Hamas Sexual Barbarism Common For Invaders From Rome To Today
The barbarism and brutality of Hamas terrorists in their Oct. 7, 2023, invasion against Israel was horrid but hardly unique as it was yet another horrific example of how rape has been historically committed by invading armies.
Hamas has been identified for having committed numerous sexual crimes and to a lesser scale, Israeli soldiers also have been accused of sexually abusing Palestinian girls and women.
Women’s historian Gerda Lerner wrote that rape has accompanied warfare “in virtually every known historical era.”
The practice of raping the women of a conquered group has remained a feature of warfare and conquest from the second millennium B.C. to the present. Rape has been used to subjugate women from the time of the Romans and the rape of the Sabine women to the terror of the “Rape of Nanjing,” in which more than 20,000 women and girls were raped during the first weeks of the Japanese occupation of the Chinese city of Nanjing in World War II to the U.S. torture and rape of prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The United Nations had refused to acknowledge the rape allegations against Hamas and didn’t include the group in the blacklist of state and non-state parties guilty of sexual violence in 2023 due to the lack of what it deemed “credible” evidence. It took the U.N. five months to finally recognize the sexual crimes committed during Hamas’ massacre.
A new film “Screams Before Silence” is irrefutable evidence of the systematic sexual brutality by Hamas. It includes eyewitness accounts of women who survived attacks, hostages who have been freed, first responders and medical and forensic experts. They report unspeakable sexual violence, including gang rapes, mutilations, burning and branding and even rapes of women who had been killed.
The hour-long film is by Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer of Meta. It can be viewed on YouTube and has been seen 10,963,434 times since its release on April 25. For more information, visit screamsbeforesilence.com and see the film at www.youtube.com/@ScreamsBeforeSilence.[31]
In a surprise blitzkrieg, an estimated 3,000 Hamas fighters attacked military bases and massacred civilians in 21 communities. In total, attackers killed 1,139 people, which included 695 Israeli civilians (including 38 children); 71 foreign nationals; and 373 members of the security forces. About 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers and children were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip.
The attack included a massacre of 364 civilians at the Nova Festival, an open-air music fest, where an estimated 3,500 people had gathered to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret near kibbutz Re’im, about 3 miles from the border with Gaza in southern Israel. The crowd was mostly from 20 to 40 years old.
Hamas said it attacked in response to the continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, rising Israeli settler violence, and recent escalations.
Israel has retaliated and the bombing campaign has, so far, killed almost 37,600 people, including countless innocent women and children and has left Gaza in ruins with many on the brink of starvation.
Experts with the “Special Procedures” section of the Human Rights Council issued a report in February outlining alleged abuses by Israeli Defense Forces, since the campaign to eliminate Hamas began. Special Procedures is the largest body of independent experts in the UN human rights system,
The experts referred to “credible allegations of egregious human rights violations to which Palestinian women and girls continue to be subjected in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.” The report said that Palestinian women and girls have “reportedly been arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family members, including their children.”
The experts received reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence. The experts wrote that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online. According to the report, experts expressed “serious concern” over the arbitrary detention of hundreds of Palestinian women and girls.
“Many have reportedly been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, denied menstruation pads, food and medicine, and severely beaten. On at least one occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were allegedly kept in a cage in the rain and cold, without food,” the report said.
One of the participants in the film about the Hamas invasion is Amit Soussana who was abducted to Gaza and freed in the hostage release deal in November 2023. She described being raped while being held by Hamas. The film also includes testimony by members of ZAKA about rape and sexual assaults. ZAKA is an Israeli volunteer group that responds to community emergencies, and from other witnesses during the massacre at the Nova Festival and elsewhere.
Sexual violence also has been reported by the Russian military since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukrainian officials, rights groups, and international media reported growing evidence of sexual violence including gang-rapes, assaults at gunpoint, and rapes committed in front of children.
In October 2022, CNN quoted a UN official who said Russia was using rape as part of its “military strategy.” Pramila Patten, UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said many cases involved children and that the true number of victims was likely to be far higher than official figures suggested because sexual crimes are often “under reported.”
During war and armed conflict, rape is frequently used as a means of psychological warfare in order to humiliate and terrorize the enemy. Author Susan Brownmiller was the first historian to attempt an overview of rape in war.
“War provides men with the perfect psychological backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women. The maleness of the military — the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical command — confirms for men what they long suspect — that women are peripheral to the world that counts,” Brownmiller wrote in her 1975 book, “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.”
The ancient Greeks considered war rape of women “socially acceptable behavior well within the rules of warfare” and warriors considered the conquered women “legitimate booty, useful as wives, concubines, slave labor, or battle-camp trophy,” according to the 1997 book, “War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals” by Kelly Dawn Askin.
Conquering the riches and property of an enemy was regarded as legitimate reason for war. Women were included with “property” and the rape of a woman was considered a property crime against the woman’s owner.
In the late 18th century and 19th century, treaties and war codes started to include vague provisions for the protection of women. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1785) specified that in case of war “women and children…. shall not be molested in their persons.” The Declaration of Brussels (1874) stated that the “honours and rights of the family…. should be respected.”
The first prohibition of rape in humanitarian law came with the Lieber Code (1863), which emphasized protection of civilians and stated that “all rape… [is] prohibited under the penalty of death.”
In the 20th century, the prohibition of rape was excluded from the Geneva Conventions and was deliberately left vague by the Hague Conventions. After World War I, the Commission of Responsibilities was organized in 1919 to examine the atrocities committed by the German Empire and the other Central Powers during the war. The commission found substantial evidence of sexual violence and subsequently included rape and forced prostitution among the violations of the laws and customs of war. Violations were rarely prosecuted.
The Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals were set up after World War II to prosecute the major war criminals of the European Axis powers (in fact only Germans) and of Japan for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Tribunals failed to charge Nazi war criminals with rape, despite testimony from witnesses about it occurring.
Rapes also were committed against allied nationals but the judges at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 stated that the laws of war only applied to enemy nationals, not that of an ally, meaning such acts were not war crimes.
“However, notwithstanding evidence of sexual violence in Europe during World War II, a lack of will led to rape and sexual violence not being prosecuted at the Nuremberg Tribunals,” Anne Marie de Brouwer and Ann-Marie L.M. de Brouwer wrote in “Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence.”
At least 34,140 European women were forced to prostitution during the German occupation of their countries, along with concentration camp female prisoners. In many cases, girls and women were abducted from the streets of occupied cities during German patrols, according to “Hebrew Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust” by Leon Rudkin.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East did convict Japanese officers “of failing to prevent rape” in the Nanjing Massacre. According to the prosecution, more than 20,000 women and girls were raped during the first weeks of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing.
Brutal mass rapes were committed against German women during and after World War II. Some estimate that more than 100,000 women were raped by Soviet soldiers in Berlin both during and after the Battle of Berlin. Rape was regarded by men in the Soviet army as a well-deserved form of punishment, whether the civilians had anything to do with the war or not. In total, historians estimate that more than two million German women were raped, according to a 2015 NPR report.
Gary Donaldson writes in his book, “American at War Since 1945: Politics and Diplomacy in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War” that Vietnamese civilians were robbed, raped and killed by French soldiers in Saigon and in North Vietnam when they came back in August 1945.
Nearly 1,000 rapes were committed by U.S. forces during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The Judge Advocate General’s office reported that there were 971 convictions for rape in the U.S. military from January 1942 to June 1947, which includes a portion of the occupation.
Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu wrote that soon after the Marines landed in Okinawa, “all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers.” Shortly after landing, the Marines found no Japanese forces but started “hunting for women” and those who were hiding were dragged out one after another to be abused.
Some historians claim there were mass rapes during the initial phase of the U.S. occupation of Japan. Fujime Yuki, a history professor at Matsusaka University, reported 3,500 rapes in the first month after American troops landed.
Secret wartime files made public in 2006 by The Guardian revealed that American GIs committed at least 400 sexual offenses in Europe, including 126 rapes in the United Kingdom, between 1942 and 1945. At least 14,000 civilian women in Britain, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II, according to Robert J. Lilly’s 2007 book, “Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe During World War II.”
Although far from the scale of those committed by American, German or Soviet soldiers, rapes and other forms of sexual assault were committed by British forces in Allied-occupied Germany during the last months of World War II.
Sexual violence against male prisoners of the Iraq War gained wide publicity after graphic photos documented such abuses on male Iraqi prisoners by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib prison, where prisoners were forced to humiliate themselves.
Five U.S. Army soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment were charged with rape and murder after a 14-year-old Iraqi girl was gang raped in the March 2006 Mahmudiyah rape and killings. American soliders raped and murdered Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, then killed members of her family, including a 6-year-old sister.
An estimated 500,000 women were raped during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda defined genocidal rape as rape intended to affect a population or culture as a whole. In one trial of a Rwandan mayor, the trial chamber held that “sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide.”
Rape first became recognized as a crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued arrest warrants in 1993. It was recognized that Muslim women in Foča in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina were subjected to systematic and widespread gang rape, torture and sexual enslavement by Bosnian Serb soldiers, policemen, and members of paramilitary groups after the takeover of the city in April 1992.
Sexual violence against women in 21st-century warfare remains a major issue in various conflicts worldwide, including the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen.