A new report by the Palestinian Feminist Collective, supported by the Progressive International, documents Israel’s systematic use of sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians, across detention centres, homes, military operations, and systems of surveillance, from the Nakba of 1948 to the present.

The report shows that this violence is not incidental.

It is a systemic and historical mechanism of settler-colonial rule.

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Core Findings

Sexualized violence, including rape and sexual enslavement, has been used by Zionist militias during the 1948 Nakba and later by the Israeli state as a method of displacement and domination over Palestinians. After 1967, such violence intensified against prisoners and detainees, laying the groundwork for the systematic sexual torture documented since October 2023.

Since October 2023, sexualized violence against Palestinians of all ages and genders has been documented across multiple sites of Israeli control. Noteworthy is the preponderance of attacks targeting Palestinian men, particularly their sexual and reproductive organs. This finding unsettles conventional understandings of patriarchal violence, and expands awareness of gendered violence as a central element of the settler colonial architecture.

Sexualized and gendered violence, before and after 2023, is kneaded into the logics of the settler state and architecture of the Occupation. Patterns of sexualized violence by the IOF include: sexual humiliation, sexual torture and rape, the normalization of rape rhetoric and public incitement, and the use of sexual coercion and blackmail.

The Israeli state’s practices of sexualized violence presented in this report constitute a historical pattern, derived and coordinated through settler and settlement structures, state institutions, their policies, laws, officials and forces, all with the majority support of the general public. An example, the training of dogs to rape Palestinians is an essential indicator of Israel’s opperationalized intent to dominate and destroy Palestinian life, and the Palestinian right and will to resist.

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Leading scholars, activists and

parliamentarians endorse the report:

"The dehumanisation I saw when held captive by Israel — with all the attention of the world on our mission — makes me terrified for how Israel treats Palestinians in the dark. This landmark new report gathers the evidence of Israel’s systematic sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians in a way that cannot be ignored."

Greta Thunberg

"This report shows how the racial and colonial structures that govern and delimit Palestinian life, reproduction, bodily autonomy and movement, are centrally sexualized, classed, and gendered. More than merely serving as an archive of genocidal violence, this report is a timely reminder of what abolition feminists have long been saying: There can be no true feminist liberation without the dismantlement of prisons, police, and military occupation. Freedom for Palestine and all Palestinians is non-negotiable."

Angela Davis

"This report pushes the legal limitations of the UN Genocide Convention as it concerns Indigenous peoples and shows us how sexualized and gendered violence are systemic technologies of native elimination that Israel has used with an aim to destroy the Palestinian people."

Noura Erakat

"The Palestinian Feminist Collective's latest report on the Israeli regime's systematic gendered and sexual violence against Palestinians should shake people to their core. But this disturbing account should also move people to action and to demand accountability."

Yara Hawari

"“A Predatory State” is a must-read and urgent call for awakening and action. It is an indictment of a system that has transformed Palestinian life - bodies, homes, families, reproductive existence, and even the dead - into instruments of control and domination.
It is time to understand that the crimes against the Palestinians - including the sexualised and gender-based violence meticulously researched and exposed in this report - is not a total sum of isolated abuses, but a system of domination, oppression and erasure. The machinery of occupation, apartheid and genocide is its toolbox. This system, nurtured by ideological ambition and economic interest, continues to survive through institutional complicity, political protection, and impunity.
States seem to claim ignorance to evade their legal obligations to prevent and punish genocide, end complicity, investigate and prosecute those responsible, and dismantle the structures that allow such crimes to persist. The report is a call upon all responsible citizens to stay united - not just to end genocide, but to fight once and for all this testosteronic model of power that roots and grows through subjugation and repression."

Francesca Albanese

"The genocide in Gaza heralds a renewed historical phase, rather than an isolated event. Dissecting this whole genocidal project, as the "Predatory State" report does, helps us reach an understanding of how global capital wants to conduct colonial war in the genocidal age."

Ghassan Abu Sitta

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