Israel “falsifying” Palestinian rapes to further Gaza genocide

New report by the Sexual Violence Prevention Association also details systemic Israeli rape of Palestinians.

A new report by the Sexual Violence Prevention Association compares racist Israeli propaganda about a supposed sexual threat from Palestinian men to the Jim Crow era South. (SVPA)

Israel is “falsifying claims” of Palestinian rape against Israelis on 7 October 2023 to “to justify a further genocide” in Gaza, a groundbreaking new report says.

Published by the Sexual Violence Prevention Association this week, the report documents how Israel is deploying “wartime rape propaganda” and the “weaponization of sexual violence as a tool of war” in Palestine.

The report deploys a framework the group has dubbed SORVO – Systemic Oppression, Reverse Victim and Offender: “a tactic employed by oppressive groups to weaponize sexual violence, and accusations thereof, to justify their oppression.”

Omny Miranda Martone, the report’s lead author, said, “I am seeing SORVO employed against Palestinians every single day. We cannot allow Israel and the US government to use sexual violence to justify genocide.”

The report details how Israel has created a false narrative of Palestinian rapists as a way to both cover up the reality that Israeli soldiers are raping Palestinian detainees and as a way to justify their genocide in Gaza.

“Israel continues to create a false narrative that reverses victim and offender to realize this genocide,” the report states.

The Electronic Intifada has been one of the very few media outlets to expose Israel’s false claims about alleged Palestinian sexual violence on 7 October 2023.

As my colleague Ali Abunimah reported in January, “There are still zero complainants in alleged cases of rapes committed by Palestinians on 7 October 2023, an Israeli prosecutor has admitted.”

And in April, a lauded Israeli “eyewitness” who claimed to have heroically saved women from rape by Hamas fighters was exposed by an Israeli journalist as a fraud.

Rami Davidian – who was a star witness in Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 October atrocity propaganda film Screams Before Silence – also claimed to have seen dozens of dead victims of alleged rapes on that day.

The new report marks the first time that a respected sexual violence prevention non-profit group based in Washington DC has confirmed our reporting.

The Sexual Violence Prevention Associationfirst detailedits SORVO framework in another report, which was published last year.

That report explained how SORVO works, examining case studies from the apartheid regime in South Africa, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews and the Jim Crow South in the US, where Black men were falsely identified as a sexual threat to white women.

As that report showed, “The Nazi regime reframed interracial relationships as a Jewish conspiracy to pollute the ‘Aryan’ bloodlines. Media sources depicted Jewish men in political cartoons as conniving and predatory to ‘Aryan’ women.”

The new report released this week is a SORVO case study focused on Israel, Zionist entities and Palestine.

It states that “Israel has crafted a false narrative surrounding the current conflict” and uses “its power as the oppressor through state actions and media manipulation to garner global support for the atrocities they commit in the Gaza Strip.”

It goes into the history, comparing Israel’s actions to other similar false rape narratives in other countries and at other points in history.

“Sexual violence as atrocity propaganda is not a new phenomenon,” it explains. “Settler states have a long history of violence against Black and Brown men under the false pretenses of retaliatory justice for women.”

In the case of Palestine, “A common Islamophobic trope is the false stereotype that Muslim men, particularly Arab men, are misogynistic and prone to committing sexual violence.”

The report details cases of what it calls “concerning misinformation,” as found in a UN investigation last year.

The Sexual Violence Prevention Association cites the infamously discredited New York Timesarticle “Screams Without Words” as an example of such misinformation.

As my colleague Ali Abunimah exposed back in January 2024, that article fell apart after its main sources disavowed the journalists’ central claim.

The family of Gal Abdush, featured prominently in mourning on the front page of the newspaper, came out and said that she had not been raped, as the paper had claimed.

Abdush was the so-called “woman in the black dress” who was the focus of the article. Yet her family were not told by the reporters behind the story that it would mention sexual violence – an astonishing fact considering that was the entire goal of the Times piece.

