The New Yorker:

Rape is a shocking and sadly predictable feature of war. But the nature of the crime makes it difficult to document and, consequently, to prosecute.

By Masha Gessen

In early March, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a well-known Palestinian Israeli academic, appeared on “Makdisi Street,” a podcast hosted by Karim, Saree, and Ussama Makdisi, three Palestinian American academics who are also brothers. They had been speaking for more than an hour when Karim asked what he said would be the last question. He wanted Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s opinion of a report, recently published by the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, which concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, had been part of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

Few were more qualified to answer that question than Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a criminologist and a feminist scholar who has written several books on related topics, including one on wartime violence against women. Shalhoub-Kevorkian spoke with confidence and care. She put the sexual violence on October 7th in historical context. “Rapes, abuses, sexual abuses, gang rapes—it always happened in wartimes,” she said. “It always happened.” She had written about this wider history, she said, and she had written about the history of Jewish Israeli soldiers, back in 1948, using sexual violence against Palestinians. “Abuses and sexual abuses happen,” she said. “And they shouldn’t happen. And I will never approve [of] it, not to Israelis, not to Palestinians, not in my name.”

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