GUEST BLOG: Pat O’Dea – The Trophies of Genocide

IDF soldiers display the trophies of genocide.

Grave robbing and necrophilia fetishism being practiced by the killers of the murdered women whose clothes they have stolen. These are the trophies of genocide.

In the half light of a Gaza neighbourhood obliterated by Israeli bombardment, Israeli soldiers rummage through a boot full of underwear that has been looted from the houses they’ve pillaged and destroyed.

“I swear,” one of them says to the camera, “Palestinian women are the sluttiest in the world.”

Amidst all the horrors that have been live-streamed from Gaza, the underwear of Palestinian women in the hands of Israeli soldiers has become a sickening motif.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about how normalised this violation of Palestinian women’s private life has become. We can scarcely open a social media app without seeing yet another image of the intimate garments of our sisters in Gaza tied to the tanks that just decimated their homes or wielded like trophies by taunting occupiers.

Why are we not as repulsed with these images as we would of German soldiers posing the underwear of murdered Jewish women?

Where are the women who owned these clothes?

In shallow graves and under the rubble, or starving to death in the ruins.

Every single one of these soldiers who can be identified in these photos and videos needs to have their names and identities forwarded to the International Criminal Court to be investigated on suspicion of committing war crimes and crimes against civilians. And tried for complicity and participation in the commissioning of genocide.