The Free

UN finds more evidence of sexual violence committed by the IDF against men, women and children in Gaza

Iron bars, electric shocks, dogs and cigarette burns: How Palestinians are tortured in Israeli detention

Those who spread the Oct 7th mass rape claims are gonna condemn this, right? You will be unsurprised to hear the UN has found more evidence of systemic sexual abuse against Gazan men, women and children, and no evidence that Israeli authorities have taken any measure to prevent such acts, despite their legal obligation to do so. Journalist Muhammed […]
UN finds more evidence of sexual violence committed by the IDF against men, women and children in Gaza

Recently published reports have revealed the systematic sexual abuse and torture of Palestinian men, women and children by Israeli forces during the assault on Gaza.

On Wednesday, a report published by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that the frequency and severity of sexual and gender-based violations meant that they were likely “part of [Israeli security forces] operating procedures”.

The inquiry detailed multiple instances of Israeli forces publicly stripping Palestinian women of their clothes and veils, and subjecting them to sexual harassment in front of their families during ground operations in Gaza.

The commission noted that “Palestinian men and boys have been disproportionally affected and victimised on many grounds”, and heard several reports of male victims being subjected to sexual violence in Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli forces.

This included physical and mental abuse while being undressed, being forced to walk naked between checkpoints, and being coerced into undressing in front of family members..

The commission added that these acts were often filmed and photographed by the soldiers themselves.

Witnesses also reported mistreatment and forced public nudity during Israeli military raids in hospitals.

One account described how, during a raid of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital in November, Israeli forces took all the men and teenage boys outside and forced them to undress.

The commission said that the increasingly sexual nature of Israeli aggression was likely driven by a desire to humiliate Palestinians in retaliation for the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, which killed more than 1,100 people.

The worst four days of my life

A three-month investigation by the New York Times published on 6 June also revealed systematic sexual abuse and torture perpetrated against Palestinians detained at Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel.

One detainee, Fadi Bakr, a law student from Gaza City, described his four-day long interrogation as “the worst four days of my life”.

Bakr reported that, prior to his interrogation, he was taken to a “disco-room” where music was blasted at such a volume that his ears began to bleed.

Another detainee testified that during interrogation he was forced to sit on a metal stick which penetrated his rectum. His account closely resembled another from an Unrwa report that cited a detainee testifying that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire”.

Evil beyond words

Evil beyond words

I got into the habit of writing these as soon as possible after I had seen the film in question, so that I would still be in touch with the impression that it had made on me and remember the salient details.

So it’s somewhat surprising for me to realise that I have taken several weeks to write about the film I am going to describe.

What has happened, I think, is that it made a very deep impression on me that I have needed time to fully process.

Les Survivantes (‘the female survivors’, literally, or perhaps better rendered as ‘the women who survived’) is a new French documentary from director Pierre Barnérias, known for his 2020 exposé of the Covid scam, Hold-Up.

⚠️ Piège : « Hold Up » n’est pas un docu, ce n’est pas du journalisme, c’est une propagande complotiste à budget blockbuster ⚠️ Honteusement cautionné par quelques politiques en errance.
Excellent thread à dérouler 👇🏽 https://t.co/Rs8UiZwUyK
— Coralie Dubost (@CoDubost) November 12, 2020

Given the vitriol and censorship aimed at that film, and given the even more controversial subject matter of Les Survivantes, I would have expected only to have been able to view it via some rebellious non-corporate website.

So it was a little surreal to find myself sitting down to watch it at a massive multiplex cinema in an out-of-town commercial zone in Nîmes.

The subject of the film is the abuse of children: not just sexual abuse, including violent rape, but also the torture of children, the dismembering and murdering of children and the forcing of children to watch and participate in the abuse, torture, dismembering and murdering of other children.

It has taken me a month to be able even to write that sentence, so it is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for the survivors of such activity to talk in public about what they experienced.

Indeed, as one of them explained, part of the purpose of the activity – in particular the forced participation – was to traumatise and shame them into a lifelong silence that these women have now broken.

An important aspect of the film is that these crimes were not carried out by random individuals but by a network – when they met up, some of the eight women realised they had been abused by the same individuals in different locations across France, Belgium and Switzerland.

As the survivors told their stories, the nature of this network became increasingly apparent – there was talk of powerful people, politicians, heads of state and billionaires.

