In the initial barrage of Israeli atrocity propaganda following Hamas’s October 7 operation Al-Aqsa Flood, sexual violence barely rated a mention. Only by November,1 when fabricated claims of babies beheaded and burned in ovens had been definitively disproven and the total death count significantly revised down, did a chorus of charges that Hamas had committed systematic sexual violence begin to circulate, in unison, throughout Israeli and Western media. The past year has seen these claims rigorously debunked in publications such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Intercept, Yes Magazine, and the London Times. Yet no matter how outlandish, how factually inaccurate or how manufactured these claims are shown to be, they have continued to provide fodder for a Western colonial imaginary that seeks to frame Palestinian resistance groups as so monstrously evil that they cannot be seriously negotiated with; so monstrous, in fact, that any action – including genocide – is justified in seeking to annihilate them. ….more