Abuse of Women and Girls Under Hamas Rule—and What It Means for Reconstruction

Domestic Violence and Political Order: Women, Silence, and Power in Gaza

Recent reporting, brought to wider attention by the counterterrorism expert Noor Dahri and reinforced by accounts in Israel Hayom, describes women in Gaza beginning to speak about rape, sexual abuse, and extortion under Hamas rule. These testimonies include allegations of sexual coercion by men in positions of authority, exploitation tied to access to aid or money, and abuse carried out under conditions of dependency and fear.

What is striking is not only the content of these accounts, but the fact that they are being spoken at all. Under conditions where speech carries risk, the emergence of testimony itself signals pressure within the environment. These are not casual disclosures. They are the beginnings of something forcing its way into language. Some reports describe large numbers of women as vulnerable to sexual exploitation under current conditions. Taken together, these accounts point to something that cannot be dismissed: the conditions under which people are living.

This matters not only because of the violence itself, but because of what it reveals about how power is lived and understood—not abstractly, but in daily life, in relationships, and in the most intimate spaces.

I have argued elsewhere that engagement with Hamas often functions only as if it were dialogue. What is missing is the internal capacity for dialogue—the ability to reflect, to symbolize, and to recognize the other as separate. In its absence, communication collapses into action. What cannot be thought is acted out.

This is not simply a failure of diplomacy. It is a failure at the level of the unconscious—the inability to mediate experience through thought, to tolerate difference, and to recognize the other as a subject with an inner life. Where this capacity is limited, women are not encountered as persons with psychological and emotional needs—needs for safety, trust, and recognition—but are reduced to objects within relations of control. Sexual coercion and rape emerge within this framework not only as acts of violence, but as expressions of a failure to recognize the other as a subject.

If objectification governs intimate relations, it does not remain there. It extends outward. It shapes how others are perceived, how authority is exercised, and how engagement unfolds. It helps explain why interaction can feel only “as if” it were dialogue. The other is not recognized as a subject. Without that recognition, negotiation becomes a form of pressure or performance rather than exchange. As Halim Barakat stated clearly: if there is violence in the home, you will have a violent society. What is lived within the family is carried outward into the broader social and political world.

Human beings do not only learn rules; they learn ways of relating. They learn how to attach, how to dominate, how to submit, and how—or whether—to recognize the other. What we call “bonding” can take very different forms. It can be mutual and life-sustaining. It can also be coercive and violent. Rape is one such form—a forced, unwanted imposition that binds through domination rather than recognition. If accounts of rape, coercion, and exploitation within Gaza are even partially accurate, then they cannot be separated from this question of how relations are formed and sustained—and how those patterns carry over into how others are approached, including in negotiation and conflict.

Lest we forget, the massacre of October 7 was not only an act of terror; it was directed at the family itself—at its destruction. What we now call kinocide, the targeting and annihilation of family units, brings into focus the family as a primary site where relations are formed, transmitted, and enacted. This is not separate from what is being described here. It is connected. How the family is lived, protected, or violated has consequences that extend far beyond the home. Reconstruction cannot avoid this.

If Gaza is to be rebuilt in any meaningful sense, the protection of women and girls must be placed at the top of the agenda. The outlawing of child marriage—an institution of sexual coercion, if not rape—and the protection of women from abuse must come first. Without this, what is rebuilt will reproduce what already exists. It is therefore striking that in the current U.S.-backed reconstruction framework, women are almost entirely absent from positions of authority. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza includes only one woman, Hana Tarazi, a lawyer responsible for social and women’s affairs.

At the very point where the question concerns women’s bodies, safety, and voice. That absence is not a detail. It is a mistake.

If change is to come, it will come through women—through their protection, their presence, and their participation. Under no condition should they be overlooked. Without women, there is no reconstruction—only repetition.

This was first published at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack with an AI translation in Hebrew and Portuguese

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)