Rights and Accountability 6 January 2025
An Israeli prosecutor argued that Palestinians detained after 7 October 2023 should be executed for alleged acts such as stealing avocados. This image, leaked to CNN, shows Palestinians detained at Israel’s secretive Sde Teiman torture camp. (Obtained by CNN)
There are still zero complainants in alleged cases of rapes committed by Palestinians on 7 October 2023, an Israeli prosecutor has admitted.
But Moran Gez, who handled cases against Palestinians swept up after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, is still calling for mass executions even without any substantial evidence against them.
“Anyone who entered Israel from Gaza on 7 October to kill or to loot, it doesn’t matter, should be included in the indictment and, as far as I’m concerned, receive the death penalty,” Gez said.
She said she made this case to colleagues involved in planning prosecutions related to the 7 October events.
“Why? Because of those who didn’t murder but looted, burned, stole, picked avocados, as some claim, because of this mess, the Israeli army forces were unable to arrive in time,” Gez added. “You came to the door with a drill and opened it to loot? Then a terrorist came in and murdered civilians there.”
Until recently the prosecutor in charge of so-called security cases in Israel’s southern district, Gez played a key role in the effort to put Palestinians responsible for what Israel considers criminal acts on 7 October on trial.
No trials have yet taken place.
Lack of evidence
Gez made her comments in an interview with Israeli mass circulation newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, published on its Ynet website on 1 January 2025.
She admits that Israel has little evidence against any specific individual.
Gez also concedes that the death penalty is unlikely to be applied, but her desire for executions even of those she accuses of picking fruits (planted on land stolen from Palestinians by Israeli colonists), is a good indication of the quality of the “justice” Palestinians can expect in Israel.
As Ynet puts it: “The biggest difficulty is evidentiary, Gez explains. Using evidence to link a specific crime to a specific defendant when dealing with dozens of crime scenes, where hundreds of suspects were caught and thousands of offenses were committed, is almost impossible.”
But her claim that there is just too much evidence to be sorted out appears to be spin aimed at obfuscating that in many circumstances the evidence might not be there at all.
“The ordinary laws of evidence are not suitable in this case. There are no organized chains of evidence, there is no one who filmed the videos you would want to present in court,” Gez admitted.
Atrocity propaganda and genocidal incitement
Almost from the first hours of 7 October, Israel and its supporters spread claims about mass rapes of Israelis and other atrocities by Palestinian fighters.
But investigations by The Electronic Intifada and other independent publications have consistently demonstrated that the rape claims are unsubstantiated or outright fabrications – atrocity propaganda used to incite and justify Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Political leaders in countries actively arming the genocide, such as the Biden-Harris administration in the US, have spread the rape atrocity propaganda as part of their support for the Israeli extermination campaign.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has falsely claimed that members of Hamas made videos of themselves raping Israelis.
Scholz’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock went even further, claiming she personally viewed these nonexistent videos.
When German government officials are challenged about these lies, they simply smear and silence the journalists asking questions.
No rape victims
In her Ynet interview, Gez confirms that 15 months after the events, Israel still has not identified a single victim in which a prosecution can be brought against an alleged perpetrator of a sexual attack.
“Unfortunately, it will be very difficult to prove these crimes,” Gez said.
“In the end, we have no complainants,” Gez admitted, noting the vast gap between public perceptions and factual reality.
“Comparing what was presented in the media to what will come together in the end, it will be altogether different,” Gez said, offering the usual spin that this is “Either because the victims were murdered or because women who were raped are not ready to reveal it.”
But this frequent excuse for why no victims have been identified cannot account for the total lack of forensic, visual or credible eyewitness evidence, especially when the sexual attacks were supposedly so widespread on 7 October.
And this is not for lack of trying to find victims.
“We turned to women’s rights groups and we asked for cooperation,” Gez stated. “They told us that they were simply not approached” – in other words no one came forward.
This corroborates the experience of The New York Times which extensively canvassed Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, sexual assault hotlines and other specialized facilities, and could not find a single victim of a 7 October sexual attack.
“No one had met a victim of sexual assault,” Anat Schwartz, the reporter who did the research for the Times, explained in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 last year.
Despite this, Schwartz, as part of a New York Times team led by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, went on to publish the notorious article “Screams without words” in December 2023, supposedly corroborating the mass rapes.
That journalistic fraud quickly fell apart, engulfing the supposed newspaper of record in scandal.
