Israeli soldiers guard a vehicle containing bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees in Gaza. Photo: Moti Milrod/AP.
Editorial note: Orinoco Tribune does not generally publish pieces older than two weeks. However, an exception is being made in this case as the current article remains as relevant today as when it was first published.
By Vanessa Beeley – Apr 9, 2024
âWe Israelis are the biggest Holocaust deniers â The Jewish state learned that it can commit its own Holocaust in Gaza and deny that it existsâ
Jonathan Ofir for Mondoweiss.
Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa reports from her visit to Gaza:
The reality on the ground is infinitely worse than the worst videos and photos that weâre seeing in the West.
People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but thatâs gone. Now theyâre eating the donkeys and horses,â Abulhawa writes. âSome are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.â
âWhat I see is a holocaust.â she summarizes. âThe incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.â
What has underpinned this wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians and children in Gaza â the 7th October Hamas âatrocitiesâ that include the media-amplified claims of âmass rapeâ.
Claims led by the discredited ZAKA organisation whose founder has a history of rape and pedophilia. ZAKA is reminiscent of the CIA/MI6 White Helmet propaganda productions in Syria from 2013 onwards, designed to criminalise the Syrian government. You can read my archive of investigative work exposing this organisation here.
I am not going to focus on the debunked claims made by the Zionist Hasbara industry. You can read and watch the multiple investigative reports that have dismantled the genocide-justifications here â 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
Two leading Palestinian media organizations, The Palestine Chronicle and Friends of Palestine Network, conducted a joint investigation, based on media reports, in addition to historical and political analyses.
I recommend following this X account to also have real-time updates on the collapse of the Zionist propaganda mill.
Journalist and researcher, William Van Wagenen, has also covered much of what actually took place on October 7th. Van Wagenen includes the âbaked babyâ narratives that were circulating shortly after the 7th October Resistance operations.
Eli Beer, founder and president of another rescue organization, United Hatzalah, made similar false claims.
While attending the Republican Jewish Coalitionsâ Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas on 28 October, he claimed that âA little baby in the oven â These bastards put these babies in the oven and put on the oven ⌠We found the kid a few hours later.â
Like all the other atrocity tales, this was also walked back and mocked on social media by the majority of independent media outlets who saw through the fabrication immediately.
2013 in Adra Industrial City, north of Damascus, Syria â extremist factions including Al Qaeda (Nusra Front) burned civilians alive in a bread furnace. The same extremist factions supported by Israel to overthrow a pro-Palestine Syrian government.
In 2014, a frail 16 year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was burned alive by Israeli extremist settlers amidst a number of Zionist settler kidnappings of young Palestinian boys.
the preliminary autopsy report states that the remnants of a burned substance (soot) was present in Muhammadâs respiratory passages and lungs, indicating he had inhaled the substance while being burned alive.
In 2015 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma. Aliâs mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four, only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.
At the preliminary court hearing in Lod, terrorist Zionist settlers chanted:
âWhereâs Ali? Thereâs no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grillâ
From the article in Mondoweiss:
In December 2015, a video showing dozens of wedding guests celebrating the arson went public via Channel 10. The guests are seen dancing with Molotov cocktails, knives and guns, and stabbing a photo of baby Ali Dawabsheh.
Literally 24 hours after the October 7th Resistance operation, on various interviews I recommended avoiding the rush to judgement being rammed down our throats by a Zionist-partisan media crush. I was absolutely correct to have cautioned thus and consider myself vindicated by the last six months of investigation into the Zionist hysterical claims.
Claims that only the Palestinian Resistance was responsible for all deaths on the day that unleashed genocide upon Palestine â or rather the intensification of a genocide that began 100 years ago under a malign British Mandate.
The reality of thousands of children horrifically burned, eviscerated, incinerated, executed, abused and tortured by the sadistic IOF forces since October 7th is something that cannot be eclipsed by the lies peddled by the genocidal maniacs intent on the extinction of Palestinians.
Euromed Monitor â Euro-Med Monitorâs field team documented the Israeli armyâs field execution of 13 children near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The majority of them were with their families, following the Israeli militaryâs instructions to evacuate their areas, when they were shot dead.
Israelâs Rape Culture
In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the goal of acquiring land led to the use of brutal tactics aimed at the dispossession and elimination of the indigenous population. Colonizers embraced sexual terrorization as an instrument for achieving this strategy.
