were stripped naked, mocked, and degraded as part of systematic dehumanization, to Abu Ghraib, where U.S. soldiers used dogs, forced nudity, and sexual humiliation to break Iraqi detainees. The methods are the same and the goal is the same, break the body to break the spirit.

What makes this moment different is the unapologetic public mockery. When the violence against Palestinians was hidden in military courts or whispered about in Gaza, the world stayed quiet. Now that it is exposed, now that it is happening to Westerners on aid boats and being joked about on American red carpets, the system of impunity is laid bare.

There is a straight line between the humiliation I felt at that checkpoint and the assaults reported on those boats. The occupation sends a vile message that they’re immune to accountability. This mindset protects all abusers, from individual predators hiding behind so called citizenship laws to soldiers in uniform raping kidnapped hostages.

I write this between two small people who still steal my glasses and refuse to stop fighting over the remote. My body has changed. I have stretch marks and a softer belly, but it is mine. No one has the right to violate it. The trauma of that strip search is different from the hard work of motherhood. Postpartum is not assault. But standing naked in that cold room, my body assulted then laughed at and thrown back like garbage, felt like a violation. It stole dignity from a body that was already raw.

That is why the testimonies, the checkpoints, and the documentation of these crimes matter. Naming regimes that shelter abusers, speaking out against state violence, and exposing my personal shame within the Zionist state are all acts of bearing witness. They might seem small, but they are enough to ignite a revolution against a system that is rotten to its core and beyond reform.