Amal ’Ajlouni is twenty-five years old. She is a mother of four. In July 2023, Israeli soldiers stormed her home in the southern Hebron neighborhood of Khallat Al-Qaba. She testified:

The [female] soldier ordered me to undress. I started to take off my prayer clothes that I was wearing, and the necklace I had around my neck made some noise, and then the soldier loosened the dog’s leash, and it came right up to me. It really scared me and the children, and we all screamed. I begged the soldier to get it away, and I told her that we were afraid of dogs. She moved the dog away and ordered me to continue undressing and also to remove my undergarments. I told her I had nothing on me and that my clothes were light and there was no reason to take off my undergarments. I begged her not to make me do it in front of the children, but she threatened to release the dog again. I had no choice, and I took off everything, weeping. The soldier ordered me to turn around as my children watched, unable to stop crying and shaking with fear.

— Amal ‘Ajlouni, testimony taken by B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bari on July 11, 2023, published September 5, 2023 (B’Tselem, 2023)

Most accounts stop there. Amal did not. She kept speaking:

I can’t forget what happened. The search and the humiliation I went through in front of the [female] soldiers, and the helplessness and shame I felt in front of my children. They are now afraid to sleep in their room at night and come to our bed. They don’t sleep well and wet the bed, and when they wake up, they are scared to go to the bathroom.

The soldiers left at 5:30 in the morning.

This is not an exceptional case. It is a pattern. The Palestinian Feminist Collective has issued a 200-page report documenting it across eight decades, in prisons, at checkpoints, during home raids, in detention facilities (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2026). Five months of research. Testimony after testimony: women, men, children, elders, all saying the same things in different voices, from different prisons, in different generations.

This is what the murder of the soul, the family, the body, a people looks like:

It looks like Rasmea Odeh in 1969, stripped naked, chained, beaten with sticks and metal bars, raped by Israeli soldiers while her father was brought into the room and ordered to rape her himself. When he refused, they beat them both and raped her in front of him. She was bleeding, her father told the UN Special Committee ten years later, “from her mouth and from her face and from her end.” Then he lost consciousness. She was in her early twenties. A medical examination reviewed by the Committee corroborated her testimony.

It looks like a Bedouin teenager abducted from the Naqab in 1949, gang-raped on a three-day schedule arranged by her captor, executed when she resisted, buried in secret. David Ben-Gurion’s diary, made public half a century later, contains the entry: “It was decided and carried out: They washed her, cut her hair, raped her, and killed her.” He knew. He covered for the officers. No one was punished. Israeli historian Benny Morris, working from these same classified sources, concluded:

That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. (Morris, as cited in Shavit, 2004; see also McGreal, 2003).

It looks like the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, where a sealed British criminal investigation, unearthed decades later, held medical evidence corroborating survivors’ testimony, and where the British investigator assigned to the case, Richard Catling, attested that “many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered.” Zionist militias broadcast threats of rape on loudspeakers to drive the surrounding villages into flight. The rape was the instrument. The flight was the aim. The land was the prize.

It looks like Sde Teiman detention facility, 2023 and 2024, where Palestinian men were held in cage-like structures, forced to wear diapers, denied toilets, stripped naked, beaten on their genitals, electrocuted on the anus, raped with objects, and raped by trained dogs. Where a soldier pressed his crotch to a detainee’s face and said, “You are my bitch.” And in the detention camps where women abducted from Gaza were held, Israeli civilians were, according to the fieldwork of Kifeya Khraim of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, invited in to watch Palestinian prisoners naked, photograph them, and mock them, “as if it’s a zoo” (UN Human Rights Council, 2025a).

None of this is metaphor. All of it is testimony, corroborated by the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, B’Tselem, Addameer, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and multiple independent commissions of inquiry.

Lana Fawalaha, 25, liberated from an Israeli prison, said:

I would subconsciously pull my shirt down as if there was a constant threat that something I don’t want to happen could happen at any moment. […] This is something that does not end in prison. It stays long after prison. We keep living like this because the body remembers the shock more clearly and accurately than the mind.  (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2026).

