A new report by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), supported by Progressive International (PI), argues that Israel has a documented history of systematic sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians “across detention centers, homes, military operations, and systems of surveillance, from the Nakba of 1948 to the present.”
Among other things, the 187-page report, “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” advances as fact the claim that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians. It adds that this is “an essential indicator of Israel’s operationalized intent to dominate and destroy Palestinian life and the Palestinian right and will to resist.”
The dog rape claim was published in a May 2026 New York Times opinion column by Nicholas Kristof and sparked global condemnation, accusations of modern-day blood libel from groups such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and a threatened lawsuit from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Sexualized violence, including rape and sexual enslavement, has been used by Zionist militias during the 1948 Nakba and later by the Israeli state as a method of displacement and domination over Palestinians. After 1967, such violence intensified against prisoners and detainees, laying the groundwork for the systematic sexual torture documented since October 2023,” the PFC report says.
It also pays particular attention to Israel’s purported “preponderance of attacks targeting Palestinian men, particularly their sexual and reproductive organs.”
CODEPINK’s Feminists: Stand with Palestine campaign has subsequently called on the Center for Reproductive Rights to share the reports in its networks and “uplift the findings regarding maternity health and sexual violence as it affects Palestinian women and families.”
The PFC is a US-based anti-Israel collective of Palestinian and Arab feminists that describes its work as advancing Palestinian social and political liberation through an anti-colonial and feminist framework.
On October 7, 2023, PFC posted on X/Twitter: “We affirm the right to resist settler-colonial dispossession, militarization, and occupation.”
PI is an international anti-Israel political network that seeks to organize progressive movements around a vision it describes as democratic, decolonized, egalitarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist. CODEPINK is a US-based, women-led grassroots anti-war and anti-Israel organization that supports Palestinian rights.
Report based on alleged testimonies framed as fact
The report is based on alleged testimonies that purportedly serve as evidence that sexualized violence took place at distinct times over the last two years, across multiple sites. The assaults were allegedly enacted by the “Israel Occupying Forces,” affiliated with multiple agencies, including soldiers, prison guards, police, and intelligence officers.
“Patterns of the documented sexualized violence include, but are not limited to the following: sexual slurs, forced nudity, forced stripping, forced witnessing of sexual acts, threats of sexual assault, sexualized comments or touch meant to degrade; physical torture that is sexualized in character or targets sexual or reproductive organs, including groping, squeezing, punching, and applying pressure to the genitals, forced oral sex, or being sexually abused while in stress positions; and cases of rape, including simulated rape, rape by IOF personnel, rape with a range of objects such as batons, phones, metal rods, sticks, or other objects, and rape by trained dogs.”
The patterns and methods used in the assaults reveal, “beyond a reasonable doubt, that sexualized violence is a systemic Israeli practice, which has accelerated in frequency and degree of brutality alongside the acceleration of genocide since 2023,” the report adds.
This alleged sexualized and gendered violence is framed throughout the report as a “colonial mechanism” deployed to destroy the “indigenous” Palestinian people.
It is also presented as an indisputable fact that “sexualized violence, rape, and sexual enslavement were methods purposefully used by Zionist extra-state forces during the 1948 Nakba and by the Israeli state following the Nakba to expedite the displacement of Palestinians from their land.”
The language used in the report, especially in Part 2 [“Israel’s Systemic Gendered Violence”] is highly polemical and pseudo-academic in its framing. While presented as fact, it is mostly activist language rooted in settler-colonial and feminist theory.
For example, one part reads, “The womb is an intimate site where past, present, and future converge in the gendered body. To theorize the Palestinian womb as a site of futurity is to recognize that Israel’s settler-colonial project against Palestinians is fundamentally a war against time: against the possibility that Palestinians will persist, continuing to create life, transmitting identity, memory, and relationship to land across generations.”
The report also persistently venerates “Palestinian martyrs.”
Report perpetuates conspiracy theories about organ harvesting
In “Case Study 2: Desecration of Martyred Bodies,” the report says, “The martyr, in this framework, is not released from political life at the moment of death; rather, it enters a new phase of state custody and juridical negotiation that affects martyrs’ bodies based on their gender, especially against Palestinian men.”
