This is an urgent and repeated appeal to the world to immediately intervene, in light of the recent stories of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women by Israeli occupation forces during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Palestinian women are being displaced, tortured, killed and forcibly disappeared, while the world sits idle. Silence and inaction in the wake of these horrifying crimes amount to complicity.

Over the past few days, more horrifying testimonies and stories have emerged from Gaza of sadistic acts by Israeli soldiers, including torture, rape, and mass field executions at hospitals where civilians are seeking shelter, medical treatment and refuge.

Palestinian civil society and UN experts have sounded the alarm multiple times and reported cases of rape and sexual violence before and during this genocide. These reports continue to be deliberately and inexcusably ignored, including by prominent and otherwise vocal feminist organizations and figures.

The deafening silence of “Western” feminists and mainstream media in particular is deliberate and inexcusable, as opposed to their earlier outrage over Israeli allegations and misinformation, used to justify this genocide.

Many Palestinian women and girls who are survivors of rape and sexual violence are hesitant to come forward, due to the social stigma in a conservative society and the belief that Israel will not be held accountable for such crimes.

Israel is committing the most horrific war crimes, and weaponizing rape and sexual violence against Palestinians as part of its genocide in Gaza and assault on the Palestinian people as a whole, throughout all of Palestine. This is the result of decades of impunity, preferential treatment and lack of international accountability by the international community. Words are not enough to describe or stop this horror; action is needed.

We conclude this SOS appeal by reminding our sisters and allies around the world that our rights, our dignity, and our humanity are indivisible. Forsaking Palestinian victims now for political convenience would be an unforgivable betrayal to decades of sacrifice and feminist struggle.

We call for:

• The international community must employ all available tools of international accountability, including political and economic sanctions, to bring an immediate and lasting ceasefire and provision of unconditional humanitarian aid.

• States must immediately impose an arms embargo on Israel and honor their moral and legal obligations, including those pronounced in the Genocide Convention.

• States need to investigate and prosecute Israeli soldiers with dual citizenship implicated in these atrocities.

• The Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict must honor her mandate and launch an immediate investigation into the ongoing atrocities.

• Feminists around the world must sound the alarm globally on the unspeakable human rights violations taking place in Gaza, namely the sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian women and girls.

• Journalists and media outlets must do their due diligence in reporting on these stories through fair and unbiased coverage.

Signatories:

1. American Federation of Ramallah Palestine
2. Association of women’s Action
3. AWMR Italia - Donne della Regione Mediterranea
4. Bisan Center for Research and Development
5. Community Development and Media Center
6. Cultura è libertà una campagna per la Palestina
7. Enjaz Foundation for development
8. Filastiniyat
9. Human Rights and Democracy Media Center SHAMS
10. Institute of Women's Studies
11. Not to forget women society
12. Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA)
13. Palestinian Women's Action committee
14. Rete Femminista Marche Molto+di194
15. Rural Women Development Society
16. Sinal do Vale
17. Singola
18. Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice
19. The center for defense of liberties and civil rights “Hurryyat”
20. The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy - MIFTAH
21. The Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development-PWWSD
22. The Regional Coalition for Women Human Rights Defenders in Southwest Asia and North Africa (WHRDMENA)
23. Union of Palestinian Women Committees
24. Wattan media network
25. Women Media and Development
26. Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
27. رابطة المرأة العراقية
28. شبكة المستقبل الديمقراطية العراقية

We, at the Palestinian NGO Forum to Combat Violence against Women and all Arab women’s and rights organizations raise our voices loud and clear on the eve of March 8, to say: “Stop the onslaught and crimes against women and children in Gaza. Stop the crime of genocide, the crime of starvation and forced displacement”. So far, this aggression has resulted in the killing of 31,000 Palestinians, over 70% of whom are women and children. Two women are killed every hour , in addition to many others still under the rubble. There are women whose fate is unknown, after being taken away by occupation forces.

Who will restore normalcy for us Palestinian women after these atrocities?