She was describing what it means to carry, in your body, the knowledge that the system designed to protect you was instead designed to destroy you. That the world watched. And called it complicated.

There is more than one way to erase a nation. The crudest is killing. The other is to destroy the community and obliterate the self, body by body, until a people can no longer find itself. A Predatory State documents both. They rape the land through domicide, the deliberate destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes, the algorithmic obliteration of entire neighborhoods by AI targeting programs with names like “The Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy,” which one former Israeli intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory” (Abraham, 2023). They rape the people through state-sanctioned sexual torture across eight decades, from the Nakba to Sde Teiman, through esqat, the sexual blackmail that weaponizes Palestinian cultural norms to coerce informants, and through the desecration of the dead. They rape the mind through the suppression of testimony, the reclassification of archives, and the psychoanalytic institution’s maintenance of collegial relations with Israeli analysts while Palestinian mental health workers are killed at their desks. They rape the soul through reproductive genocide: the destruction of hospitals, the starvation of pregnant women, the killing of entire family genealogies, the assault on Palestinian futurity itself.

This is not war. This is erasure.

And the naming has been done. The report concludes, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Israel has perpetrated systematic sexualized and gendered violence against the Palestinian people, constituting the crime of genocide. It is not alone. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found the claim of genocide plausible enough to order binding provisional measures against Israel. The International Association of Genocide Scholars named it as such. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in March 2025 that Israel has “employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination” and confirmed the finding of genocide in September 2025 (UN OHCHR, 2025b). Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s 2026 report to the Human Rights Council is titled, plainly, “Torture and Genocide” (Albanese, 2026). The UN Committee Against Torture, in December 2025, found that Israel applies a “de facto State policy of organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment” of Palestinians in detention, practices the Committee found “amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and form part of the actus reus of genocide” (UN Committee Against Torture, 2025).

These are the findings of the international legal and human rights system that the Western liberal order built and claims to believe in. No charges have been lodged against any Israeli security official for any of it. The naming has been done, again and again. What has not been done is anything at all.

We are mawjudun la yujadun. We exist, but we are unfindable. The crimes against us are documented. We are hypervisible. And yet we are nowhere to be found: not in the conscience of empire, not in its laws, not in its statements. We have survived what was designed to make survival impossible. And still we are expected to come composed, to make our case in language that does not disturb, while being systematically humiliated, violated, and de-dignified. One body at a time. Since 1948.

The settler-colonial state never hid its goals. Erase the people. Dismember the bodies. Murder their sounds. What has changed since 1948 is not the intention. It is the technology. And the impunity.

I am writing this on a Wednesday morning with a lump in my throat and a scream I cannot release. The dreaded scream that wants to shatter everything in sight. I do not know what it will take for the world to act. What is maddening is that this is not the first report. There have been others. There will be others. We all have the inner machinery of forgetting, the way the mind seals over what it cannot hold. But we will not allow you to forget. Because we believe in your humanity. We believe in your conscience. And we know that conscience, when it is working, cannot survive what this report contains and remain unchanged.

No one reading this should remain the same.

Empire does not want Palestinians to take up arms to defend against this violence. Fine. Then heed the Palestinian civil society call that has been on the table since 2005: boycott, divest, sanction. Every time you order from Amazon because the delivery is faster, think about A.A., a 35-year-old father arrested at Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024. He spent 19 months in Israeli detention. At Sde Teiman military camp, soldiers stripped him and a group of detainees, beat them, sprayed pepper spray in their faces, and brought in dogs. One dog raped him. He told PCHR’s field researchers: “The dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us.” Afterward, a doctor stitched a wound in his head. Seven stitches, without anesthesia (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 2025). Amazon does not fund Sde Teiman. It funds the economy that keeps Sde Teiman possible.