Tamam Mohsen
The âonly Democracy in the Middle Eastâ is reported to be a hub of sexual abuse, rape and ritual pedophilia cases. According to the Berghahn Journals:
Sexual violence is a common phenomenon in Israeli society. Despite its frequency, it is still kept silent in the public sphere. The last few years have seen a rise in awareness on the topic of sexual abuse and harassment; however it is a crime with a very low percentage of incident reports. This is for a variety of reasons, the main reason being that we live in a society that tends to blame the victim, which causes them feelings of shame and humiliation preventing them from reporting the incident.
Israel is a Pedophile Haven
Israel is a haven for pedophiles escaping prosecution in other countries. Perhaps the best known case is that of Malka Leifer. A former ultra-Orthodox Jewish school Principal sentenced to fifteen years for child sex abuse.
Israeli author and public speaker Alon Mizrahi went on X to point out Israelâs harbouring of this criminal serial abuser of children:
This lovely lady, from a prestigious Hasidic family, was the principal of an ultra-orthodox Hewish school in Melbourne, Australia who in 2008 âfaced trial on 70 sex offense charges laid by Victoria Police, with accusations from at least eight alleged victimsâ (from Wikipedia).
All victims were her former underage pupils.
To cut a long story short, lovely Malka fled to Israel in 2008, where she comfortably lived, thanks to generous help from senior politicians, psychiatrists, and extremely helpful judges, until 2021, when the scandal was making international news, with high-ranking Australian politicians intervening on behalf of the victims.
In March of 2023 Leifer was found guilty of 18 counts of sexual abuse, including rape, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
But for 13 years, Israel refused to extradite Leifer to Australia, and she was allowed to lead her normal life in a West Bank settlement. And thatâs how much Israel cares for (Jewish!) victims of sexual abuse.
In 2020 Jerusalem Post ran the headline â Tens of Thousands of Pedophiles Operate in Israel every year.
Annually there are 100,000 victims of pedophilia in Israel according to one monitoring organisation.
While indigenous Palestinians are denied the right to return to their homeland, a number of pedophiles in Israel are âJewishâ immigrants who have exploited the law of return (whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship) to seek refuge from prosecution for their heinous crimes.
Mainstream media in the US is reporting on the Jewish American pedophiles who âhide from justiceâ in Israel after subjecting children to abuse and rape. Jewish Community Watch says the majority of its cases originate from modern Orthodox to Ultra-orthodox Jewish enclaves in the U.S., but that it happens across the wider Jewish community.
Even Hollywoodâs accused sexual predators are seeking refuge in Israel. Hollywood filmmaker Brett Ratner fled to Israel after six women accused Ratner of sexual assault and sexual harassment in 2017. A report in Haaretz describes Israel as a âhot spot for foreign Jewish sexual predatorsâ.
Another Haaretz report in 2016 cites Manny Waks, the chief executive officer of Kol vâOz, a newly formed nonprofit that aims to prevent child sexual abuse in the global Jewish community:
âSex offenders tend to move from country to country to avoid jail, but what makes Israel unique is the Law of Return, which essentially grants unhindered access to anyone who is Jewish to come here without any real screening,â
The same story was covered by the UKâs Independent. This phenomenon cannot be dismissed as âconspiracy theoryâ, it is fact.
More Haaretz investigations can be found at these links â 1, 2,
From the American Psychological Association:
This study explores thought patterns of Jewish Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox pedophiles in Israel and how they resolve the contradiction between their commitment to Jewish Law and having committed sexual offenses against minors.
In 2022 Haaretz reported that 100 rabbis, teachers and other figures who have been accused, charged or convicted of sexual abuse overseas have already found refuge in Israel.
Also in 2022 The Jerusalem Post reported that the rate of sexual abuse of kids is highest among religious Zionist sector. âA new study by the Neâemanei Torah Vaâavodah movement reveals dramatic data on sexual abuse victims from the religious Zionist (Tzioni Dati) sector.â The abused often become abusers. How many of these abused children (majority male) are the IOF forces of tomorrow?
More Jerusalem Post investigations (one Times of Israel) can be found at these links â 1, 2, 3, 4.
