by Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust.
Women pressured by government officials to have sex in exchange for food rations. Widows molested and intimidated. Young girls sold off into forced marriages.
If it was happening in Texas or Indiana, or Paris or Rome, women’s rights groups, media pundits, and human rights advocates would be shouting from the rooftops.
The reason you haven’t heard about it is because it’s happening in the parts of Gaza that are still ruled by Hamas.
The London Daily Mail has published an extraordinary account, based on video testimony from Jusoor News, of systemic abuse of Gazan women by Hamas. So far, other major international news media outlets are ignoring the story.
A Gazan man described to Jusoor News (a Middle Eastern NGO) how “he found a widow displaced in the war being molested inside a tent in the Gharabli area by a bunch of Hamas members.” Concerned citizens who alerted Hamas leaders about it “were told we had to keep silent about it.”
Another Gazan man recounted that one of his neighbors “was blackmailed by one of Hamas’s charity organisations… they wanted her to whore herself in exchange for a food parcel, or an aid voucher…”
A Jusoor correspondent explained to the Daily Mail that “widows and divorced women” are in particular danger, “because they have no support and no income—their vulnerability is taken advantage of, and the situation is getting worse day by day.”
A Gazan mother of four described asking for food rations from an official at a charity organization “who looked religious, like a sheikh.” He demanded sexual favors in exchange for the food.
“I asked him how he could talk to me like that,” she recalled. “I told him I would expose him. He said: ‘You cannot expose me, I am the government here’.”
Meanwhile, at least 400 Gazan girls aged 14 to 16 registered as married during just four months in 2025, but “this likely represents only a fraction of the true scale,” the article noted.
The Daily Mail contacted the “UN Women” organization. It declined to comment.
The silence of UN Women is consistent with the silence of the rest of the international community.
There are no tent encampments on college campuses to protest the mass sexual abuse of women in Gaza by Hamas. No swarming of Grand Central Station or the Golden Gate Bridge. No heckling of public officials. No waving of hands drenched in red paint.
Why the silence?
Perhaps for the same reason that all the people who have been yelling “Free Gaza” recently were mysteriously silent when Gazans suffered under the fascist rule of Hamas from 2007 to 2023.
Some of the protesters never really cared about Gaza—they were uninformed students who just wanted to do “what the cool kids are doing.”
Some of the “Free Gaza” crowd are just cause-of-the-month extremists who drift from protest to protest. They did all they can to smear Israel, and now they’ve moved on.
Some of them are even more cynical—they’re worried that telling the truth about Hamas will undermine their agenda of trying to get Israel to leave Gaza entirely.
And for some, well, it may be impolite to say it, but it seems that they only yell about Gaza when they can yell at Israel because they just don’t like Jews.