Hamas Is Reportedly Using Rape as Warfare. Where Are the Feminists? | Opinion

Just when you thought the news out of Israel couldn't get any worse, reports emerged Tuesday morning that 40 babies had been executed by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Some of these babies were reportedly beheaded. Read that again: So-called Palestinian resistance fighters, cowards targeting the most vulnerable, cut off the heads of babies.

The report joined widespread ones of sexual assault and rape during Hamas's medieval, ISIS-style rampage. It joined footage of women abducted with their babies, grandmothers taken hostage and paraded down the streets of Gaza. According to one survivor, "They came to slaughter, to destroy. I know they kidnapped girls. They raped women even after killing them." Another survivor tells of returning to the site later to look for his friends, and seeing mostly bodies "of young women, lying cold and mutilated." Another widely-shared video showed a young woman's nearly naked body, lifeless and mutilated, being paraded through the streets of Gaza in the back of a pickup truck. Palestinian men sat on her, draped their legs over her, pulled at her hair, and spit on her: a broken female body brandished like a trophy.

Then there's the video of a teenage Israeli woman being pulled by terrorists from the back of a vehicle in Gaza. In the video, she is barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, and as she turns, you can see the back of her sweatpants covered in blood that came from between her legs.

These videos, broadcast on social media and Telegram for the world to see, were filmed and shared by Hamas with pride. There is no effort to hide or minimize what they are doing to women. In fact, the rape and brutalization of women has been the crucial hallmark of this brutal attack.

It's chilling and sickening. But nearly as disturbing is the complete silence of the largest and most visible international women's organizations supposedly dedicated to protecting women all over the world from rape and violence. They have all suddenly gone silent. Not one has spoken out against what appear to be the mass rapes committed by Hamas fighters.

Their silence sends a loud and clear message: We don't care about the rape of Israeli and Jewish women. We don't care if their broken bodies are paraded through streets by terrorists.

The silence of feminist and women's organizations authorizes rape as a weapon of war. It sanctions the beheading of babies when it is called "resistance."

I expected more from human rights organizations devoted to women, feminist organizations created to expose atrocities committed against women. Equality Now describes itself as an international women's rights organization working to end discrimination and violence against women and girls globally. But not one statement has been made on behalf of women violently raped by Hamas or the babies (presumably some of them girls) executed and beheaded.

It turns out that it's not rape these orgs care about; it's who is being raped, and whether these women meet their ideological criteria for qualifying as victims. Jewish women don't count. Women in Israel (who, by the way, aren't all Jewish) don't count.

Likewise, AWID, describing itself as a feminist and women's rights organization, hasn't made a peep about the mass rapes in Israel. Women for Women International? Also nothing. Feminist Majority Foundation, advocating for "women's social, political, economic equality around the world," has rightly spoken out this week against the oppression of women and girls in Afghanistan, but nothing on the rape of Israeli women.

Hamas is using rape as warfare. This fact should be beyond politics and it's time for feminist and women's organizations around the world to start talking about it and to condemn it.

Monica Osborne is a former professor of literature, film, and trauma studies. She is Editor-at-Large at The Jewish Journal and is the author of The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma. Follow her on X: @DrMonicaOsborne.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.