A Haifa psychologist was arrested in 2021 for âindecent acts on children in his careâ.
In March 2024 almost 6 months after October 7th, an Israeli male nurse, Oren Hananaiev, had his medical licence revoked after being âconvicted of severe indecent acts without consent and possessing and publishing inappropriate content featuring underage children.â
From the analysis of Hananaievâs correspondence, many conversations were found with Yaakov, in which he advised him to use sedatives to âprevent resistanceâ during sexual assault. Furthermore, the investigators found correspondence between the two where Hananaiev suggests certain childrenâs games where one might sexually exploit kids while they still think that it is part of the game.
According to the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (2011):
The number of incarcerated sex offenders in Israeli prisons, which may be related to the total number of sex offenders, has been steadily increasing, from 350 offenders in 1997, to 1300 in 2009.
About 60 percent of convicted sex offenders in Israel have committed offenses against children under the age of 13.
Israelâs ultra-Orthodox community is rife with accusations of sexual offences against minors. Pedophiles seek refuge in Israel for a good reason. They are in âgoodâ company.
How many of the Brooklyn, New York, Haredi cult accused of sexual abuse have sought refuge from exposure and justice, in Israel?
A far-right Israeli lawmaker accused Israel of trying to normalise pedophilia as recently as May 2023, only a few months before Israel was accusing the Palestinian Resistance of âmass rapeâ. As many have stated on social media âan accusation is a confessionâ.
Israel has failed in almost every way in treating sexually abused children, says a report by a committee of experts aiming to change social norms, treatment and government policy on the issue. (Haaretz)
Jerusalem Post reports that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, around 56,000 Israelis have been forced to flee their homes and live in hotels throughout the country.
These hotels are allegedly a âticking time bomb of crimeâ â Cases included indecent exposure, crimes against children, and rape amongst other violent incidents. Even Israeli settlers are prey to the overt sexual predation that pervades their society.
The Limited Times:
Zion Vanuno, 64, is suspected of committing indecent acts against children in a hotel with evacuees in the center of the country. According to the suspicion, Vanuno lured the children with candies to go to different places in the hotel, where he committed indecent acts on them.
How ‘Israel’ Destroyed Kamal Adwan Hospital and Sexually Abused Doctors and Patients It Abducted
Israel â a history of rape as a weapon of terror
In his article âIsrael and Rapeâ journalist Robert Inlakesh goes into some detail about the cases of rape and sexual harassment within the IOF armed forces.
There have also been credible claims by a female soldier that she was raped by a fellow serviceman during the ongoing brutal military assault on Gaza.
Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israelâs armed forces. According to a Haaretz report, âa third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].â
In 2020, the Israeli armyâs sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.
It has been reported that a growing sector of Israeli society rape Israelis, they rape tourists, they abuse and rape children, they rape their own evacuees. How these predators (especially in the IOF) react to Palestinians that have routinely been dehumanised and reduced to legitimate targets for an inherent predatory sadism is naturally expected to be a hundred times worse. And it is.
The Tantura Massacre 22nd â 23rd May 1948.
On the night of 22-23 May 1948, a week after the declaration of the State of Israel, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura (population 1,500) was attacked and occupied by units of the Israeli armyâs Alexandroni Brigade. During the Nakba or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 some 400 villages were razed and occupied by Zionist forces.
Tantura was one of the tens of Palestinian villages and towns inside and outside the boundaries of the UN-envisaged Jewish state specifically targeted for capture under the notorious Plan Dalet, the Haganah master plan for the military establishment of Israel on the largest area possible of Palestine.
Palestinians were caged in makeshift cages and mowed down by machine-gun fire. Schoolchildren were ruthlessly shot even if they had raised their hands in surrender. Civilians were burned alive, buried in communal graves. Young girls were raped.
How different is this to what the IOF are doing in Gaza for the last six months but on an unprecedented scale.
Sabra and Shatila in 1982 witnessed the massacre of an estimated 3,500 Palestinians by Christian militiamen enabled and presided over by the Zionist forces. As journalist Robert Fisk said:
They (Israel) had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance â the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila â and they had established military liason with the murderers in the camps
According to multiple reports rape was also a feature of the Phalange militia on their genocidal rampage through the Palestinian community.
Fiskâs horrifying description of what he saw is haunting â here were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies â blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition â tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.