And notably, when the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan applied for arrest warrants against senior Hamas leaders last May, he did not include any allegations of rape on 7 October 2023.
This is a strong indication that the court’s investigators could not substantiate them either (although Khan did include tenuous allegations that Israeli prisoners of war and civilians held in Gaza since 7 October have been subjected to sexual violence).
Two separate UN reports could not verify any of Israel’s 7 October rape claims, finding in the extensive materials they reviewed, including thousands of photographs and videos, that there were “no tangible indications of rape” as well as an “absence of forensic evidence of sexual crimes.”
They did assert that there is evidence of sexual violence on 7 October, albeit using expansive, vague and shifting definitions of “sexual and gender-based violence.”
Both UN reports also affirmatively debunked a number of high-profile Israeli claims about 7 October sexual attacks.
One UN report states that several Israeli claims of sexual or gender-based violence on 7 October, including the widely reported cutting of a fetus from its mother’s womb, proved to be “unfounded.”
The second report also acknowledged that some specific allegations of sexual violence were determined to be “false, inaccurate or contradictory.”
“Lower expectations”
Contrast Gez’s claim that no Israeli rape victims have been found because they are either dead or “not ready to reveal it” with the situation of Palestinians detained by Israel since 7 October 2023.
Palestinians would presumably be no less reluctant or ashamed than Israelis to come forward as victims of rape or sexual assault.
And yet since 7 October, Palestinians have given multiple firsthand victim and eyewitness accounts of sexual violence and rape by Israeli personnel.
Israel’s well-documented and systemic sexual violence and torture against Palestinians – including at least one case of a detainee being subjected to a horrific gang rape and torture that was partially caught on video at the secretive Sde Teiman concentration camp – have however not garnered a fraction of the outrage and concern as the unverified, evidence-free claims of Israelis being raped.
As for those rape claims, Gez recounts to Ynet late nights poring over materials such as “testimonies from ZAKA, the rabbinate and the girls who washed bodies.”
What she does not say she read are any forensic evidence or pathology reports confirming signs of sexual violence.
As is now well known, ZAKA is the Jewish extremist group founded and run for decades by a serial child rapist, that collects bodies from disaster sites for burial. Its volunteers have no medical training and it is not an organization with any expertise in crime scene investigation or forensics.
ZAKA’s leaders and members played a key role in fabricating and spreading 7 October atrocity propaganda, including subsequently debunked claims about rapes and beheaded babies.
Conceding the lack of solid evidence for the inflammatory rape claims, Gez advises that: “In this matter, I would lower expectations.”
“I know that the public has expectations and I understand the need to relate to the sex crimes and the horrific sex attacks that took place, but the overwhelming majority cannot meet the threshold of proof in court,” the prosecutor said.
Still, Gez is not willing to subordinate her desire for retribution to a lack of evidence, admitting that legislation will need to be changed, presumably to do away with the need for evidence. But that would only help in the future.
She also wants to see a return to the use of military courts for Palestinians from Gaza, similar to the ones still used against Palestinians in the West Bank, where Palestinians are presumed guilty and the conviction rate is effectively 100 percent.
No confessions
For cases arising from the events of 7 October, Gez affirms that “In the end, you need a confession.”
But here too, Israel has drawn a blank, according to the prosecutor.
“Surprisingly, in the interrogations of these terrorists, they try to minimize the nationalistic aspect,” Gez said. “From my experience in security cases, most terrorists are very proud of what they did and do not hide it.”
At most, according to Gez, detainees have only admitted to actions such as firing shots but not hitting anyone.
“That’s not how I’m used to seeing terrorists,” she asserted, calling Palestinians detained on 7 October “cowards” for failing to confess to the kind of lurid crimes for which she seeks revenge.
Of course what she doesn’t consider is that many Palestinian detainees swept up into Israel’s secretive network of prisons and torture camps did not carry out the acts they are accused of, or that they are falsely confessing to relatively minor actions in the hope of ending or avoiding Israel’s systematic torture.
As of this writing, Gez’s damning statements have appeared only in Hebrew and behind a paywall, and are likely intended to pander to the bloodlust of an Israeli audience.
It is important that they be brought to global attention as they underscore once again that claims that Israel has a functioning and fair judicial system, at least as far as Palestinians are concerned, are nothing more than transparent lies.
David Sheen contributed translation.
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