Female sex offenders in the Gaza genocide

A female Israeli soldier guards two teenage Palestinian boys, who have been abducted and stripped to their underwear by the Israeli military in Gaza; she forces the two boys to dance around in their underwear, while she records a video of them and laughs.

Two female Israeli soldiers capture a teenage Palestinian boy in Gaza and strip him to his underwear; they bind his hands behind his back, blindfold him, and then pose on either side of him for a social media photo. The woman on his right pouts for the camera while making a gun sign with her fingers above the boy’s head.

Two teenage Palestinian boys, aged 16 and 17, are abducted by the Israeli military from an aid distribution centre in Gaza; they are transferred to detention centres in Israel, where female Israeli soldiers strip them naked and then photograph them, play with their genitals, and tie them to the floor and straddle them. One boy says that the experience left him “wanting to die”.

These cases shine a light on the phenomenon of the female sex offender with sadistic tendencies, who targets underage boys.

When many people think of gender roles in the context of sexual violence, they do not think of females as perpetrators or males as victims; however, female-perpetrated sexual abuse of male victims, including underage male victims, can and does happen.

In Gaza, this has occurred in a racialised context of ‘white’ women targeting ‘brown’ boys. This phenomenon previously reared its head during the US-British occupation of Iraq – US military investigators documented a case where female US soldiers photographed and laughed at two naked underage Iraqi boys, who had been handcuffed facing each other at Abu Ghraib; as well as a case where female US soldiers forced a 17-year-old Syrian boy to get naked in front of them as a form of humiliation at Abu Ghraib.

Female British soldiers were also involved in stripping two underage Iraqi boys naked, and then forcing them to simulate sexual acts whilst photographing them at Camp Breadbasket, on the outskirts of Basra.

READ: 1 killed, 5 injured in Israeli drone strike in southern Gaza despite ceasefire

A common stereotype of women is that they are inherently incapable of sexual abuse. However, feminist author Val Young has pointed out that in contexts where women are given power over others, contrary to popular stereotypes about women’s perceived ‘universal nature’, “some women, within the limited power that they have, can be abusive, vicious, cruel, possessive, domineering, violent, manipulative, aggressive, dishonest, self-deceptive and criminal.” 

Female Israeli soldiers in Gaza have been given free rein, along with the rest of the Israeli military, to pursue their darkest fantasies against a helpless population – and so it is no wonder that these cases of sadistic sexualised targeting of vulnerable boys have emerged, perpetrated by certain women; and there are almost certainly more such cases that have simply not been reported.

Young has observed that female perpetrators of abuse often misuse the banner of feminism to justify their destructive behaviour against others: “It is hardly surprising that abusive women are the first to exploit feminism, picking out the parts they like (self-empowerment, assertion, the right to be heard and validated) and ignoring the concepts of cooperation, individual boundaries, equality, and respect for others.” One might recall here Israel’s minister for women’s empowerment, May Golan, who bragged that she is “personally proud of the ruins of Gaza” and “proud to be racist”.

A broader cultural trend

This exploitation of feminism in service of brutalising Muslim populations is also found in Hollywood; the 2016 action-comedy film ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’ stars Tina Fey and Margot Robbie as the two leading protagonists – ambitious female reporters who are embedded with the US military during the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. In what are meant to be comedic moments, Fey’s character aggressively calls an Afghan man “donkey pussy” and “dog-washer”; jokes that an Afghan man “likes to watch men with donkeys” (while Robbie’s character laughs); and aggressively calls an Afghan boy on the street a “little bastard” and a “little shitbird”. Another example is the 2012 film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, which stars Jessica Chastain as the leading protagonist – a CIA agent named Maya who oversees the torture of Muslim men in black sites. In one scene, she stands in front of a Muslim man and observes him while his hands are tied to the ceiling and his pants are pulled down around his ankles, exposing his genitals and buttocks. 

This War on Terror cultural propaganda helps to manufacture consent for sexualised and racialised mistreatment of Muslim/Arab males by ‘Western’ female perpetrators, under the guise that this constitutes a form of female empowerment and a victory for feminism; one can see the fruits of this in the Gaza genocide, where Palestinian boys – along with their adult male counterparts – have been subjected to sexual abuse by female Israeli soldiers.

READ: Israeli army detains 40 Palestinians in West Bank raids: Report

A climate has been created wherein sexual abuse of Palestinian boys by the Israeli military is legitimised; the UN has noted that Palestinian men and boys have been singled out for particular forms of sexualised persecution, and that this was given the green light by the Israeli authorities: “Palestinian men and boys experienced specific persecutory acts intended to punish them in retaliation for the crimes committed on 7 October. The way in which these acts were committed, including their filming and photographing, in conjunction with similar cases documented in several locations, leads the Commission to conclude that forced public stripping and nudity and other related types of abuse were either ordered or condoned by Israeli authorities.”  

Dr Tommy Curry, personal chair of Africana philosophy and black male studies at the University of Edinburgh, has stated that “Contemporary studies into sexual abuse and early sexual debut, which often occurs as statutory rape, systematically ignore Black males’ experiences of rape and sexual assault to hold fast to the idea that Black males are primarily perpetrators of sexual violence, not victims to it be they adults or children.” Curry has pointed out that black boys were in fact raped by white women during slavery in the US south, but that this has been barely written about: “While the rapes of Black males by White men during slavery were sometimes made known to the public through legal proceedings, the rape of Black men and boys by White women were clandestine affairs… Black men and boys were able to be sexually violated for centuries without a mention of this victimization in history books or among theorists.”

Likewise, the dominant narration around Palestinian males (and Arab males more generally) in relation to sexual violence is one that conceives of them as perpetrators, rather than as victims – least of all victims at the hands of female perpetrators.

The phenomenon discussed in this article – of Palestinian boys being sadistically sexually victimised by female Israeli soldiers in the context of the Gaza genocide – needs to be given much greater attention, so that the needs of the victims can be in some way acknowledged and addressed, however difficult that may be.

READ: Israeli military company establishes first branch in UAE

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.