Captured moments of IDF soldiers taking great pleasure in harassing Palestinian children. The UN green lights their appetite for sexually abusing Palestinians in detention. Photo: BettBeat’s Newsletter/File photo.
By Karim Bettache – Aug 16, 2025
Palestinians, stripped naked, were forced to “make sounds like a sheep and say, ‘I am a whore'” while IDF soldiers recorded the sexual humiliation for their private enjoyment.
The United Nations has reached a new moral nadir. In a grotesque perversion of justice that would make Orwell weep, the international body tasked with protecting human dignity has effectively sanctioned the systematic rape and sexual torture of Palestinians while manufacturing phantom atrocities to justify Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza.
The evidence is damning and irrefutable. Two comprehensive UN reports—here and here—document with forensic precision the widespread, systematic use of rape, sexual torture, and reproductive violence by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians. This institutional depravity extends beyond Gaza’s borders, as revealed by a Freedom Flotilla activist who witnessed the sexualized torture of international volunteers, including the particularly brutal treatment of a Lebanese girl. According to the activist, “There is no doubt in my mind they are raping Palestinians daily and take great pleasure out of it […] if they treat us [Westerners] like this, imagine what happens to the forgotten people of Palestine.”
Yet the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has chosen to add the Palestinian resistence to a blacklist for the —repeatedly debunked— alleged sexual violence while giving Israel a gentle finger-wag and a promise to “maybe” consider adding them next year.
This is not incompetence. This is complicity.
Oct 7: Not a Single Rape Victim has been Found
As Ali Abunimah —who finally spends time discussing the mass rapes against his people instead of exclusively the rape hoax —- reveals in devastating detail, the UN’s decision rests on the fraudulent report by Pramila Patten, the Secretary-General’s advisor on sexual violence in armed conflict. Despite her inflammatory claims about “patterns of rape” on October 7, Patten’s own investigation could not verify a single specific rape. Her team reviewed thousands of photos and videos and found no tangible evidence. They were provided no forensic evidence. They weren’t allowed to meet with any alleged victims.
To date—over 20 months after October 7—not a single identified victim, living or dead, of rape during the resistance-led operation has been produced. Not one.
Yet on this foundation of lies, the UN has constructed its moral edifice that legitimizes the ongoing sexual torture of Palestinians.
The Reality of Israeli Sexual Violence
While manufacturing ghost rapes to demonize Palestinians, the UN has documented actual, verified cases of Israeli sexual violence with clinical precision. According to the UN’s own reports:
• There are cases of sexual violence against detained Palestinians, including rape, gang rape by multiple soldiers, attempted rape, genital assault, and sexual torture with objects
• Numerous cases of sexual and gender-based violence have been documented across more than 10 Israeli military and prison facilities
• Palestinian detainees have been subjected to rape with metal objects, broomsticks, and vegetables
• Electrical probes have been used to burn the anuses of Palestinian prisoners
• Prisoners have been forced to strip naked, perform sexual acts, and endure prolonged sexual humiliation. These acts are often filmed with the smartphones of soldiers.
The Commission found that “forced nudity, with the aim of degrading and humiliating victims” was frequently used against victims. Palestinians were forced to “make sounds like a sheep, and say, ‘I am a whore.‘
“When asked if it was legitimate to “insert a stick into a person’s rectum,” Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky responded: “If it is a Nukhba [militant], everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”“
Reproductive Violence as Genocide
Israel’s assault on Palestinian women further reveals the genocidal intent behind the sexual violence. The destruction of Gaza’s reproductive infrastructure is systematic and deliberate:
• All major maternity hospitals have been destroyed or rendered non-functional
• The Basma IVF Center, Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, was deliberately shelled, destroying 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm samples
• Pregnant women are being deliberately targeted by snipers
• Cesarean sections are performed without anesthesia
• Women are forced to give birth in unsanitary conditions without medical care
As one UN investigator concluded: “The Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention.”