We have always held activities on March 8. We had a long list of rights we demanded and others we were able to achieve. However today, as the women of Gaza are being annihilated, we stand the length and breadth of our homeland and our Arab nations, angry, in a state of revolution and in deep mourning. Our demand today is to halt the genocide in the Gaza Strip and to halt the reproductive genocide against our women. We declare this day the day of Palestinian women, as they stand hungry in long queues, waiting for insufficient aid, terrified of the skies above them, filled with missiles of death. This is for the women whose bodies are exhausted, in camps for the displaced and in shelter centers, for those raped in prison and for their naked bodies stripped at checkpoints. It is for the menstruating women who cannot find sanitary products and for those with high-risk pregnancies who are starving, displaced and bombed. It is for the women whose wombs may be removed for the simplest of medical complications and those whose privacy has been violated because of overcrowded tents and displacement. It is for the mothers who could die at any moment and for all women whose Palestinianism has crucified humanity at the altar, amid deafening Arab silence, boundless American support and the complicity of several European countries.

Nevertheless, we continue to appreciate all forms of Arab and international support and solidarity with the Palestinian cause, which shows respect for our people’s dignity. Widening this solidarity will further reaffirm the justness of our cause. Hence, we await more action and movements in solidarity of our right to demand an immediate end to the genocide in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem, to forge our way forward towards freedom, self-determination and the establishment of an independent and fully-sovereign Palestinian state.

Today, we Palestinian and Arab women, reaffirm the following on March 8 and every day forward:

- To put pressure on Israel to immediately halt its aggression and to hold its leaders accountable for their crimes in violation of international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention and all international laws and treaties, towards delegitimizing this occupying entity.

- To open the Rafah Crossing and all crossings to allow aid in and the wounded out for treatment

- To dismantle the land corridor linking Israel with some Arab countries supplying it with goods

Long Live Palestinian Women, who stand steadfast and resistant in the face of the Zionist aggression We speak in the voices of Gaza’s women and say:

Halt the genocide…halt the onslaught immediately!

In a recent statement, nearly five months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, several UN experts confirmed the various reports and testimonies that have been coming from Palestinian women and human rights organizations for months now. In Gaza, women have been kidnapped and forcibly disappeared and placed in dire conditions in undisclosed locations. In the occupied West Bank, released prisoners testified on the horrific realities inside Israeli prisons and the widespread torture and ill-treatment where sexual violence is used as a weapon employed against both women and men. The targeting of women and girls with such atrocious crimes is targeting the most vulnerable, in an attempt to break and degrade the society as a whole.

The inaction and failure of the international community to stop Israeli crimes, namely the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and other heinous crimes all across Palestine for decades now has emboldened Israel to act with impunity. This allows Israel to continue committing horrific crimes against Palestinian women and girls, namely rape and other forms of sexual violence and torture.

The silence of “Western” feminists has also been appalling, given their earlier outrage about unsubstantiated Israeli allegations which were used to justify and commit the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

First and foremost, we demand an immediate ceasefire and the unconditional provision of humanitarian aid. In order to put an end to such heinous crimes and impunity, we reiterate the need for an independent international investigation into all crimes, especially sexual violence, followed by international accountability for the perpetrators.

On the eve of declaring statehood on 14 May 1948, Zionist forces expelled half of the population of what became Israel before the state was created and while the British Mandate government was supposedly protecting the people and land of historic Palestine. When the British evacuated and the Zionist leaders proclaimed statehood, they "got an instant gift" by way of "a land emptied of its people but not its infrastructure," said Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, founder and president of the London-based Palestine Land Society, in a briefing to the DC-based Palestine Center on 27 May 2005.

As shown in Abu Sitta's 428-page, full-color Atlas of Palestine 1948 (London: Palestine Land Society, 2005), close documentation of the events from March 1948 to April 1949 contradicts the common claim that Jews were defending themselves against the Arab invasion. In fact, the opposite was true, said Abu Sitta. The Arabs came to rescue what was left in Palestine and failed to do so. The brutal armed struggle that had been building since the 1930s in historic Palestine erupted in the spring of 1948 and led to the depopulation of 675 Arab Palestinian villages and the expulsion of 935,000 Palestinians (according to data current to 1948), or half of the population within what became Israel. Abu Sitta noted that, as the Atlas shows through 27 references from Israeli sources, 70-plus massacres by Jewish nationalist forces encouraged Arab flight in 1948. He noted that in May 1948 there were at least 1,113 Arab Palestinian towns and villages and 183 Jewish settlements, located mostly in urban areas around the coast. Only 99 of those towns and villages remain today.

