holding hands with every star in the sky

Gazan women living under Hamas rule are describing sexual abuse by men in senior positions, sexual extortion in exchange for aid or money, and exploitation by those in positions of power, according to testimonies obtained by Britain’s Daily Mail.

The accounts are emerging amid growing concern that the terrorist organization has reasserted control in much of the Gaza Strip, while global attention is fixed on Iran.

A Gazan man, who identified himself as a member of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the “military” wing of Hamas, confirmed to the Mail the dire situation facing widows. He said he had reported to the leadership that some Al-Qassam members were exploiting martyrs’ widows” in a tent in the Gharabli area of Deir al-Balah.

He said he was ordered to remain silent. “We told them this was an insult to our honor and pride,” he said, adding that he destroyed the tent in anger.

Another Gazan man confirmed that a similar thing happened to his neighbor, who was blackmailed by “one of the Hamas charity organizations. They wanted her to prostitute herself in exchange for a food parcel, an aid voucher, or 100 shekels [about $33].”

These testimonies come against the backdrop of broader allegations of sexual violence during the conflict, including testimony from several former hostages such as Romi Gonen and Arbel Yehoud, who told the Mail that she was sexually abused every day in captivity after being abducted from her kibbutz on Oct. 7, 2023.

Meanwhile, Hamas, which has refused to disarm as part of a ceasefire agreement, continues to rule almost half of the Gaza Strip with an iron fist. According to sources on the ground who spoke to the Mail, the exploitation of vulnerable women and girls is routine.

Abdullah, a pseudonym, a journalist with Jusoor News, spoke to the Mail from his hiding place out of fear that Hamas would find him. “Unfortunately, there are many such cases. It is a very widespread phenomenon. In every area, many women are exploited, especially widows and divorceés, because they have no support or income. Their vulnerability is being exploited, and the situation is getting worse by the day.”

‘You cannot expose me. I am the government here.’

Noor, also a pseudonym, a divorced mother of four who was displaced from her home during the war, spoke to the Mail from Gaza in a whisper over the phone, for fear of being caught. She described sexual coercion in exchange for aid, which began when a religious figure started harassing her at the lowest point of her life.

“I wasn’t getting any aid, so I went to a charity. I am a mother of four, displaced by the war and not part of a recognized displacement camp, so I got no assistance. I went to an Islamic charity that distributes aid to the displaced and needy in Gaza. I was received by a man who looked religious, like a sheikh. He said he would stand by me and help me. I told him I was separated from my husband. He said, ‘Oh, separated? A beautiful woman like you?’”

He took Noor’s phone number, which she said she believed would lead to fatherly support, but instead, he suggested a late-night video call.

“From the beginning, the way he spoke to me felt like harassment. I’m much younger than him. I trusted him because he was an older man. I saw him as a father figure. He’s my father’s age, but he harassed me directly. I was afraid, of course. He chased after me. I asked him how he could speak to me like that, and I told him he should be ashamed. I said I would expose him. He said, ‘You cannot expose me. I am the government here.’”

Noor said this reflects a broader pattern in which vulnerable women become targets because they have no breadwinner and depend on aid. “They exploit women’s distress, but the women are too afraid to speak.”

He would not let her leave

Another woman reported: “One charity in Gaza is unfortunately the biggest perpetrator of these acts. From its chairman to its doorman, it is done by all the employees and members there, as if the organization was set up for the purpose of sexual harassment, psychological abuse and the harassment of young women.”

During the war in the Gaza Strip, the AP news agency documented several incidents in 2025, including the case of a 38-year-old woman who believed she would finally receive the help she needed for her six children. After weeks of struggle, she was told that a certain man could help her with food, aid and work.

She turned to him after being separated from her husband and forced to close her business, but then he took her to an empty apartment, complimented her and ordered her to remove her head covering. She said he told her he loved her and would not force her, but at the same time would not let her leave. Eventually, she said, sexual contact took place. She declined to provide further details, saying she felt fear and shame.

“I had to cooperate because I was afraid. I wanted to get out of that place,” she told AP. Before she left, she was given 100 shekels. Two weeks later, she received a box of medicine and a food parcel. “The job she had been promised never materialized,” the report said.

Abdullah, the journalist, added: “Hamas exploited media channels and spread exaggerated or false numbers. Hamas lied about everything. They stole the aid, created the hunger narrative, and the naive West believes it. They have no respect for anyone.”

TRANSCRIPTION:

An Instagram post by @honestreporting. It begins with a graphic of words against a solid background reading "Palestinians are being raped. We need to talk about it."