The report calls the article “inflammatory,” saying it was “debunked by multiple sources” and included “sensationalizing and graphic language.”

The report argues that theTimesarticle came out at a critical juncture: “It was published as global support was waning for Israel’s campaign of violence in Gaza, and, in many ways, it single-handedly reversed that sentiment.”

The report also details the fact that Israeli forces use sexual violence – including rape – against Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, and this fact is covered up by Israeli sources and mainstream Western media.

The Sexual Violence Prevention Association analyzed 65 articles in The New York Times and Politico that mentioned sexual violence in Palestine between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2024.

Of those articles, 66 percent focused on alleged sexual violence against Israelis, while only 22 percent of the articles focused on Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians.

This despite the fact, as documented by The Electronic Intifada, that there is still not a single named or anonymous Israeli victim of a rape on 7 October and still not a single credible eyewitness to the rape of an Israeli that day.

The report describes Western media coverage as having “a strong bias in the amount of coverage dedicated to positioning Israelis as victims as opposed to Palestinians,” saying it is often “sensationalized, falsified or biased.”

Such coverage is highly impactful, the report states. It notes that Israel’s defense team at the International Court of Justice focused much of its testimony on 7 October 2023, claiming that there was sexual violence and other atrocities.

“This is significant because, in effect, Israel is not denying its actions,” the report explains. “Rather, Israel is claiming it has a right to these actions because of the events of October 7th.”

The report’s authors note the fact that the Israeli government has blocked a full United Nations investigation into alleged sexual violence on 7 October 2023.

But the smaller scale investigation that the UN released last year, led by Pramila Patten “found no evidence of systematic rape by Hamas or any other Palestinian group, despite widespread media reporting to the contrary,” the Sexual Violence Prevention Association report notes.

This is despite the fact that Patten claimed (without showing evidence) that Palestinian sexual violence likely took place that day.

The new report states that Israel’s “blockage of a more thorough investigation demonstrates that Israel is interested in falsifying claims to justify a further genocide.”

Deflection and denial

A primary motive for Israel’s false allegation that Palestinians raped Israelis en masse is to cover up the documented fact that the reverse is the actual truth.

“Palestinian women have endured decades of denial of bodily autonomy and integrity as well as sexual violence for the duration of the occupation,” the new report states.

It says there has been an escalation in sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and that Israeli soldiers likely “feel emboldened to commit atrocities against Palestinians because of Western media’s coverage of October 7th that alleged a ‘mass rape’ occurred against Israelis.”

The new report argues that the Western media’s “failure to condemn or even register sexual violence against Palestinians persists despite extensive evidence, including numerous first-person testimonies of sexual violence in Israeli detention.”

When the fact of Israel’s systemic sexual violence against Palestinians is documented, Israeli leaders are quick to respond by claiming that sexual violence occurred against Israelis on 7 October 2023, the new report says.

“Another common tactic is to claim that these accusations are anti-Semetic. This deflection is a form of denial because it redirects the conversation from any Israeli wrongdoing.”

“Everything is legitimate”

The report details how in August last year, there were the notorious “right to rape” protests in Israel. It had come to light that Israeli prison guards were systematically raping and sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners.

The Israeli military “categorically denied any allegations of abuse through a spokesperson,” the report notes. “However, this denial was issued shortly after nine Israeli soldiers were detained by the IDF [Israeli military] for alleged ‘severe sexual abuse’ of a Palestinian man at a facility in the Negev desert.”

Yet when this became public Israeli politicians and members of the public rallied in support of the alleged rapists. Israeli lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky (a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party) even argued that “everything is legitimate” for alleged Hamas members when asked if it should be permitted to rape a Palestinian detainee.

The new report argues that this “demonstrates a powerful example of SORVO in action: the Israeli military has accumulated enough power to categorically deny abuse while simultaneously acknowledging that nine of its members committed this atrocity.”

The SORVO concept puts into an analytical framework the way that Israel uses systemic oppression to reverse the victim and the offender – something The Electronic Intifada has been reporting on for many years.

Originally published by The Electronic Intifada.