“It was the lowest depth of hell.”

This is how Mohammed Qaoud, a journalist from Gaza, described his detainment by Israeli forces at the notorious Sde Teiman concentration camp. In a webinar hosted by the Progressive International in May, he detailed the various forms of mistreatment and humiliation that were ritually inflicted on him and other political prisoners.

The “most severe” form of torture, Qaoud said, was sexual. At Sde Teiman, “[s]exual torture was practiced on Gaza prisoners specifically; later it was practiced on all prisoners, but it began concentrated on Gaza prisoners.” Among many humiliating rituals designed not only to break the prisoners, but also to destroy the very reproduction of Palestinian life, it included strip searches, strikes on prisoners’ genitals “with the aim of castration”, and rape using trained animals.

Sexual violence against Palestinians is the subject of a landmark new report by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), published in partnership with the Progressive International. A Predatory State gathers survivor and witness testimonies, declassified Israeli archives, Palestinian oral histories, academic research, media reporting, human rights documentation and United Nations records into a single narrative.

Over the past three years, the evidence of the genocide in Gaza — and the many crimes against humanity that accompanied it — became impossible to ignore. Yet many still clung to the belief that this violence was an aberration: that it was the product of a bad government rather than the imperialist and colonial system at its purest.

Many insisted that if Benjamin Netanyahu were simply replaced, or “progressive” Israelis made political gains, some form of justice could be restored.

The PFC report dispels these notions. Instead, it shows that sexual violence has been integral to the process of Zionist colonialism in Palestine from its very beginnings. “Sexualized and gendered violence have historically been an intrinsic feature of the Zionist project, and continues to animate the systematic war waged on Palestinian bodies, intimacy, home life, and spaces,” the report says. The status quo — from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu — is one of ritual violence designed to destroy the foundation of Palestinian life.

The report documents sexualised and gendered violence across detention, interrogation, warfare, surveillance, family separation, home destruction and the withholding of the dead. In Israeli prisons and detention sites, it records forced nudity, sexual humiliation, genital torture, rape with objects, and rape by trained dogs. In Gaza, it traces the destruction of reproductive healthcare, the denial of water, food, fuel and medicine, and the attacks on maternity care that make birth itself a site of siege.

For example, the report notes that Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, the Basmah IVF centre, was directly hit in December 2023, reportedly destroying around 3,000 embryos. In one case documented by the report, Rania Abu Anza spent ten years undergoing IVF treatment before giving birth to twins. Both babies were killed with their father in an Israeli airstrike.

Across occupied Palestine, the report documents esqat — sexualised blackmail, surveillance and coercion — used to recruit informants, fracture communities and threaten Palestinians with exposure or fabricated disgrace.

The report’s traces the continuity of these practices over the entire history of the Zionist project. The same methods reappear again and again across decades and sites — from the Nakba to the Intifada, from the colonial checkpoint to Sde Teiman. And they are universal to the colonizer’s security agencies: from prison guards and soldiers to police and intelligence officers. The purpose is to humiliate, coerce, displace and ultimately to destroy.

This use of sexual violence is indicative of a much more expansive and far-reaching genocidal project than the assault on Gaza. It represents a systematic effort to prevent the Palestinian people from reproducing “biologically and culturally” — to make the continuation of Palestinian society not only intolerable, but ultimately impossible.

The PFC report is a calling. It reminds us that is no returning to a fairer, more progressive colonialism. The process of imposing one society on the body of another is necessarily a violent process. As Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

For Palestinians, justice can only be found in decolonization — the final and irreversible return of Palestinian land to the Palestinian people. Only then can the decades of torture be brought to an end.

Please read and share this landmark report here.

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Our History

17 July 1936 - The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War began on 17 July 1936. To mark the anniversary, we republish the Farewell Address to the International Brigades delivered by Dolores Ibárruri, also known as La Pasionaria, in Barcelona on 28 October 1938. It was Ibárrui’s last speech before she left Spain for the Soviet Union.

Here are some extracts, which can be enjoyed and shared on Instagram:

”From all peoples, from all races, you came to us like brothers, like sons of immortal Spain; and in the hardest days of the war, when the capital of the Spanish Republic was threatened, it was you, gallant comrades of the International Brigades, who helped save the city with your fighting enthusiasm, your heroism and your spirit of sacrifice.

”For the first time in the history of the peoples’ struggles, there was the spectacle, breath­taking in its grandeur, of the formation of International Brigades to help save a threatened country’s freedom and independence – the freedom and independence of our Spanish land.

“Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Republicans – men of different colours, differing ideology, antagonistic religions — yet all profoundly loving liberty and justice, they came and offered themselves to us unconditionally.

“They gave us everything — their youth or their maturity; their science or their experience; their blood and their lives; their hopes and aspirations — and they asked us for nothing. But yes, it must be said, they did want a post in battle, they aspired to the honor of dying for us.”

¡No Pasaran!

Art of the Week

Frantz Fanon, the great scholar of the struggle against colonialism, was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, then a French colony in the Caribbean.

As a young man he volunteered to fight with the Free French Forces during the Second World War, an experience that taught him about the bitter contradiction of a metropole that demanded loyalty from its colonial subjects while treating them as racially inferior.

After the war he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, and in 1952 published Black Skin, White Masks, a searching examination of the psychic wounds that colonialism inflicts on the colonised.

Living in Algeria, he took up a post at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in 1953. Confronted with patients broken by torture and the violence of French rule, he eventually resigned his post and committed himself to the Algerian War of Independence, becoming a militant and spokesman for the National Liberation Front (FLN).

His final and most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, completed as he was dying of leukaemia in 1961, offered a searing analysis of decolonisation, the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the pitfalls of national consciousness, and the place of violence in the overthrow of colonial power. This poster by PI Creative Director Gabriel Silveira commemorates Fanon’s life.