The caption reads as follows: "Palestinians in Gaza are beginning to speak out about [what] Hamas' exploitation of power really looks like, and the testimonies are horrifying.

According to the Daily Mail, Gazan women say Hamas members and Hamas-linked charities are sexually exploiting vulnerable women in exchange for food, money, and aid. Widows, divorced women, and displaced mothers are reportedly being targeted because they have no support and rely on aid to survive. One woman who threatened to expose a Hamas member said he told her: 'You cannot expose me. I am the government here.'

Now, Gazan children are coming forward too. The Daily Mail reported filmed testimony where boys as young as 9 and 10 described being abused by Hamas-linked clerics and then threatened into silence. Fathers who tried to expose the abuse say Hamas members threatened to frame them as Israeli collaborators.

And while Western activists who claim to care about Palestinians amplify fake dog rape claims against Israel, they have nothing to say when Palestinians are legitimately raped and exploited by Hamas.

If you only care about Palestinian suffering when you can blame Israel, you were never pro-Palestine. You were just anti-Jew."

Transcript ends.

Because the Daily Mail has a very....interesting relationship with the truth sometimes, I decided to do a little research of my own. Unfortunately, the Daily Mail article says it's an exclusive, and you can read it here:

HOWEVER!! They named several of their sources, which is a good sign and lets us check credibility.

Most easily, we have Hamza Abu Howidy. He's a Palestinian refugee now living in Germany, having escaped the Hamas regime after being jailed and tortured for protesting Hamas in 2019. He now works with Realign for Palestine. His story is here:

Howidy doesn't report on sexual violence against Gazans in any of his writing that I can find. That doesn't mean he didn't say this, but I can't back it up.

Their second named source is Jusoor News, a nonpartisan pan-Arab news network, which they say provided them with the video testimony they're reporting on. Unfortunately...

Good luck figuring out how to translate this video-heavy site into English. It makes sense that it's in Arabic (we aren't their target audience, after all), but it does make it harder to verify Daily Mail's claim. If anyone reading this speaks Arabic and wants to watch some news coverage to see if they can find Jusoor's reporting on this, that'd be deeply helpful.

And that...is about it for named sources.

So let's turn to what else we can know.

First, I'm Jewish! A lot of Jewish newspapers show up pretty prominently when I search for news (thanks, algorithm, I guess). So let's see what the Jewish world says about Jusoor:

Hey hey! JNS is....okay. Not my favorite source by far. But I like them here because take a look at all those explicitly named sources. We have multiple named members of Juhoor News' staff and this article isn't reliant on the Mail's article, but goes directly back to Juhoor's video and indicates we should be able to find it on Juhoor's website. (I am once again asking: if you speak Arabic, please help me with this fact check!) That's a more concrete source than "they sent us a video."

Next, let's see what else I found. I...honestly? Don't bother reading this article. It's the New York Post and like once a year they luck into a piece of actual half-decent journalism (this is not that piece), and the rest of the time it's the 21st-century equivalent of "woman has Elvis Presley's alien baby." No, what we want from this article are the screenshots.

These are not the same screenshots as the Mail article. That bolsters the JNS claim that the video is available on the Jusoor News website, since their logo is visible in these screenshots. I assure you the Post does not have the level of give-a-fuck necessary to add a logo to fake screenshots to add credibility, because they don't care about credibility. The laziness of this being a tabloid actually works in our favor here.

And finally, at long FUCKING last, I found this:

The link goes to an MSN news aggregator, but the article itself is from bne Intellinews, which has a rating of Least Biased and Mostly Factual, the latter designation because they occasionally post stories that don't have both sides of a narrative.

In other words: this is a trustworthy source.

And they confirm the reporting by Jusoor, and appear to have viewed the video themselves. Although one of the stories in the Post's article (yes, I read it, reading non-credible sources is a pretty important part of fact-checking) is mentioned in the coverage here, most of the stories Intellinews is highlighting are different from the other three English-language sources.

The English-language reporting appears to be mixed and questionable. But there are good indicators in the JNS article and supporting proof in the NYPost article (now there's a sentence I never thought I'd type) that the video of Gazan testimonies is a real primary source, and that we should be able to find it on Juhoor News if an Arabic speaker can review the videos. The Intellinews article further supports this claim.

I regret to say this story is very, very real, and indeed also lines up with previous stories we've heard out about Hamas and sexual violence.

