UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, International Criminal Court Prosecutor, International Court of Justice President: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Indigenous Palestinian People.
So in the first year of the genocide on the Gaza Strip by Israel, our field workers, all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, have been collecting testimonies from released female prisoners. And what these testimonies reveal was a systematic trend of sexual violence that was being used as a weapon of genocide. And what’s clear is that although these women came from different geographical areas, they were taken to different detention centers, the tactics of sexual violence that were used by the Israeli military were all the same, so it’s very clear that it’s happening as a matter of policy and there’s a directive for the Israeli military to engage in these methods of torture.
And we see that sexual violence happens at the checkpoint, during home raids, it happens in Israeli detention centers, and it happens in Israeli prisons. I’d like to highlight four themes that is prevalent within all the testimonies that we collected and it’s sort of the manifestations of sexual violence and their effects.
