Israel’s systematic use of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners is by now well understood and exhaustively documented.

Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli, who represents Palestinian “security” prisoners in Israeli detention, told this reporter that his clients sometimes beg him not to visit.

One even told him directly: “Don’t come, because every time you do, I get raped.”

Marmarelli said he could recognize signs of sexual violence with riot batons – a phenomenon, he said, that has been growing since Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, assumed his position – even before his clients spoke. They are visible in the marks of abuse, and the way prisoners struggle to walk.

But batons are not the only weapon used in sexual assaults on prisoners. Specially trained dogs are increasingly deployed to abuse detainees, as revealed by organizations such as the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor as well as the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.

One striking account recounts how a young fellow prisoner was attacked and raped by dogs in front of his fellow inmates.

“The soldiers let loose trained police dogs on the young man, who was subjected to [rape],” Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr, a lawyer from Gaza who was detained early in Israel’s genocide told human rights organizations. “I was hoping to die so that this would not happen to me.”

But where do the dogs come from? And by what mechanisms do they enter the Israeli system?

>> The new senator from Michigan will face an uphill battle if he wants to transform the U.S. relationship with Israel. But he has options — and public pressure…

>> We speak with Forensic Architecture’s #EyalWeizman about his new book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, a meticulous investigation into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the physical destruction of the territory and its impact on the Palestinian people.

>> … “ungrounding” is “a kind of destruction that we have not seen anywhere else,” with Israeli bulldozers “terraforming” the landscape to erase all traces of Palestinian life. With thousands of bodies still unrecovered from under destroyed buildings, Israel’s flattening, extraction and reshaping of the rubble in Gaza is a continuation of its crimes, says Weizman…

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Nov. 1, 2026

Among the outgoing government’s most consequential feats over the past four years has been its transformation of the West Bank — the subject of a new report by Shatha Yaish, Oren Ziv, and Basel Adra. Expanded land seizures, military restrictions, mass displacement, and over 100 new Jewish settlements have reshaped an already fragmented territory, and the very fabric of Palestinian life.

Nowhere was this transformation clearer in recent days than in the West Bank city of Hebron, where Netanyahu has been turning displacement into an election spectacle. As resident Issa Amro wrote, after an attack on Israeli soldiers on Oct. 23, Israel expelled 4,000 Palestinians from the city in four days — destroying many of their homes and engineering a new reality that locals fear will become permanent.

I came across a tweet recently that reads: “reminder that rape is used a weapon of war on a regular basis because it is one of the most demoralizing, terrifying and life-changingly traumatic things that can happen to a human being.”

This post was in light of the gruesome sexual assault case coming out of Cornell University, and it really stuck with me. I’ve spent the past few years reading and talking about the experiences of Palestinians as they face every kind of abuse from Israeli soldiers and settlers. It is not lost on me that the vehicles used by the patriarchy to suppress women, like rape, are unfortunately present in every aspect of our society — the same society that has manufactured consent for a genocide in Palestine. From college campuses to Palestine, we are seeing sexual and gendered violence being intentionally used to strip human beings down to the barest parts of themselves.

It is this system of imperial patriarchy that cultivates a world in which two situations are allowed to occur simultaneously: A college girl can be drugged and sexually assaulted for 7 hours, and women and men in Palestine can have their bodily autonomy ripped away from them as a tool of genocide. In both cases, the victims have been dehumanized by the outside world to such an extent that they are now an other.

And in both cases, their perpetrators and assailants can leave the crime scene unscathed, with their hands clean.

This summer, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report on the harrowing sexual and gendered violence Palestinians have faced during 70+ years of occupation, and increasingly so in the past three years of accelerated genocide. Israel has always treated its military personnel and settlers with impunity, allowing them free rein to sexually torture Palestinians. With extensive evidence, the report concludes that Israel systemically uses sexual violence as a method of genocide.

The stories that are recounted in “A Predatory State,” by both Palestinian men and women, are absolutely terrifying. When read all together, the pattern is plain and clear: Israeli soldiers and personnel operate within a dynamic of power where they believe they have complete authority over another human being. This results in gruesome and grotesque behaviors like sexual coercion, assault, harassment, and even enslavement. Palestinians are subjected to these abuses any time Israelis show up to steal their homes, massacre them, and round them up in mass-imprisonment campaigns.