This interprets documented practices of holding on to the bodies of terrorists as a systematic form of Israeli necropower, further claiming that this power is gendered, without including any discussion of the reason for such a practice.
It also ventures into blood libel territory in this case study, when it discusses “organ stealing” as a practice it says Israel has carried out since the First Intifada in 1987. For this claim, it cites Palestinian Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh who “noticed martyrs’ bodies, after being returned, were missing eyes and kidneys.”
“Abusing martyrs’ bodies in this fashion, by stealing their body parts and then desecrating their bodies to hide the theft, demonstrates how the Palestinian martyr is gendered in a way to deny their dignity, especially of young men resistance fighters.”
The problematic description of terrorists as “resistance fighters” aside, there has been no evidence of Israeli authorities systematically stealing organs from Palestinian bodies.
This is a misquotation of the quote Abu Ghazaleh provided to a 1990 article by Mary Barrett in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine. Barrett asked Abu Ghazaleh about widespread anxiety in Gaza and the West Bank concerning alleged organ theft after the Intifada began, to which he replied that there were “indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half.”
These indications were based on reports from what he defined as “credible people.” He did not examine the alleged corpses himself.
A 2001 report by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman on practices at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine (Israel’s only facility authorized to conduct autopsies in case of unnatural death) uncovered a medical malpractice scandal: During 1988-2000, tissue and body parts, including skin and corneas, were removed from deceased Israeli soldiers, Israeli civilians, both Jewish and Arab, and Palestinians without relatives’ permission.
Discussion of organ harvesting as a broader and systemic practice is not based in documented fact and appears more connected to longer-term established antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Later on, in Case Study 6, the report claims that Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to decide which Palestinian buildings to target is a form of gendered violence, as it prevents Palestinian couples from having sexual intimacy.
“By assaulting the intimate, gendered spaces where bodily integrity, reproductive capacity, family and society building, and nurturing happen, militarized tracking through AI extends the reach and force of the predatory state by targeting the heart of reproductive and intimate life: the home. By displacing or killing as many Palestinians in a home as possible, AI-generated programs disrupt the conditions and spaces for pleasure, sexual intimacy, caregiving, and generational continuity.”
Once more, theoretical arguments are presented as empirical evidence.
Perhaps the most heinous part of the report is the final section, “Colonial Constructions of Palestinian Men.”
This argues that Israel fabricated all claims of sexual violence against Jews and Israelis on and after October 7 as a means of demonizing and racializing Palestinian and Arab men.
The report says that “racialized constructions of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim men as other, violent, aggressive, and sexually deviant mirror the colonial histories and patterns across colonial projects where Indigenous and Black men have been imagined as threats, primarily to white women.”
It calls the graphic accounts of the rape of Israeli women on October 7, 2023, “fabricated” and intended to “construct Palestinians as barbaric and depraved.”
“For decades, the international community and Israel have remained silent about the rape of Palestinian women. Yet, after October 7, Israeli settler women have been positioned as the ultimate victims.”
It then goes on to say that “allegations that Hamas engaged in systematic rape on October 7 are rooted in the long-standing racialized colonial demonization of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim men” and that there is “no credible forensic evidence, nor victim testimony, corroborating the October 7 mass rape allegations.”
“When Israel uses falsified allegations of sexualized violence supposedly perpetrated by Palestinians to establish moral justification for genocide, it is reversing the realities of power, repositioning Israeli settlers as victims and Indigenous Palestinians as perpetrators,” it concludes.
Sources cited in report largely disputed
It is worth noting that the majority of the sources on which the paper relies are controversial or have been the subject of controversy.
The report relies heavily on [anti-Israel New Historian] Ilan Pappé, [Palestinian writer and activist] Susan Abulhawa, [former convicted terrorist] Rasmea Yousef Odeh, B’Tselem, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, [US-sanctioned] Francesca Albanese, [Australian Muslim sociologist and lawyer] Randa Abdel-Fattah, and Al Jazeera [media blocked by the US, Israel, Pakistan, and at times by the PA].
Abulhawa, for example, described the October 7 attacks as a “spectacular moment that shocked the world,” called the Israel-Hamas War a “Jewish supremacist slaughter,” and said that “these sons of Satan will taste what they meted [out] to us.”
Yousef Odeh was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) convicted by Israeli military courts for involvement in a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing, that killed two young civilians.