An Israeli soldier with his gun sits and dangles white underwear over the open mouth of another soldier who is lying down beneath him, in a video released on YouTube Jan. 10, said to be filmed in Gaza. Photo by Screenshot/YouTube

Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman March 29, 2024

There are many parallel battles being fought simultaneously in the Israel-Hamas war: a war of narratives, a war of regional actors and a war of history. 

Perhaps the most insidious and disturbing area of conflict, however, is the war of sex. 

Both Palestinians and Israelis have made allegations of sexual violence against the other during the course of war: Israelis on Oct. 7 and as hostages in captivity, and Palestinians during the Israeli invasion of Gaza. 

But yet another alarming form of gender-based abuse has emerged: Israeli soldiers posing with the lingerie of displaced Gazan women, and posting the images to their social media accounts.

They’ve hung bras on the front of their tanks; modeled for their friends wearing lacy negligees; and, in one instance, dangled white silky underwear over the open mouth of a fellow soldier — all in the abandoned homes of the garments’ owners. 

These images depict acts of sexual humiliation, which is not as grave an offense as the allegations of sexual assault made by both sides. But they are profoundly disturbing. Much focus has rightfully been paid to the human and physical devastation of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military. But there is also an under-covered moral cost to the combatants themselves, revealed by the deep dehumanization on display in the lingerie photos. 

“These pictures enter a different realm,” photojournalist Nina Berman wrote, “where one’s most intimate relations and private thoughts, feelings, and desires have been penetrated, looted, picked apart, and turned into jokes.”

Gender-based violence in conflict is “often an indicator of ways in which we have trained armed forces to be hypermasculine, to associate femininity with weakness,” said Kerry Crawford, a political scientist who specializes in gender-based violence during conflict. “It is not unique to these forces.” 

In response to a recent Reuters article that authenticated several lingerie photos shared on Instagram and YouTube, an IDF spokesperson said that “incidents that deviate from the orders and expected values of IDF soldiers” are investigated, and if found to be inappropriate, “handled accordingly.”

Yet academic experts in conflict have found that while the leaders of armies and other military groups tend to portray instances of gender-based violence and sexual humiliation as the acts of a few bad apples, they in fact often speak to a more pervasive breakdown.

Research from scholars like Elisabeth Jean Wood and Dara Kay Cohen, co-authors of the United States Institute of Peace report Wartime Sexual Violence: Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward, has shown that armed groups can be disciplined to not commit gender-based violence with careful recruitment and cultivation of commanders, and effective training for how those commanders should enforce the rules. 

“We do not say ‘boys will be boys,’ because this is not an inevitability,” said Crawford.

Some online commentators have compared the photos of Israeli soldiers posing in the lingerie of displaced Palestinian women to the release of sexually degrading photos taken by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. But there are key differences. The Israeli soldiers are engaged in acts of sexual humiliation without a human subject, while in Abu Ghraib, American soldiers posed and photographed detainees themselves in a degrading or tortured manner. 

Additionally, the release of the Abu Ghraib photos was not a planned disclosure, but the act of a whistleblower. The images of the Israelis were released publicly, by the soldiers themselves, on their own social media accounts, a significant departure from the ostensibly hidden acts of Abu Ghraib. 

In one picture, an Israeli soldier posted a photo to his online dating profile of himself in uniform in Gaza, carrying his gun, sitting against a wall festooned with brightly colored bras and thongs.

“The fact that a combatant feels so comfortable openly sharing these images speaks to the norms within the unit,” explained Crawford. “It also speaks to their notion of impunity — if something is considered acceptable, they’re not thinking twice about it.” 

I have many close friends and family members who have served in the Israeli military. It is personally painful to me to consider that people who are serving in the same armed forces could act in such a morally repellent manner — and that the societal response to seeing such images on soldiers’ social media feeds could be so tolerant of this behavior.

Yet it is clear that the trauma of Oct. 7 is a mortal wound that cannot heal in Israeli society — certainly not without an end to the war. There are reserve soldiers who survived the terrorist attack on kibbutzim and the Nova festival who went straight into combat in Gaza, and the desire for reprisal from such a devastating atrocity is understandable.

On an individual level, the experience of hyperaggression in response to a traumatic terror attack like Oct. 7 could help explain why some IDF soldiers are crossing clear boundaries in Gaza, including in these painfully invasive photos. But the trauma from such events does not by necessity lead to this type of behavior — and there are simply too many of these photographs, from too many different people, to dismiss them as the product of a few vengeful soldiers who want to humiliate Palestinian women. 

The true fault lies not with the individuals who engage in this sexual humiliation, but with the chain of command that has allowed a culture of dehumanization and degradation to fester, despite ample international humanitarian law, and internal military protocols, that forbid it. 

It forces the question: If a society with mandatory conscription is exposing their combatants to this lapse in morality and professionalism, what consequences will the behavior have for Israel’s soul at large?

I wonder about the day after the war, when the soldiers who posed in the bras of displaced and murdered women will go home to their mothers, wives and sisters. The psychic cost of the sexual humiliation and dehumanization in which they have willingly participated may not be as immediately apparent as an injury, but it is irrevocably there. I fear for the spiritual and moral health of a nation that lets such dehumanization slide. 

Ardi Imseis, an assistant professor of law at Queen’s University in Canada, told Reuters that the behavior of the soldiers violated civilian rights protected by Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says that, among other things, civilians must be protected against insults and public curiosity.

Civilians are not, however, the only beneficiaries of those laws.

“Much of international humanitarian law is to protect the morality of combatants,” said Crawford. “It is not just about protecting civilians, but protecting the morality of combatants themselves. There has to be limits in war.”

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