I kind of made this very hard for myself, because I never actually saved the videos I watched back then that I found thought-provoking - but I looked around for a couple of videos that I remember being either thought-provoking or convincing. This isn't perfect list, it's made with hindsight, and more importantly, what I found convincing isn't going to convince everyone. (OBS! I'm not saying I endorse or agree with all things said in them, what I am saying is that they in retrospect where important to my deradicalization process)

1. Haviv Rettig Gur: The Great Misinterpretation - how Palestinians view Israel

The most memorable one, that was incredibly crucial for my deradicalization and which I find incredibly important and fully endorse, is this video by Haviv Rettig Gur about the Palestinian view of Israel

2. Dr Einat Wilf: Antizionism is Antisemitism

This speech by Dr. Einat Wilf is just... great, and I highly recommend it. So many of her videos resonated with me, and still do (especially the video of her talking about why she believes it was wrong for Sweden to recognize Palestine in 2014)

3. Anti-Zionist Jew Vs. Rudy Rochman

This campus debate between Rudy Rochman and an antizionist jew, among others, was pretty memorable

4. Lex Friedman - Israel-Palestine Debate: Finklestein, Destiny, M. Rabbini & Benny Morris

My sincere apologies for including a video featuring both Destiny and Finklestein, but this debate was pretty interesting and informative, mostly because of Benny Morris- it also finally made me loose all respect for Finklestein (finally)

5. Pro-Palestinians Can't Debunk this Israeli Video

This one I also remember (partly for the cringey title (imo)- I found it very hard to stomach, but true to the title, I couldn't really counter anything said in the video, and it helped me realise that I knew much less than I thought I did

I'll say again that it isn't like, a list of the "most convincing videos" or whatever, just a few that stuck with me. שבת שלום 🧡

If it was necessary to give up Jerusalem to have peace, then I don't want peace.

Not because Mecca has Jewish significance, yes because there are Israeli Muslims and Baha’i for whom Mecca is sacred and who have difficulty visiting it because of hostility against anyone with an Israeli passport, but mostly because that’s fucking ridiculous, right? You intuitively get it.

It could well be the third holiest site to Israelis since they’re like 30% Muslim. But why should they get someone else’s first holiest site? 

They would mourn Hitler too. I am going to say a harsh reality, but sometime violence is the answer and is the only ways to make it stop. If you continue abusing, bully, harassing, etc and not expect retaliation.

Israel is not committing a genocide, what Israel is doing is responding to being attacked constantly, it is a war. People die in war too. Just saying if a Canadian terrorist group invaded and kidnapped and murdered and raped and enslaved a bunch of American civilians, The US would have destroyed Canada already fully, they would have sent troops, guns, you name it.

I could fucking argue Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was committing an actually genocide on women and girls. And what the Taliban is doing to women and girl is a genocide, I don't see massive social media out pour for them, wanting to send them aid, wanting to get them out of there, wanting destroy the terrible evil men who are causing this. If there was a fucking outrage maybe the world powers would actually do something to help them.

Just because you think someone is similar to you, doesn't mean they have the same struggles as you, in fact they might actually be the oppressor, they might actually be similar to "the white bigoted Christians."

Stop applying Western ideas to none Western none Christian countries. Just because one group of people is a minority in US or Canada or The UK, doesn't mean it is true for other countries.

I recognized I am privileged as an American. If I lived in one of those countries that hated women and to that extreme, I might frankly have killed myself already. I am wowed by the strength of those women and girls that chose to continue living even in those horror movie levels of living.

In the sleek, detached comfort of a Brooklyn loft or a London flat, the idea of a “bomb-shelter rave” sounds like grotesque performance art — a desperate, neon-soaked cliché. In Tel Aviv, it is something else entirely.

This week, as I was visiting Israel for a conference and to meet my family and friends in Tel Aviv, I experienced it first-hand. In Israel, every building is required to have a reinforced bomb-shelter. Ours is a bare concrete bunker underground. That night, someone dragged in a speaker. Someone else switched on a small strobe light. Within minutes, what had been a tense room of strangers waiting for the authorities to tell us we are safe to go back home, turned into something else entirely. As Iranian ballistic missiles were intercepted in the sky above us, our shelter became something resembling a nightclub.

Similar gatherings happened throughout the city — some in below-ground parking lots, others in train stations. There was even a wedding. All had one thing in common: the instinctive, almost stubborn insistence on living.

You might be wondering: How can anyone dance while war— and the loss of so many lives— hangs overhead? But this isn’t bravado, and it isn’t a celebration. No one here calls it ‘partying.’ It’s something closer to release. A way through the fear rather than around it. We aren’t dancing because we’ve forgotten the conflict, we are dancing because it has stripped us of every other form of agency. When cornered, the human body refuses to stay passive. It moves. It resists. It asserts life in the face of a sky that tells you to cower.