No different to the descriptions of decomposing bodies in and around Al Shifa Hospital or the corpses crushed beneath the tracks of a Zionist tank or bulldozer, children shot, their bodies left next to the white flag they were carrying. The terrified elderly man shot dead because he was dehydrated and couldnât keep moving.
The merciless Zionist bloodlust has only grown in strength since the first days of dispossessing Palestinians of their lands and their lives.
Rape and the threat of rape is systematically used in Israeli prisons for Palestinian women, children and men. A web search will reveal countless reports on the degrading and inhumane treatment of female prisoners forced to endure humiliating body searches and threatened with rape if they do not comply.
The crimes committed by the IOF in Gaza since October 7th replicate the crimes committed during the Nakba and in the 75 years of Zionist occupation of Palestinian territory.
Female detainees were submitted to sexual violence, torture, inhuman treatment, strip searches, sexual harassment, and rape threats while being arrested and held by Israeli army forces according to testimonies collated by Euromed Monitor.
A UN report published in February 2024 said experts were appalled by reported (Israeli) human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls.
âWe are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also 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,â
Palestinian prisoners that had been stripped naked and were tortured allegedly became entertainment for the Israeli spectators that were brought in by the IOF to watch the sadistic process. They were given permission to film the torture on their mobile phones.
In 2010 a report was submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. It involved the Zionist sexual assault or threatened sexual assault of Palestinian children aged between 13 and 16. The torture was used to obtain confessions from the children, admitting to stone throwing. Read more here, here and here.
The depositions sent to the UN report direct attacks, including squeezing boysâ testicles, pushing a blunt object (a club or rifle stock ) between the chair and a childâs buttocks, and repeated threats of âIâll screw you if you donât confess you threw stones.â
Of course the Zionist censorship machine moved to shut down the NGO, Defence for Children Palestine, that dared to expose the sexual abuse of minors by Israeli forces and security sectors. In October 2021, the DCIP was designated a terrorist organisation by Israeli authorities along with five other Palestinian NGOs.
Khan Younis in Gaza â History repeating itself?
An account (described by Zionists as fiction) from 1956 describes the slaughter and rape carried out by the Zionist forces in Gaza, in particular in Khan Younis.
According to the accepted Palestinian narrative, about 275 Palestinians were killed in the Khan Yunis massacre, while some 111 people were killed in Rafah. Rape was allegedly permitted to control the rebellious Palestinians.
The following letter was sent by a Golani Brigade soldier to his girlfriend on November 6, the day after the Sinai Campaign concluded, which is kept in the IDF archive. It is no different to the rhetoric we hear from IOF savages now inside Gaza or from the extremist Zionist settlers in West Bank:
Only the Arabs are to blame for all this and at every opportunity I take revenge on them,â he wrote. âI am not satisfied with the amount [of people] I have already killed; we killed hundreds but for me it is not enough. At every opportunity I take revenge on them, and opportunities are not lacking, especially these days when I am among thousands of Arabs. They are under curfew, and this is a great opportunity to do anything we want to them. And Iâm doing just that, and I wonât stop until I am on my way home, I swear.
Palestinian memory holds years and dates close.
The Nakba was in 1948, the Naksa in 1967, Sabra and Shatila September 1982, the Intifada â87. November 3, 1956, however, does not live in infamy. Despite being one of the greatest massacres of Palestinians, the Khan Yunis massacre that brutally took the lives of hundreds of Palestinian men and boys, has only received a footnote in history- a mere few lines in a UN report. (Article in Palestine Chronicle)
The massacre of Khan Yunis in 1956 reached twice the number of the Dier Yassin massacre and lasted longer than the massacre that took place at Sabra and Shatila. Read more here.
Rape is a weapon of terrorists
In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has always been carried out with maximum brutality. The colonizers trained by the British relished sexual terrorism as one of their most potent instruments of power and subjugation of an unruly, justifiably resistant population.
It can be argued that rape or the threat of rape was a primary reason that many communities fled their villages and homes in 1948. The present day oppression of Palestinian women in the Resistance or political movements challenging the Zionist entity is dependent upon rape and sexual abuse to coerce female prisoners into confessions, sometimes even into collaboration.