Hamas said the latest attack was an Israeli attempt to ‘spread chaos’ in the besieged and occupied strip

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972 Magazine [published in Israel]
October 18, 2026

Last month, Al-Saada Tower in Gaza City collapsed in the middle of the night, killing at least 21 Palestinians buried beneath the ruble. As Ibtisam Mahdi reported, dozens have been crushed to death in similar incidents while Israel prevents reconstruction, leaving families with an impossible choice: to live in war-torn structures at risk of caving in, or flimsy tents exposed to the elements.

Also:

• Days away from Israeli elections, a ‘sour mood’ pervades the Haredi street
• Israel’s far right has unprecedented power. Why isn’t it satisfied?
• ‘We’ve paid the price for war. We haven’t yet reaped the fruits of peace’ >

The sources said that Israel's decision to contact lower-level Palestinian fighters and activists before killing them "does not mean that the occupation is showing mercy toward Palestinians or attempting to improve its image before the world."

They emphasized that many Israeli bombardments continue to kill civilians, including women and children.

Haaretz reported in September that Israel is killing fewer civilians in Gaza due to pressure from the US to avoid collateral damage and to preserve larger bombs dropped by warplanes for attacks on Iran and Lebanon.

As a result, Israel has increasingly used smaller munitions launched from drones.

According to the Israeli paper, this is the reason for the relative decline in civilian deaths from Israeli airstrikes in recent months. Recently, the ratio has been approximately 0.6 civilians killed for every resistance fighter killed, Haaretz claimed.

One source speaking to Asharq al-Awsat disputed the reports, calling them inaccurate.

The source emphasized that recent Israeli airstrikes had killed civilians during attempts to assassinate individuals, while other civilians had been killed as a result of continued indiscriminate bombardment.

from +972’s Sunday Recap +972 Magazine [published in Israel]

While Netanyahu’s bloc adds more extremists to its ranks, his opponents are impeding their own path to power by refusing to work with Arab parties.

Also:

• Eisenkot is trying to outflank Netanyahu on the right. It’s a failed strategy
• Why Smotrich still defines the horizon of Israeli politics
• Israel’s election won’t change the renewed reality of political apartheid
• Jewish Israelis must do more than stand together with Palestinians
• PODCAST: What’s at stake for Palestinian citizens in Israel’s election?

#SanctionIsrael #StopGazaGenocide #FreePalestine #StopArmingIsrael #EndBlockadeOfGaza #RestoreFundsToUNRWA #AntiZionismIsNotAntisemitism #BDS #DivestFromIsrael #SolidarityWithPalestineIsNotAntisemitism #EqualRightsForAllFromTheRiverToTheSeaIsNotAntisemitic #JewHatredHurtsPalestine

cross-posted from: https://hcommons.social/users/adachika192/statuses/117540535774619273

Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Occupied Palestinian Territory amid continuing genocide in Gaza, UN Commission of Inquiry finds (OHCHR, 2026-10-26)

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/10/israel-has-committed-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity-occupied

Report of the Independent International Commission of
Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including
East Jerusalem, and Israel (pdf)
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/coiopt/ga-81-430-auv.pdf
------

>> Israel has committed war crimes and the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, intentionally targeting Palestinian civilians as it continues to commit genocide in Gaza, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel said in a new report today...

#palestine #oPt #OHCHR #WestBank #Gaza
@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@fedibird.com

The picture shows Palestinian journalist Marah Awad blindfolded and handcuffed, standing beside a masked and armed Israeli soldier outside a house in Beit Ummar town, south of the West Bank.

Assal Rad's 'Don't Say Palestine' is a masterpiece on language distortion and dishonesty, combining brilliant analysis with searing moral outrage and destined to become a classic read for years to come.