Albanese’s report calls this economy by its name, an economy of genocide, a joint enterprise in which the acts of each company feed a whole that drives, supplies, and enables the destruction. Amazon’s part is not small. Together with Google, it holds a $1.2 billion contract called Project Nimbus, largely funded through Israel’s Ministry of Defense, providing the state with its core cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. When the military’s own cloud overloaded in October 2023, at the height of the bombardment, the Nimbus consortium stepped in. An Israeli colonel described this cloud technology as “a weapon in every sense of the word” (Albanese, 2025). Your purchase does not buy the restraints. It sustains the company that sustains the state that runs the facility. That is how an economy of genocide works.

Think about M.A., eighteen years old, raped with a bottle four times while soldiers watched. He said: “I had wanted to continue my education; now I am lost after what happened to me.” Every time you book an Airbnb, know that Albanese’s report documents Airbnb increasing its listings in illegal Israeli settlements from 139 in 2016 to 350 in 2025, collecting commissions of up to 23% on property built on stolen Palestinian land (Albanese, 2025). The rent is channeled into a predatory state. It reaches the same system that trains dogs to rape humans. Airbnb knows. It continues.

Visit Albanese’s report. Read it. From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide. Every company named. Every supply chain traced. Every dollar followed to what it funds. There is no excuse for not knowing.

And if you are a mental health professional: ask yourself what your membership fees pay for. Ask what it means to belong to an association that condones, through its silence, what the UN calls a de facto state policy of torture. Then do something with that question. If your institution condemns torture, and most claim to, insist that it say so here, about these bodies, in this genocide. If your institution condemns crimes against humanity, and most claim to, demand that it name what the UN Committee Against Torture, the UN Commission of Inquiry, and the International Court of Justice have all named. Hold your institution to its own stated values. Write to your board. Raise it at your next conference. Make them answer. Silence is a position. Make them own it or abandon it.

What does that silence communicate to Lana Fawalaha, lying awake in her hijab on a prison floor, waiting? What does it communicate to the daughters and granddaughters of the women who ran from Deir Yassin, who transmitted what happened in their bodies to their children the way all unbearable things are transmitted: not in words, but in the nervous system, in the posture, in the way a mother’s hand tightens when soldiers are mentioned?

Read this report. Read it as a son, as a daughter, as a mother, as a father, as an uncle, as an aunt. Do not manage it from a safe distance. Let it reach you where you actually live.

Act. Follow this link for further action

Palestine is not a tragedy without an author. What is being done to Palestinians is targeted, state-sponsored, and deliberate. The rape of Amal ‘Ajlouni’s dignity in front of her children was an order carried out by a soldier who knew exactly what she was doing. The dog trained to rape human beings at Sde Teiman was a policy instrument. The AI system called “Where’s Daddy” that leveled homes with families inside was a procurement decision. The starvation of pregnant women is a logistics choice made daily. Every actor in this chain, the soldier, the commander, the government, the arms supplier, the corporation, the professional association that looks away, has made a choice.

That is what makes the silence of our institutions not merely a failure but a crime of its own kind. They are not helpless. They are choosing.

References

Abraham, Y. (2023, November 30). “A mass assassination factory”: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza. +972 Magazine. https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ [VERIFY URL before publication]

Albanese, F. (2025). From economy of occupation to economy of genocide (A/HRC/59/23). United Nations Human Rights Council. h

Albanese, F. (2026). Torture and genocide (A/HRC/61/71). United Nations Human Rights Council.

B’Tselem. (2023, September 5). Soldiers enter homes of extended ’Ajlouni family with dogs, separate children from their parents and steal items. Female soldiers strip search women[Testimonies taken July 11, 2023].

McGreal, C. (2003, November 4). Israel learns of a hidden shame in its early years. The Guardian.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. (2025, November 10). PCHR documents testimonies of systematic rape and sexual torture in Israeli detention.

Palestinian Feminist Collective. (2026). A predatory state: Israeli systemic sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians. Progressive International.

Shavit, A. (2004). Survival of the fittest? An interview with Benny Morris. Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture.

UN Committee Against Torture. (2025, December 22). Concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Israel (CAT/C/ISR/CO/6).

UN Human Rights Council. (2025a). Kifeya Khraim & Witness #3: Public hearings, COI Palestine [Video].

UN OHCHR. (2025b, March 13). “More than a human can bear”: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023.