In the mamad, the fortified safe room, which I’ve visited more than 40 times this week, the air is thick with recycled oxygen, and heavy with metallic adrenaline as 20 bodies are squeezed into a space meant for four. Normally, this is a sensory warning: “Prepare to die.” Then someone, a stranger in a dusty hoodie and worn sneakers, hits play on a JBL boom box.

The track is relentless, 128 beats per minute, a heartbeat that overrides the erratic thrum of our own pulses. In that moment, Purim — the Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient attempt by a Persian madman to annihilate the Jewish people — isn’t a holiday, it’s a call to action. When sirens scream “hide,” we rise. When the world demands smallness, we take up space. The bassline repairs the city’s psychic infrastructure, one four-on-the-floor bar at a time.

Israelis have always had a special relationship with dance music. Decades before this war, electronic beats were part of the country’s rhythm, from late night in Tel Aviv’s clubs to massive festivals that draw thousands of young people looking for a few hours of freedom under the open sky. I remember dancing in the desert when I was younger, arriving with my friends after midnight and leaving only once the sun came up over the Mediterranean — soaked and exhilarated — the city slowly waking around us.

On Oct. 7, 2023, that culture of joy was shattered when Hamas militants stormed the Nova music festival in the south of Israel, murdering hundreds who had gathered simply to dance. Since then the act of dancing has taken on a deeper meaning for Israelis. Nova survivors used the slogan “we will dance again” as a promise, to never give in to hate and darkness.

When I was dancing in that mamad, the fear which usually paralyzed me — the way my chest would tighten, teeth rattle, prayers repeat — evaporated. Inside the concrete cocoon, explosions become percussion, the track becomes therapy. Violence and music collide, destructive energy reframed into something creative, collective, and alive.

I found myself dancing to trance music I grew up with. Beside me was a young woman with dark, curly hair. Her family is from Iran, she can only speak to them over the phone once in a while, since the internet is often blacked out. They are safe but she worries for them. She spoke with terrifying, beautiful clarity about watching the regime’s power flicker, about relatives she hasn’t seen in years, and about her dream of dancing in Isfahan one day. She laughed softly at the irony: Here, in a Tel Aviv shelter, she was reclaiming the very freedom that had been denied her, and that upsets the Iranian regime to no end.

“They will dance again,” she said, voice cutting through the bass. The sentiment wasn’t one of surrender, but rather pure, unbridled hope. Her words hung in the recycled air, defying gravity and expectation alike. Around us, strangers joined hands, jumped, spun — tiny acts of courage multiplying, forming a tribe in concrete.

This is context at its most extreme. How can you explain a group of strangers spontaneously dancing in a bomb shelter? In terror, we can become victims. In a room where bass drowns blast, we are a tribe. We are not ignoring the missiles — we are refusing to let them set the tempo of our lives. Every movement is a claim: Life, freedom, joy, and defiance are not negotiable.

The organization with not even a proper military, no western backing or financial & military support, is the actual imperialist? Color me surprised, I didn’t know imperialists are suddenly this weak! Wonder what happened to those countries US, France, Britain, Spain just ran over and stayed there for a couple of years.

First of all, they DO minimize civilian casualties. They are well within the bounds of what is acceptable for urban warfare. They actually have one of the best combatant to innocent ratio of all time. War is just that bloody. Blame war. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it’s true.

Let’s be clear: if Israel didn’t have its military, nuclear technology, and the iron dome, there would be a genocide, it would be a Jewish genocide. Read the Hamas charter. Read the mission statements of literally any terrorist group in the region. The only reason why they don’t go all the way is because they can’t.

... and more babies have been born in Gaza than people have died there since Oct 2023. (Something top Hamas officials brag about.)

That's definitive proof that, yes, the IDF does minimize civilian casualties.

Shaun King's got me up here defending Benjamin Netanyahu (ugh) but this argument is so actively stupid I have to refute it. Putting aside the Jewish self-conception of being a people whose origins are in the Levant (something that we not only believe, but which has been proven over and over again by genetic testing, archeology, and historical research):

1) Benjamin Netanyahu is not and has never been a citizen of Poland. He was born an Israeli citizen and has lived there for most of his life (aside from two extended stretches living in the US). As far as I can tell Benjamin Netanyahu has never stayed in Poland for any signficant amount of time

2) the Netanyahu family has not had the name "Mileikowsky" for an actual, literal century. Benjamin Netanyahu was born Benjamin Netanyahu

3) The Netanyahus changed their name around the same time they moved to Mandate Palestine, meaning there have been Netanyahus in what is now Israel for about a century.