Call to Action

(See link below to sign)

Trigger warning: explicit sexual violence.

For over two years of unrelenting bombing, Palestinian women have fought for survival and against sexual and other violence, including starvation in Gaza. Yet many women’s organisations and self-proclaimed feminists, especially in the Global North, have remained silent, ignoring that this is “reproductive genocide” – against children, the next generation, and women (pregnant, breastfeeding, mothers) deliberately targeted because we give life. Women give birth to, feed and raise children, and are the primary carers of families and communities – whatever else we do.

We demand an end to the complicity, funding and political backing for this appalling sexist and racist inhumanity. Palestinian women and children have the support of millions of people worldwide who have been marching and protesting, outraged and horrified at the daily massacre. We must reflect this support.

Hundreds of Palestinian women and children have testified about sexual and other forms of torture, including multiple and repeated rapes, while in captivity. They urge people everywhere to put pressure on those governments that are arming Israel to act against these atrocities. This is even more urgent now that the Israeli Knesset is considering legislation that would give permission to soldiers to execute Palestinian prisoners.

Getting justice and ending rape and sexual violence are fundamental demands of the women’s movement, of all who call themselves feminists, who organise against sexual and gender-based violence, and support racial and social justice. Yet many feminists, women’s organisations and elected officials, especially in the Global North, have said little about the rape of Palestinian women, children and men.

A range of human rights bodies have documented rape and other torture in Israeli detention. They include Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Committee Against Torture, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls. The evidence in each of their reports is informed by the personal testimonies and eye witness accounts of hundreds of women and children – traumatic, shocking and indefensible. A PCHR press report (10 November) states that “what is happening in Israeli prisons is a systematic policy aimed at destroying the Palestinian people, not just isolated incidents of abuse”. It contains testimonies of torture of a woman and three men. The woman, a 42-year-old mother, graphically recounts being stripped and suffering four rapes by groups of soldiers in military detention over three days.

I cannot describe what I felt; I wished for death every single moment. After I was raped, they left me alone, handcuffed to the bed, without clothes, for many long hours. I could hear the soldiers outside speaking Hebrew and laughing.

Some media outlets have reported the stripping, rape and torture (sometimes to death) of men in Israeli detention. But violence against women and children remains much less visible, yet it is just as devastating, as is the shame, humiliation, and at times social rejection that follows. Such assaults are also filmed – another weapon used to publicly shame and silence victims, ensuring maximum physical and psychological harm. In the words of Pramila Patten, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, “Sexual violence is a crime that shreds the very fabric that binds communities together, leaving social cohesion and safety nets threadbare.”

Israel’s “organised and widespread torture” is a “de facto state policy” according to the UN Committee Against Torture (November 2025). They received written evidence from the Defence for Children International Palestine (DCI) which had gathered testimonies from 325 child victims (2021 – 2025). They say that while the detention and torture of children has gone on for decades, their scale and brutality rocketed after October 2023.

The range of torture applied to adults is also commonly applied to children who are not allowed any contact with parents. It includes sexual torture: strip searches, sexual abuse and sexual humiliation, combined with threats to kill – children or their parents.

Some of the testimonies are from very young children, well below Israel’s age of criminal responsibility (12 years old). Bahaa, aged seven was shot at, arrested and imprisoned for throwing stones at a military vehicle. After release he was too terrified to go outside his home. Unlike Israelis, Palestinian children are tried in military courts under military law.

By arming and financing Israel’s genocide, Western governments are actively supporting this illegal torture, including rape – a coordinated policy of systematic collective punishment, which they know violates multiple international laws and conventions, and for which Israel has enjoyed total impunity.

Palestinian women in the West Bank have reported directly to Women Against Rape on the conditions women and children face under occupation and genocide. Sexual harassment at checkpoints – women and girls held up for hours, stripped and strip searched, including removal of their hijab, often in front of others. Women and also men are stripped and sexually assaulted and humiliated in front of family members at home. Night raids include arrests of women and children without charge, blindfolded and held in prison torture camps for months.

The extensive report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, called the destruction of Gaza “apocalyptic” and a “femi-genocide” (July 2025). 67% of those killed are women and girls according to a UN press release.

Across time and continents rape has been a weapon of the colonizer against the colonized – part of the goal of subjugation and annihilation. We join people around the world to honour what the liberation movements of women, Indigenous people, people of colour, immigrants and refugees, queer and trans people have taught us, that silence=death. It is our responsibility to amplify the testimony of the Palestinian people, starting with women and children, and support their struggle for survival and justice.

We will not be silenced by false and cynical claims that speaking against the genocide and rape of Palestinians is antisemitic.  Those of us who are Jewish reject this outrageous weaponization of antisemitism aimed at hiding the rape and genocide of Palestinian women and children.

Inspired by the enormous courage and resilience of our Palestinian sisters, the organizations below, representing women of whatever race, ethnicity, faith or no faith, and other people of conscience of whatever gender demand that:

• governments, international human rights institutions, and NGOs take action to end Israel’s reproductive genocide, including its use of rape and other forms of sexual violence.
• the International Court of Justice puts Israel on trial for rape and sexual torture of the Palestinian people as a crime against humanity.

References:

1. “More than a human can bear”: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023, Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Easy Jerusalem, and Israel, UN Human Rights Council 58th Session, 13 March 2025
2. Sex-based violence against women and girls: new frontiers and emerging issues, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, to the Human Rights Council 59th session June-July 2025, and You Tube interview.
3. Ill-Treatment and Torture of Palestinian Children in Israeli Military Detention and use of Excessive Force by Israeli Forces, Submitted 13 October 2025 to the 83rd Session of the UN Committee Against Torture by Defense for Children International (Palestine).
4. PCHR Documents Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Detention against Released Palestinian Detainees, at https://pchrgaza.org Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Gaza, November 10, 2025.

To Sign click here

Signed by:
Women Against Rape
Women of Colour in GWS
Global Women’s Strike
International Jewish AntiZionist Network