Ms. Soussana, 40, is the first Israeli to speak publicly about being sexually assaulted during captivity after the Hamas-led raid on southern Israel. In her interviews with The Times, conducted mostly in English, she provided extensive details of sexual and other violence she suffered during a 55-day ordeal.
Ms. Soussana’s personal account of her experience in captivity is consistent with what she told two doctors and a social worker less than 24 hours after she was freed on Nov. 30. Their reports about her account state the nature of the sexual act; The Times agreed not to disclose the specifics.
. . .
For months, Hamas and its supporters have denied that its members sexually abused people in captivity or during the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. This month, a United Nations report said that there was “clear and convincing information” that some hostages had suffered sexual violence and there were “reasonable grounds” to believe sexual violence occurred during the raid, while acknowledging the “challenges and limitations” of examining the issue.
Now, write an individual article for each child starved to death or bombed by Israel. I can’t muster the energy to care about a single rape in the middle of a genocide.
We have rape kits in Texas that have gone untested for over a decade. If rape was important to the people enacting justice, we have a long list to get through before we can start worrying about rapes in warzones.
But justice isn’t the intent behind articles like this. They want to justify the genocide with individual crimes.
That’s bullshit. There are many news articles literally every single day about the civilians killed in Gaza. Meanwhile, on Lemmy, you have people still denying that Hamas sexually tortured women captured on October 7. Sorry it doesn’t fit your narrative.
In my opinion, there is a huge difference between civilian collateral damage during a military operation and the use of rape as a weapon of war. We xan argue about how much force Israel is using and whether X amount of collateral damage is acceptable. But gratuitously raping people has no legitimate purpose, military or otherwise. It serves to sow terror and incite retaliation, which is why Hamas did it.
Neither rape nor civilian murder, or ‘collateral damage’ as you put it, is tolerable. But minimising the actual deaths and lifelong physical casualties, rather than just rape, of hundreds of people to just ‘collateral damage’ as though you would react in the exact same way if Hamas was bombing Israeli hospitals and schools, is [insert disparaging word here].
My point is that bombing a building that you believe contains soldiers sometimes also causes civilian deaths. We can debate whether sufficient care was taken, but the justification is that the army believes that enemy soldiers were present. Same with cutting off aid shipments. We can debate whether Israel has gone too far in restricting humanitarian aid, but the justification is that Israel doesn’t want supplies diverted for use by Hamas. What exactly is the justification for raping people?
Starving children is not a military operation.
You’re full of shit.
Nope. As I said in my other comment, cutting off aid to Gaza in order to starve out the militants hiding in the civilian population is a military operation that is at least plausibly justifiable. And I acknowledge the argument that Israel has taken it too far.
But what is your justification for raping people? What sort of military operation is that, exactly?
It is not justifiable at all! You don’t bomb a town because there’s a couple terrorists living there! Collective punishment is absolutely wrong.
Starving people to out militants is unconscionable. And, doesn’t exactly work either. Hamas has stockpiled supplies. The civilians haven’t. And if you kill all the civilians to find the militants, you’ve become just as much of a monster as the militants, if not even worse.
I guess the civilians could out the militants themselves, no? Then the IDF could take out the militants with fewer civilian casualties.
It’s easy to criticize from your armchair, but what is your solution to the ancient problem of militants who commit heinous acts and then hide among the civilian population? If you don’t have a realistic alternative, then complaining about civilian casualties is just virtue signaling. Lots of people on here have obviously never had to make a hard call to accomplish a mission. The IDF is using conventional military and siege tactics, while Hamas is using human shields and terrorist tactics. Civilians lose either way. That’s war. At the end of the day, however, I would rather see Israel win, not Hamas.
Also, when people say “but what about the children”, it sounds just as disingenuous as when conservatives say it. You should remember that Hamas and their ilk are not your friends, nor are they liberal or progressive or Marxist. They are brainwashed religious zealots who would happily torture and kill you if they could.
I have no love for Hamas and I want to see them eradicated.
You know what my solution is? Go in with boots on the ground and evacuate civilians wherever there’s going to be a military operation. Make it a point to protect civilians and help them. Root out the militants where you can, evacuate civilians, and kill them. If there’s a hospital where militants are hiding, declare it a truce zone and embed yourself in the hospital by helping doctors and delivering aid. Don’t initiate any confrontation, and respect the truce. Your presence there prevents them from acting. Don’t bomb the place.
It would mean more military casualties, but that’s the price paid for being the good guys. We can’t indiscriminately bomb the enemy and kill scores of innocent people. That doesn’t help you win the war anyway.
The IDF is no closer to their poorly defined victory than they were months ago. All they have to show for is a whole lot of dead civilians, and hostages they killed themselves.