For me, the biggest point to be made in the Times’s coverage of Israel over the years is that, even in describing Israeli atrocities, it insists on implying that these atrocities are somehow deviations from an Israel which is, at heart, committed to human decency. For example, in an article in May describing the accelerating KKK style reign of terror conducted by Jewish settlers against West Bank Palestinians, Times reporters felt the need to stress that the core group of settlers behind this terrorism only “represent a small fraction of the roughly 700,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements.”

It is language like this that obscures the decades of destruction of homes, massacres, theft of land and water, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities committed by successive Israeli governments in the West Bank. It obscures the complicity of the broader community of Israeli Jews in the West Bank’s apartheid–not merely the messianic settler thugs terrorizing Palestinians but also the more decent and secular minded Israeli Jews who have settled (illegally under international law) in the West Bank after finding affordable housing there. It obscures the Jewish supremacy that has been Israel’s essence since its founding.

Unless news media regularly provide the context of the barbarism that is Israel’s essence–rather than attributing Israeli excesses during the Gaza War to Netanyahu or a small group of fascist settler thugs–the door will remain wide open to what Johnson, in the conclusion to his book assesses as very likely: restoration in the coming years of the virtually unanimous support for Israel which existed in mainstream American life in the decades prior to the country committing genocide in Gaza.

Israeli violations of ceasefire as of Saturday have killed 1,580 people, wounded 5,711 others, says Gaza Health Ministry

Censorship of Palestinian voices coupled with institutional cowardice and complicity in Zionism may be some of the themes Randa Abdel-Fattah explores in Discipline - but she never envisioned she would experience surreal parallels in her real life after the book was published.

In this new episode of The New Arab Book Club, host Elias Jahshan sits down with the acclaimed author, lawyer, and Palestinian advocate to discuss her new novel, which marks her first foray into adult literary fiction after 20 years of publishing teen and young adult fiction, children’s books, and also non-fiction.

Set in Sydney against the backdrop of escalating Israeli aggression in Gaza in 2021, Discipline follows two Arab diaspora characters navigating the worlds of academia and mainstream media, and explores the price we all pay when those with privilege remain silent. Initially published in Australia in 2025, it’s now available globally and has already garnered widespread praise - including a spot on the shortlist for the 2026 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.

In this wide-ranging interview, Randa Abdel-Fattah opens up about making global headlines after her invitation to the 2026 Adelaide Writers' Week was rescinded over her stance on Palestine—a decision that sparked a solidarity boycott campaign from Australian Indigenous authors and international names like Zadie Smith, Percival Everett, and Yanis Varoufakis, ultimately forcing the festival's cancellation. Randa also delves into the relentless targeting she has faced from mainstream media, the emotional process of writing and editing Discipline while witnessing a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, and interrogates those who call themselves "progressive" but stop short in Palestine.

6Randa Abdel-Fattah is an Palestinian-Egyptian lawyer, human rights advocate, and multi-award-winning author from Australia. She teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney, holding a PhD in Sociology with research focused on Islamophobia, race, youth identity, and Arab/Muslim social movements in Australia. She is also the author of 12 books, including Where The Streets Had a Name, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, and her groundbreaking 2005 debut Does My Head Look Big in This?

The film’s interviewees are depicted as mere “cogs” in a system that turns good progressive educated, non-Arab-hating gods in the sky into murderers.

This framing is dangerous. Focusing on the machinery of war – the surveillance systems, targeting procedures, algorithms, chains of command and political directives to explain how violence becomes systematic and scalable – completely misses the point.

The violence existed well before AI. The system of apartheid was in place for decades.

When you make the machine the protagonist, its operators turn into bystanders to their own actions. In a way, they are absolved.

What motivates them is a question that is never raised. Zionism and Jewish supremacy are never discussed.

Without confronting the ideology, the story becomes one about good or ordinary people caught inside a terrible system, rather than holding accountable people who have made deliberate choices within that system and who could have made other choices.

It fails to ask what Zionism has done to the Jewish Israeli psyche, what generations of being taught that Palestinian freedom represents an existential threat has produced, and of course what the manifestation of that thinking has meant for Palestinian bodies.

My new research establishes how the AI program “Where’s Daddy?” was used on an almost daily basis from October to December 2023, when 68 journalists, and hundreds of their family members, were killed.