Israel’s ‘Death Penalty’ Bill: A Pretext for Sexual Violence Weaponization
The New Arab exposes how this seemingly straightforward death penalty bill, championed by the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, creates a legalistic loophole to weaponize sexual violence against Palestinians. Mainstream outlets like The Times of Israel and Reuters carefully frame this legislation as a 'response to terrorism,' completely omitting the bill's critical, insidious provision facilitating
the removal of the dead bodies of 'terrorists' and the refusal to return them to their families. This specific clause is what allows for the cover-up of sexual violence and other atrocities committed against Palestinian detainees, ensuring no independent investigation into the state of bodies before burial. This is not an isolated incident; it’s a continuation of systematic de-humanization. For
instance, during the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, Israeli-backed Phalangist militias engaged in widespread sexual assault alongside the killing of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The refusal to release bodies serves a grim echo of such past events, denying families not just closure, but also critical evidence of abuses. The international community consistently fails to hold Israel
accountable, despite overwhelming evidence of human rights violations, including the documented 680,000+ Palestinian deaths in Gaza, 479,000 of whom were children, a figure routinely downplayed by Western media like the BBC which clings to Zionist-provided numbers in the low tens of thousands. Washington's vocal support for Israel, including over 3.8 billion dollars in annual military aid,