Femicide is the killing of women because of their gender. Until this week, I had never realized how pertinent the book I had recently published titled Femicide in War and Peace (Routledge, 2023) could be.
It is an edited volume that addresses for the first time the heinous phenomenon of femicide in conflict and in peacetime, and the thin dividing line between the two. It was prompted by the Ukrainian war, and although I refer briefly to Israel, the book is unique in that contains reports of femicide in places one would least expect, and which hitherto never reported that women have been killed just because they are women.
The volume draws upon cases from what is today called “the Global South,” as well as material from Western countries, to give a detailed view of crimes against women and how femicide is perceived in different countries. There are chapters on violations of human rights with respect to women in Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and the North Caucasus, as well as in the United States (“Black Women’s Lives Matter”), and Kosovo.
Of course, I mentioned the increasing violence in the Arab sector in Israel and the concomitant rise in femicides and those dishonorable “honor killings,” when a family member sees fit to murder their own mother, sister, or daughter in order to retrieve the “honor” of his family. Until today, the violence against Israeli women and their murder was not part of my mandate.
Femicide in Hamas's brutal war against Israel
Now it is. Last week, Hamas initiated a cruel and barbaric war against Israel. At the time of this writing, the Foreign Ministry has stated that to date more than 1,300 Israeli civilians have been slaughtered, including 258 soldiers. Thousands have been injured. The statistics are still not accurate, since not all the victims have been found or identified. In addition, there are 126 confirmed hostages, but this figure may be substantially higher.
WHAT MAKES this war different from all other previous wars in Israel during the past 75 years of the state’s existence? The salience of women, who hardly featured in any other catastrophic previous war. In the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, to which this war has been compared, women largely served on the home front; 2,600 soldiers died and hundreds became war widows.
In this war, women were at the center of the action. They were innocent wives, partners, and mothers. Women soldiers serving as observers were shot or kidnapped. Women on kibbutzim and agricultural settlements were murdered and burned. Mothers were torn from their children and abducted. Children were dragged off into captivity with or without their family members.
Of the 260 or so corpses from the fated music festival at Kibbutz Reim, where young people were enjoying a party in nature, more than half were female.
The treatment of these women at the hands of the evil Hamas terrorists did not befit any human society. They took delight in raping some of the women, as part of their war effort. They butchered women in front of their children. They abducted women with callousness that has rarely been seen in the Western world, and spat on the naked, lifeless body of one young female blogger from Germany, who had danced freely at the party in the nature just hours before.
EIGE IS the European Institute for Gender Equality, with whom I have collaborated in the past on femicide, despite the fact that they do not include Israel as a member country (even though Israel is recognized as a collaborating country by the European Union). They have a wonderful slogan: Femicide: Name it, count it, end it! We have no data on the extent of femicide among the Hamas during so-called peacetime, and data on femicide in Gaza are few and far between.
I have an out-of-date report from 2016 on “Murder of women crimes in Palestine” in which 11 femicides were reported in Gaza in 2014 and six in 2015. The data is very sketchy indeed and there is no attempt at delineating various types of murder. It is known that there are fewer femicides in society as egalitarianism increases. The Hamas is clearly a patriarchal and misogynistic group of terrorists.
Violence against women happens in many forms – from emotional, psychological, and financial abuse, barriers to personal autonomy and security, to physical and sexual abuse culminating in murder. It includes infanticide, sex selection, misogynistic laws and cultural practices, and can include genital mutilation, forced sterilization, or forced pregnancy.
Women experience these forms of violence during peacetime, as well as in times of crisis, conflict, or national insecurity. The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in violence against women as women globally.
But this war on women by Hamas within the confines of Israel is different. It has outraged a whole society and left morally aligned people the world over horrified. Social media is full of stories of brave women protecting children, or being abducted by the barbaric Hamas terrorists to an unknown location in Gaza.
Israel's government has refused to speak out about the plight of women in the war
The Israeli government has proven inept on so many fronts before and during this war. But one item stands out for me more than any other: no government member has spoken out specifically about the plight of women.
It is inconceivable that there is a ministry for the advancement of the status of women, and a female minister (May Golan) – one of the very few – who calls for the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructures, but makes no meaningful statement on those valiant women.
In a “normal” situation, perhaps the wife of the prime minister would take up the cudgels. I am also waiting for statements from feminist NGOs the world over, including EIGE, to deplore the situation.
Out there, where things become misconstrued in days, some may argue that women in Gaza are also helpless and are being killed. They are, and it is terrible. Global femicide rates are on the rise. But Israeli troops are not raping women and girls, they are not burning women alive, they are not kidnapping babies or beheading them, and they are not executing women in front of their children.
The writer is a senior researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and founder of the Israel Observatory on Femicide (www.israelfemicide.org).