The freed Palestinian prisoner, Rasmea Odeh, publicly spoke in an American court about how she was raped by Israeli intelligence interrogators. Odeh, who was arrested in 1969 at the age of 19, reported that during her interrogation, she was beaten with wooden sticks and metal bars, and was left naked in a blatant violation of her sexuality.
Odeh was sexually tortured with electric shocks. Wires were attached to her genitals, breasts, abdomen, arms, and legs, and in that disoriented state, she was raped with a stick while her father was forced to watch. (Mondoweiss)
Prominent Israeli Rabbis like Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu have advocated for rape in wartime. A leading Israeli professor, Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, explicitly called for the rape of Palestinian women to deter the Palestinian resistance during the unrest of the summer of 2014.
Later, in 2016, Rabbi Colonel Eyal Qarim of the Israeli Military Rabbinate also echoed the same notion, making allowances for the rape of Palestinian women by Jewish Israeli soldiers âout of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors.â (Mondoweiss)
The apartheid Zionist state passed a sexual terrorism law in July 2023. The law was condemned for allowing Jewish Israelis to have a far lesser punishment for rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment than Palestinian citizens.
The law directly targets Palestinian citizens of Israel who are accused of sexually assaulting or harassing Jewish women if authorities deem the motive as ânationalisticâ.
The irony should not be lost on you.
Rape by the Zionist military, intelligence or police forces is not restricted to children and women. Men are also submitted to horrific torture practices including rape.
Mustafa Dirani was abducted by an Israeli âelite forceâ from inside Lebanon in 1994. He was finally released in 2004. Dirani claimed compensation for alleged rape by a Shin Bet interrogation expert.
The ritual humiliation of women is also not confined to within prison walls. Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada on September 28 2000 until July 2006, 68 pregnant women had to give birth at checkpoints, 34 infants and 4 pregnant women died on these checkpoints.
Israel and Abu Ghraib
When the images of prisoners taken by the IOF in Gaza emerged, men stripped down to their underwear in winter, beaten by metal pipes or guns, urinated on by their monstrous captors â it was likened to scenes from Abu Ghraib. As the inhumane abuse expanded across Gaza and included women, the comparisons increased.
Journalist W Van Wagenen wrote about the Israeli involvement in Abu Ghraib, in particular at Facility 1391:
But the âcreativeâ torture techniques focusing on sexual humiliation and rape have a clear origin.
Israeli interrogators were teaching US contractors and MPs torture techniques that Israel has long used against Palestinians and other Arabs.
In November 2003, as Cambone was lauding Israel for its assistance in Iraq, The Guardian published a report detailing the torture Israel subjected prisoners to at a secret prison known as âFacility 1391.â
âI was barefoot in my pajamas when they arrested me, and it was really cold,â says Sameer Jadala, a Palestinian school bus driver. âWhen I got to that place, they told me to strip and gave me a blue uniform. Then they gave me a black sack,â for his head.
Other former prisoners at Facility 1391 have described how they were stripped naked for interrogation, blindfolded, handcuffed, and threatened with rape. (emphasis added)
There can be no denying that Israel has a culture of rape and abuse of those it considers âuntermenschâ. It is engrained in their psyche and has been for almost a century because they believe they are not only âchosenâ but âuntouchableâ. The British spawned a Frankensteinâs monster and they have lost control of the rapacious entity that is committing crime after crime against Humanity, not only in Palestine.
Britain forced Zionism on the population by allowing mass âimmigrationâ, by arming the zionists while disarming the Palestinians, and by using all other weapons available to an occupying power to crush resistance.  Thousands of Palestinians were killed when they rebelled in the 1930s, all attempts to reason with the British having failed.
Executions and the collective punishment of whole villages were part of how Britain lived up to its âsacred trust of civilization.â The leadership needed for the coming stages of confrontation with the zionists was largely decapitated. The British did their dirty work for them. (Jeremy Salt)
âIn order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence [them] absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.â Judith Lewis Herman â Trauma and Recovery: the aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror.
An illegal settler colonial entity built on genocide, rape, torture, apartheid and oppression will always fail eventually. It is only a matter of time before the truly depraved and rotten Zionist core will surrender to its own internal moral decay and implode.
Vanessa Beeley
Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards â the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism â whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. You can support Vanessaâs journalism through her Patreon Page.
