Women’s bodies have always been a battlefield in war

For anyone who has risked a glimpse at social media, the images are indelible. The twisted body of a 23-year-old Israeli-German, Shani Louk, paraded semi-naked through Gaza on the back of a pick-up truck, gunmens’ boots resting on her back.

Another woman barefoot and struggling, hands tied behind her back, the seat of her trousers soaked with blood, being dragged from a pick-up truck then forced back in by her hair as the truck is swarmed by men filming her on their phones. Only the woman and the men closest to her know what is being perpetrated on her.

Some on social media suggest the images are a foul propaganda stunt, yet many were purportedly taken from Hamas body camera footage, as well as from CCTV, civilians and first responders. Survivor and witness testimony, many from the Supernova rave, describe seeing women being raped before they were shot. CNN has reported that Israeli police are using forensic evidence, video and witness testimony to document cases of rape by Hamas.

Was it ever conceivable that Hamas went on that murderous spree on October 7th without perpetrating sexual violence? The need to back a narrative of moral purity versus unadulterated evil is as old as war. So is sexual violence, employed as a cheap weapon of terror, retribution and humiliation for millennia, a way of binding men to each other and to the protection of their units and armies. German women raped by Stalin’s Red Army in the second world war, Asian women coerced into sexual slavery as “comfort women” by the Japanese, the women of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Rwanda, South Sudan, Vietnam. The Irish women assaulted and humiliated at the hands of soldiers on all sides in 1920.

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Sexual violence is the most neglected war crime in the 1949 Geneva Convention, writes journalist Christina Lamb in Our Bodies, Their Battlefield. It wields as much destruction as guns or missiles and the combatants get away with it because men in power haven’t stopped them. It was met with tacit acceptance and committed with impunity, military and political leaders shrugging it off as a sideshow. Or it was denied to have ever happened.

In recent years when the bar for barbarism was set by Islamist groups such as Isis and Boko Haram, it was and is easy to overlook the atrocities committed decades earlier in Bosnian rape camps by Europeans. Women imprisoned in a spa hotel went mad from being subjected to nightly gang rapes; some leapt off glass balconies to their deaths. A 2000 landmark case in the Hague against three Bosnian Serb soldiers heard how they rounded up Muslim women and girls in their own home town, some as young as 12, detained and gang-raped them vaginally, anally and orally, forced them to dance nude with weapons pointed at them, enslaved them and then exchanged, sold or transferred them to other soldiers. It was those men and many more like them that made possible the wider project of ethnic cleansing, said the UN prosecutor.

They pre-figured Isis’s sub-human treatment of the Yazidi women – one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities – decades later. In 2015, when Kurdish fighters recaptured the Yazidi-dominated town of Sinjar, they uncovered a mass grave containing the bodies of dozens of older Yazidi women slaughtered because they hadn’t made the grade as Isis sex slaves. As Isis explained in its online magazine, it had tasked its “sharia students” to determine which “Islamic rulings” should apply to the Yazidi community, and the conclusion was that Yazidi women could be enslaved under Islamic law. They also concluded that one fifth of the women should be transferred to the IS leadership and the remainder divided among the fighters.

A recent UN independent inquiry on human rights violations committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine details cases involving girls and women from 16 years old to a woman of 83 who was continually raped and beaten over several hours. One victim told investigators that when Russian soldiers deployed to their village, they first inquired about women living alone. Another reported that while a soldier raped her pregnant daughter, he said: “It’s not scary, everyone does it”.

It doesn’t end there of course. What will those surviving Russian soldiers and militia-men who perpetrate such atrocities do when they go home? Abjure violence and live a peaceful life, respecting all women?

There are signs that the international community is paying attention. The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize went to two campaigners against wartime rape: Nadia Murad, a Yazidi repeatedly assaulted by Isis militants, and Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynaecologist called Dr Miracle for his genital repairs of rape victims.

Yet a major concern for Israeli women’s rights groups is that little if any investigative work was done to document sexual violence perpetrated in the October 7th rampage before bodies were returned to their families. Most of the rape victims were killed and the full picture may never emerge because either bodies were burned too badly or the victims were buried and the forensic evidence buried with them, Tal Hochman of the Israel Women’s Network told the Guardian. No samples were taken. We may deduce that international experts will not have an opportunity to conduct independent examinations. Since every claim from both sides is and should be questioned, and many rape victims are not believed anyway, the gender-based nature of some of the depraved assaults and murders of October 7th will forever be disregarded as propaganda or unproven.

It’s hardly surprising that every time Christina Lamb walks past a war memorial she wonders why women’s names aren’t on it.