Hamas committed mass rapes and mass sexual assaults.

The most widely circulated claims since October 7 2023 included the "mass systematic rape" narrative, promoted globally, amplified by the media and constantly repeated, before evidence was produced. The use of sexual violence as a weapon of war is a grave crime, codified under international law, that demands solid evidence for accountability. Many of these accusations did not hold under examination. Several accounts were retracted or discredited. The New York Times' flagship investigation "Screams Without Words" was the subject of sustained challenge from journalists, after its central case was contradicted by the victim's own family and its lead reporter was found to have no relevant record. The UN report sharing such allegations in March 2024 recognized it had no forensic evidence, no named victims, and no verified testimony to substantiate a systematic campaign.

The question to be asked: what is this argument for? No act or crime, proven or alleged, by any individual can justify a genocide against two million people. If the purpose of the mass-rape narrative is to explain, contextualise, or license the levelling of Gaza, the starvation of its population, and the killing of tens of thousands of people, then it is functioning as atrocity propaganda, a story deployed to manufacture consent for collective punishment. Nothing licenses genocide. A claim that exists to justify one is not a moral argument. It is a weapon, and its target is the world's willingness to permit what is being done to Palestinians.

The violence against Palestinians is documented, systematic, and more than a century old. It runs from the British colonisation of Palestine, through the ethnic cleansing of 1948, to the siege and the genocide on Gaza. Within that history, sexual and gendered violence by the coloniser against Palestinians is extensively recorded: the documented abuse and rape of Palestinian detainees, including the assaults at the Sde Teiman facility that Israeli forces themselves recorded, sit within an established evidentiary record. The claim of mass rape asks the world to fixate on unproven allegations against Palestinians while a documented record of sexual violence against them, produced by the colonial regime, is largely ignored.

The claim performs the classic colonial inversion. It recasts the coloniser as the violated innocent and the native as the savage aggressor, the oldest move in the colonial script, in which the dispossessed are painted as sexual threats to justify their destruction. The same regime conducting a genocide presents itself as the victim of one, while the documented sexual violence flows overwhelmingly in the other direction, from the colonial power against the people it holds captive. Casting the native as rapists to cast the coloniser as victim is how domination has always laundered itself, and it is doing the same work here: turning the perpetrator of mass violence into the party deserving of the world's sympathy.