A former employee of Crédit Suisse (which cropped up in my recent article on the Rothschilds’ Chatham House operation) described how he had walked out of a party hosted by his banker boss when it started to involve a simulated satanic child sacrifice involving the banker’s daughter.

Just in case there was any lingering doubt, the caption at the end of the film refers to the network being run by “global financial power”.

We have, of course, all heard about Jeffrey Epstein or Jimmy Savile, with dark rumours about activities even less acceptable than sex with underage girls and boys.

But I for one never wanted to think about this too much, didn’t really want to emotionally embrace its reality, even though I accepted it intellectually.

Les Survivantes forced me to think about it, to feel it through the words of little girls who had suffered, survived and somehow found the courage, as women, to tell the world what had happened.

I know I was not the only person who walked out of the cinema desperately suppressing the desire to burst into angry tears.

In the subsequent weeks, the shock of what was described in the film has percolated into my thinking.

I thought I was being pretty hard-line in the language I use to describe the circles involved in all this, using labels like “criminocrats” or “mafia” and adjectives like “corrupt”, “odious” or “vile”.

However, I now realise I have been letting them off the hook. They’re worse than any of that.

It is already difficult to understand how anyone could deliberately cause the deaths of millions of people in wars, deliberately poison them with toxic drugs, deliberately destroy the natural world, polluting land, air and water, deliberately wreck communities and cultures, cynically enslave and exploit people across the world.

But how can we digest the fact that members of this same global financial power also enjoy raping, torturing, dismembering and murdering little children?

What words can we use to describe what they are? Even “Satanist”, which is presumably how they regard themselves, seems too weak.

I’ve always thought that mere human beings can no more be entirely evil than they can be entirely good.

Now I’m not so sure.

The Genocide Goes On!- 3,000 STARVING KIDS IN GAZA DYING BEFORE EYES OF THEIR FAMILIES

If Israel wants the Ceasefire the FIRST THING must be to open the Gates and let Food and Supplies into their vast destroyed Gaza Prison

from thefreeonline on 13th June 2024 by Press Tv.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says nearly 3,000 children are at risk of dying before the eyes of their families as they have been cut off from treatment for severe acute malnutrition in southern Gaza.

The figures, based on reporting from UNICEF’s nutrition partners, come as only two of the Gaza Strip’s three stabilization centers that treat seriously malnourished children are functioning.

Palestinian children wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are treated in al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, on June 9, 2024.

“Horrific images continue to emerge from Gaza of children dying before their families’ eyes due to the continued lack of food, nutrition supplies, and the destruction of healthcare services,” said UNICEF Regional Director for West Asia and North Africa Adele Khodr.

“Unless treatment can be quickly resumed for these 3,000 children, they are at immediate and serious risk of becoming critically ill, acquiring life-threatening complications, and joining the growing list of boys and girls who have been killed by this senseless, man-made deprivation.”

The Latest | Israel bombs another UN-run school in Gaza, a day after strike on school…

Malnourished children are at heightened risk of catching diseases and other health issues due to limited access to safe water, sewage overflow, infrastructure damage, and a lack of hygiene items.

According to medics, treating a child for acute malnutrition typically takes six to eight weeks of uninterrupted care and requires special therapeutic food, safe water, and other medical support.

“Our warnings of mounting child deaths from a preventable combination of malnutrition, dehydration and disease should have mobilized immediate action to save children’s lives, and yet, this devastation continues,” Khodr said.

“With hospitals destroyed, treatments stopped and supplies scant, we are poising for more child suffering and deaths.”

UN says 3,000 malnourished kids in Gaza dying before eyes of families A four-year-old Palestinian child who suffers from malnutrition rests near his mother (not pictured) at their shelter at the UNRWA-run Salaheddin school in central Gaza City on June 10, 2024. (AFP)

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has added Israel’s military to a global list of offenders that have committed violations against children.

UN reports ‘unprecedented scale’ of violations against children in Gaza, West Bank in 2023

Israel’s inclusion in the list comes after eight months of devastating war killed more than 15,500 children in Gaza and have created what UN and aid officials call a man-made crisis of near-starvation.

With many of Gaza’s water wells and pipelines destroyed during the military campaign, clean water has become increasingly difficult to find, according to UNRWA, UN agency providing relief to Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip.