Gazan women bid farewell to one of their relatives who was martyred as a result of an Israeli bombing in Rafah (French)

The Israeli website "Siha Mekumet" said that the war on Gaza had returned to what it called the feminist struggle, and that the feminist movement chose to focus on the attack of last October 7, ignoring the grave Israeli violations against the women of the Gaza Strip.

In an article entitled “The war in Gaza takes the feminist struggle back years,” Samah Salaima wrote that she was not able to celebrate International Women’s Day this year, after everyone in Israel chose to return to October 7, 2023, in light of a UN report that addressed allegations of Israeli women being subjected to violence. He was raped during that attack.

Samah wrote that the report focuses on what he called evidence of “sexual crimes” committed by Palestinians, but indicates that the investigators did not hear any direct testimony from the victims, but rather reviewed and studied the evidence and information collected by the Israeli authorities and their experts.

She said that part of the report also touched on the situation of Palestinian women during the war and their fear of human rights violations, but this was completely ignored, and the Israeli authorities did not allow those who drafted it to enter the Gaza Strip to meet with Palestinian women.

Battlefield

According to Samah, the report and the Israeli reaction to it have, for 5 months, turned the woman’s body into a battlefield in the conflict, which she considered a dangerous retreat for the feminist movement “after years of struggle to expand the concept of women’s oppression, including physical, social, economic and political oppression,” as well as the deprivation of women’s rights. The right to housing, food, health, motherhood, and safe pregnancy and childbirth.

But the feminist movement chose, according to Samah, “to focus obsessively on rape allegations, which have become a major driver of revenge against Palestinians wherever they are, and politicians invest in it to achieve their own goals, in the name of avenging the honor of the Jewish man,” according to the report.

Samah added that the discussion about women's protection has regressed back to the old square, where sexual violations become as if they were the major harm that befalls women during war. This is an image summarized by a CNN news anchor whose guest told her about the huge number of Palestinian women who were killed by the Israeli army. Her response was, “But they were not raped.”

Finally, Samah wondered: How can Women’s Day be commemorated without thinking about the thousands of women who were killed in Gaza, and about the 60,000 pregnant women there, 500 of whom give birth every month without food or health services, and all the time say goodbye to an infant who was killed in the bombing or who died of hunger and disease, and without thinking about... Displacement, hunger, bombing of hospitals and maternity clinics, or even in that phrase that Israeli soldiers wrote on the walls of a nursing home for abused women in which they threatened Palestinian women with rape?

Earlier this month, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) denounced the adoption by a UN official of Israeli allegations of committing “sexual violations” against Israeli women during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood 5 months ago.

A Hamas statement said that the UN official relied in her report on Israeli institutions, soldiers, and witnesses chosen by the Israeli occupation authorities, in an effort to prove what the statement described as “a false accusation refuted by all international investigations and reports.”

Hamas added, "What it described as the UN official's allegations completely contradict what was stated in the testimonies of released Israeli women and female prisoners about the good treatment of them by the resistance fighters," adding that these accusations will not succeed in obscuring the ugliness and horror of the crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

Previously, the Israeli government rejected what it called allegations of sexual violence against Palestinians, describing them as “baseless allegations,” after a report in the Guardian newspaper quoted a United Nations committee of experts that Palestinian women were subjected to sexual assaults while they were in Israeli prisons.

Source: Israeli press