Palestinian women detail Israeli sexual assaults in Kamal Adwan raid
A Palestinian woman reacts on 22 February 2024, following overnight Israeli air strikes in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza
Maha Hussaini reports in Middle East Eye on 14 January 2025:
Before anything else happened, Maryam al-Muqayad says male Israeli troops told her to take off her clothes. Then, the soldiers took the 13-year-old Palestinian girl, dragged her by her hair and made her kneel down. When they had stopped abusing her, they forced her to leave northern Gaza, her home, and make her way south.
She was not alone.
Dozens of Palestinian women and girls reported similar sexual abuses committed against them by Israeli forces during the storming of Kamal Adwan hospital in the north of the wartorn coastal enclave last month. The incursion was preceded by nearly three months of a blockade preventing the entry of aid, medicine and food, as well as heavy bombardment in the hospital’s complex and vicinity.
Once troops reached the hospital, they burned down different departments and killed patients and medical workers inside, according to health officials. The remaining doctors and patients, roughly 350 people, were forced out of the hospital at gunpoint, half-dressed.
Muqayad was at the hospital accompanying her sick grandmother. “The Israeli army set fire to several sections while shelling was everywhere around us,” she told Middle East Eye. “The attacks continued for more than three-and-a-half hours before they started calling on everyone inside the hospital to stand in its yard,” she said.
At first, worried about leaving her grandmother, she resisted going out, but eventually decided to join the rest of the group.
Dragged and forced to undress
According to eyewitnesses, people were taken to the adjacent al-Farid hall for search and interrogation.
The men were forced to strip down to their underwear, and the women were ordered to remove their headscarves, while some women and girls were also forced to undress. “We refused to remove our hijabs, so they started exerting more pressure, ordering girls under 20 to move south without their families, but the families refused. They then strip-searched many women and [sexually] harassed them,” Muqayad said.
Israeli soldiers reportedly touched private parts of women and girls. Those who tried to resist were “brutally beaten”.