Abu Sitta argued that the myth that Palestine was a land without a people was "not only false but a wicked lie in order to make Palestinians homeless." While he did not discuss it in his presentation, his own family fled their home in Beir al-Sabe' (Beersheba) in 1948 when he was 8 years old. Abu Sitta argued that one of the primary reasons why Arab Palestinians living in the region rejected the Partition Plan (U.N. Resolution 181, 29 November 1947), which was outlined as a solution to Britain's inability to fulfill its mandate, was that the Partition Plan would have given 55.5 percent of the land to a section of the population who only owned 5.4 percent of the land. By 1948, Jews constituted one-third (32 percent) of the total population, up from nine percent in 1914.

The Atlas of Palestine 1948 relies on the historic maps drawn by British and French cartographers in the early 1900s, aerial photographs taken by German Air Force (1917-18) and the Royal Air Force (1945-46), and 55 detailed charts and tables based on records maintained by the British Survey of Palestine Department, whose purpose was to implement the Balfour Declaration and determine which land could be given to Jews for settlement, thereby allowing more Jewish immigration to Palestine, said Abu Sitta.

Abu Sitta was categorical in his attribution of the British government's intent in colonizing and mapping Palestine. "A map is a birth certificate of a place…an identity card. When you make a map like that, you implicitly indicate you own a place." He argued that the way the borders were created was “to establish land for Jewish immigration and to exclude land from the Arab world." While the Zionists had only claimed 11 percent of historic land in their declaration of statehood, the borders of Israel that resulted from the armed conflict of 1948 and the 1949 Armistice Line incorporated more than 77 percent of the land controlled by the British Mandate into the new state of Israel, including 460 Palestinian villages. The Armistice Line dissected an additional 111 Arab Palestinian villages. This was reminiscent, said Abu Sitta, of the way the British and French High Commissioners had divided the land in the 1920s, dissecting 23 villages in historic Palestine, without thought to the lives of the people and their access to their water and land resources.

Within the region that became Israel, "Palestinians made up over half the population but had no say in the political make-up of the state," said Abu Sitta. After statehood was declared on 15 May, the Zionist Jewish leaders gained control of everything left behind by the British, including a total of 2,700 elements of the British Mandate's infrastructure, said Abu Sitta. This included nearly 2,000 miles of first-class roads, 624,000 miles of railroads, 41 railway stations, 31 airports, 33 hospitals, 15 post offices, 37 military camps (including unused supplies and ammunition), 99 police stations and posts, 350 schools, 1,984 Christian and Muslim religious buildings (not including those in Jerusalem), and 3,649 sources of water (wells, springs, cisterns, etc.). Also lost to the Palestinians were the "intangible forms of infrastructure," said Abu Sitta, including the civic records maintained by the British Mandate government and the certificates of birth, death, school, and land ownership.

One of the most historically destructive actions that David Ben Gurion, the head of the Zionist struggle for statehood and Prime Minister of Israel from 1948-54, did to establish Jewish dominance over the Arab population and land from a historical point of view was to create a committee of scholars, geographers, and theologians in the same week of February 1949 in which Israel signed its armistice agreement with Syria, whose goal was to "erase" all the names used in historic Palestine for the past five thousand years and to create new Hebrew names. "They wanted to make these names a symbol of the old link with Palestine, but unfortunately they could not find genuine Hebrew names for more than five percent of the names previously used," said Abu Sitta. These new maps and new names erased the vocabulary of the life of the people, he added, because of the way the names had recorded historic events like weddings and battles.

Abu Sitta argued that, despite the fact that U.N. Resolution 194 (11 December 1948) provided for Palestinian refugees' right of return and that their "inalienable right to return home" has been reconfirmed by the international community 135 times since then, the application of international law has enabled the return of refugees all over the world except in Palestine. Of the estimated six million Palestinians made refugees in 1948 and thereafter (or 85 percent of the region's total inhabitants at the time), only 4.2 million are registered with the U.N. and are counted today because of their need for the food aid and social services provided by the U.N. Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA), said Abu Sitta. For internally displaced Palestinians who remained within Israel, only half of the 211 towns and villages that exist today are recognized, while the others are deprived from health care, roads, social and educational services, and so on, said Abu Sitta.

Abu Sitta noted that the people of depopulated villages went to only one or two places as refugees. "Villages did not split, even in adversity," said Abu Sitta. "The Palestinian family and social structure was strong, as it is today."