“Rape is a more heinous crime than murder since the rape victim dies throughout the period she lives,” Indian author and psychologist Dr. Amit Abraham reportedly said. The rapist completely strips his victim of any agency, dehumanizing the victim into nothing more than an object of sadistic cruelty.
What kind of parent would choose to subject their children to such horrors?
A May 29 article in the Associated Press, “War and displacement in Gaza are fueling a rise in early marriage,” blames child marriages and rape of young Palestinian teens in the Gaza Strip not on the Palestinian adults responsible for those crimes—their parents, who agreed to these unholy unions, along with the mothers-in-law who pinned the children to the wall as their rapists sons allegedly consummated their marriages to 13- and 14-year-olds—but on Israel.
“The devastation that Israel’s campaign has wreaked in Gaza has helped fuel an increase in marriages of young girls, according to experts and official data,” write AP’s Toaq Ezzidin and Wafaa Shurafa. “With almost the entire population driven from their homes, most living in squalid camps and dependent on aid, some parents have sought some financial stability for their teen daughters by giving them away in marriage.”
The article alleges that Israel’s post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas is responsible for the horrific fate of the children featured in the story: “All the parents said that if not for the war, they would have never resorted to marrying off their daughters so young.”
Media watchdog CAMERA has long faulted the AP, a leading international news agency, for stripping Palestinians of any agency or responsibility for their own plight.
But in blaming Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities—among them widespread rape and genital mutilation—for the rape of Palestinian young girls by adult Palestinian men, AP takes the infantilization of Palestinians to a new nadir, reaching parody proportions.
We rightly don’t hold 13-year-olds responsible for their own rapes.
By holding Palestinians parents who enabled these atrocities as equally exempt from responsibility—and by ludicrously blaming Israel for the horrific decisions of Palestinian grownups—AP treats grown Palestinians like small children bereft of choices, as helpless as young girls pinned to the walls.
Deflecting fault onto Israel ignores the fact that the problem of child marriage has long been rampant in Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including in places far from Israel, such as Yemen and Sudan, where the rates are particularly high.
In the Gaza Strip itself, the AP suggests that Israel is responsible for the rising number of child brides from 17.8% in 2022 to 20.6% in 2024 and 2025, reflecting an increase of 2.8%. But the authors ignore that in just 12 months—years before Israel’s post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas—the figure increased even more, at a rate of 3.2% from 2018 to 2019.
Relying on the parents’ word that the war made them do it, AP does not consider why the phenomenon has long been a feature of life in the Gaza Strip and even spiked years before the devastating post-Oct. 7 war.
From the media to the United Nations
Just like the latest reported uptick in child brides should be examined in the historical context, so, too, must the impulse to facilely implicate Israel of rape.
“Antisemites have long depicted the Jews as a perverse, predatory, and pornographic people; horny vampires of the Orient. That ghoulish portrait—which, for short, can be called the ‘lust libel’—is one of the more enduring of the classical antisemitic stereotypes,” Jonah Cohen wrote in Fathom in 2022. “Today, it is all over the internet, influencing not just disaffected, and sometimes murderous, angry white men but even some prominent members of American popular culture.”
Since then, the ancient anti-Jewish canard has gained a foothold in international institutions. In 2024, “experts” associated with the United Nations claimed there were “credible allegations” of Israeli forces committing sexual violence against Palestinian women. Their statement was based on nothing more than an evidence flimsy, methodologically flawed report by an extremist organization called Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC).
The weaponization of the “lust libel” escalated last month when U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres placed Israel, alongside Hamas, on a blacklist of parties said to be using sexual violence in conflict.
“They never really gave us the basis” for the decision to put Israel on the blacklist … they never clarified any specific cases to us,” said Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon, slamming the U.N. decision. “They don’t have any real basis to rely on. It could have been media reports or things like that.”
Media reports like Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 New York Times travesty of journalism, alleging Israel’s use of sexual assault, including rape by dogs, is a standard operating procedure. The AP’s blaming Israel for Palestinian adults raping Palestinian children is a continuation of Kristof’s vacuous reporting, feeding an echo chamber of vilification.
The absence of evidence has never deterred those hell-bent on vilifying Israel with the heinous charge of rape. In 2006, a Hebrew University researcher, confronted with the absence of cases of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women, nevertheless sought to associate Israel with the rape of Palestinians. The scholar absurdly concluded that soldiers refrained from raping Palestinian women due to racism—and not because of their adherence to moral conduct.
“The ordinary response to [sexual] atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable,” Judith Lewis Herman wrote in her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.
“Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried,” the American psychiatrist. Therein “lies the dialectic between the impulse to bury rape conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
In the lust libels alleging Israel’s use of widespread rape and sexual assault, a different dynamic than the above scenario is at play. However ludicrous or unsubstantiated, every lurid lie is fit for print and worthy of the public consciousness. Nothing is unspeakable.
Dog on Palestinian prisoner rapes? Proclaim them aloud. Israel pulling the strings of puppet Palestinian men raping Palestinian? Utter at will. Israel is a villain because its soldiers didn’t rape? A scholarly insight.
The only dialectic at play here is the limits of the accuser’s imagination and the potential public platforms ripe for exploitation. Leading media outlets like the Associated Press and The New York Times are playing a starring role in this revised playbook, with fact-checking and ethical journalism dying a little more every day.