Rapists as Heroes
Perhaps most damning is the complete absence of accountability. Israeli soldiers film themselves committing sexual violence and post it on social media with impunity. When reservists were caught on video raping a Palestinian detainee so brutally that he required life-saving surgery, Israeli officials rushed to their defense.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called the accused rapists heroes who suffered “terrible injustice.” When asked if it was legitimate to “insert a stick into a person’s rectum,” Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky responded: “If it is a Nukhba [militant], everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”
Israeli journalist Yehuda Schlesinger openly called for the institutionalization of rape against Palestinian prisoners on national television.
“Even after endless Catholic Church scandals and the Epstein revelations implicating an endless stream of prominent Western politicians as regular participants, we still desperately cling to the fiction that it is the victims who rape us—never people who look and behave like us who systematically rape them.”
Palestinian Resistance Dismisses UN Report on ‘Sexual Violence’ in October 7 Operation
Centuries of Mass Rapes
And here lies the putrid heart of Western moral bankruptcy. Just as with colonialism, where the victim is accused of “savagery” and “terrorism”, with rape, it is the victim who stands accused of the very crimes being perpetrated against them. Western racism runs so deep that after two years of systematic mass rapes against Palestinian children, women, and men—documented with clinical precision—all the West does is obsess over a fabricated rape hoax allegedly committed by resistance fighters.
This is how the racist brain operates: Hollywood has conditioned us to believe that only “savage” brown men rape white Westerners, never acknowledging the systematic sexual violence that has defined Western colonialism for five centuries. From indigenous children raped in Canadian residential schools to Algerian children sodomized under French colonial rule, colonized peoples have served as disposable objects for Western sexual depravity across generations.
Yet our racist consciousness refuses this confrontation with truth. Even after endless Catholic Church scandals and the Epstein revelations implicating an endless stream of prominent Western politicians as regular participants, we still desperately cling to the fiction that it is the victims who rape us—never people who look and behave like us who systematically rape them.
The Bankrupt Moral Order
This is the moral universe the United Nations has chosen to legitimize. While Palestinians are subjected to the most horrific sexual violence imaginable—documented, verified, and filmed by the perpetrators themselves—the UN focuses its condemnation on phantom crimes that exist only in the fevered propaganda of a genocidal state.
The message is clear: Palestinian bodies are expendable. Palestinian suffering is irrelevant. Palestinian women can be raped, Palestinian men can be sexually tortured, Palestinian children can be kidnapped and sodomized with impunity, and the international community will not only look the other way but actively provide cover for these crimes.
The Death of International Law
We are witnessing the complete collapse of the post-World War II international order. The institutions created to prevent another Holocaust have become the enablers of one. The United Nations, founded on the ashes of genocide, has become its accomplice.
When the UN can look at documented evidence of systematic rape and sexual torture committed by Israeli forces and respond by targeting their victims instead of their tormentors, we have moved beyond moral bankruptcy into something far more sinister. We have entered an era where international law serves only to protect the powerful while criminalizing resistance to oppression.
The Palestinians are learning what the world’s oppressed have always known: justice will not come from the institutions of power. It will come, if it comes at all, from the streets, from solidarity, from the refusal of decent people everywhere to accept this monstrous inversion of morality.
The UN has chosen its side. It stands with the rapists, the torturers, and the genocidal. History will remember this betrayal, and it will not be kind.
In the words of one Palestinian survivor: “We have been stripped of our humanity and treated no better than animals.” The United Nations has now made this official policy.
This is what the death of international law looks like. This is what complicity in genocide sounds like. This is what happens when the guardians of human rights become the gravediggers of human dignity.
The UN has spoken. Rape away.
– Karim
(Substack)
Karim Bettache
Prof. Karim Bettache acquired his BSc and MSc in psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow with the cultural psychologist Professor Chi-yue Chiu and as a lecturer for Monash University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor for the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He specializes in cultural, political, and social psychology. His work attempts to connect individual psychological phenomena (e.g., racism) to broader sociopolitical and historical developments of human societies (e.g., colonialism or capitalism). Hence, his work strongly overlaps with a multitude of social sciences such as sociology and the political sciences.
