By Maha Hussaini – Middle East Eye
Dozens of women report being sexually assaulted during the Kamal Adwan hospital raid last month
Before anything else happened, Maryam al-Muqayad says male Israeli troops told her to take off her clothes.
Then, the soldiers took the 13-year-old Palestinian girl, dragged her by her hair and made her kneel down. When they had stopped abusing her, they forced her to leave northern Gaza, her home, and make her way south.
She was not alone.
Dozens of Palestinian women and girls reported similar sexual abuses committed against them by Israeli forces during the storming of Kamal Adwan hospital in the north of the wartorn coastal enclave last month.
The incursion was preceded by nearly three months of a blockade preventing the entry of aid, medicine and food, as well as heavy bombardment in the hospital’s complex and vicinity.
Once troops reached the hospital, they burned down different departments and killed patients and medical workers inside, according to health officials.
The remaining doctors and patients, roughly 350 people, were forced out of the hospital at gunpoint, half-dressed.
Muqayad was at the hospital accompanying her sick grandmother. “The Israeli army set fire to several sections while shelling was everywhere around us,” she told Middle East Eye.
“The attacks continued for more than three-and-a-half hours before they started calling on everyone inside the hospital to stand in its yard,” she said.
At first, worried about leaving her grandmother, she resisted going out, but eventually decided to join the rest of the group.
Dragged and forced to undress
According to eyewitnesses, people were taken to the adjacent al-Farid hall for search and interrogation.
The men were forced to strip down to their underwear, and the women were ordered to remove their headscarves, while some women and girls were also forced to undress.
“We refused to remove our hijabs, so they started exerting more pressure, ordering girls under 20 to move south without their families, but the families refused. They then strip-searched many women and [sexually] harassed them,” Muqayad said.
Israeli soldiers reportedly touched private parts of women and girls. Those who tried to resist were “brutally beaten”.
The army then took groups of women and girls to al-Fakhoura school in northern Gaza, assaulting them along the way and threatening them with detention and separation from their families.
‘An Israeli soldier hit a pregnant nurse in the belly with his weapon butt’
– Maryam al-Muqayad, Palestinian girl
“They told us they would film us to show [the world] that Hamas was using us as human shields. When we arrived, they dragged us by our hair across the schoolyard, forced us into toilets, and ordered us to undress,” Muqayad said.
When they refused, the soldiers beat and forcibly stripped the women, while hurling insults and scolding them for not complying with the evacuation orders of northern Gaza.
“They forced us to undress, then dragged us back outside by our hair. They threw our clothes at us and made us kneel with our hands raised, then slammed our heads against the walls,” the 13-year-old recounted.
“An Israeli soldier hit a pregnant nurse in the belly with his weapon butt. They searched us and separated children from their parents, then made us walk behind tanks emitting black smoke.”
The soldiers told them to head to the southern Gaza Strip and told them that Gaza City would soon be invaded.
“They lined us up and told us that they would shoot anyone who moved. Then they ordered us to walk behind a [military] jeep to Abu Sharkh Roundabout, then to the al-Halabi Roundabout, and finally to Jabalia Nazla Street,” she said.
“With the soldiers was a young man they had taken from al-Fakhoura School, using him as a human shield. They forced him to enter houses before the Israeli army stormed them, fearing they might be booby-trapped.”
Israeli soldiers detained dozens of Palestinians, including medical personnel, patients, and displaced people, and forced the rest to evacuate to the southern Gaza Strip.
But once they passed the Israeli checkpoint in northern Gaza, they headed towards the adjacent Gaza City, rather than continuing south.
The Israeli military issued the first evacuation orders for Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip on 13 October 2023.
Since then, the number of residents who have complied with these orders or have been expelled by the Israeli army is nearly one million.
The total number of Palestinians to have been displaced in the entire Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war is approximately two million.
‘Without apparent reason’
Alaa, 30, was with Muqayad when Israeli soldiers forced women to strip.
However, she considers herself lucky to have been only pulled by the hair over her hijab – she was spared the strip searches.
As women who were released began to arrive in Gaza City, accounts of sexual harassment of women and girls by Israeli soldiers were shared widely.
Many women who witnessed sexual violence or were themselves assaulted refused to speak to MEE, considering the sensitivity of the subject.
“The army trapped us inside the hospital for over a month,” Alaa, who preferred to use only her first name, said.
When tanks broke in and soldiers entered, they asked the women to remove their clothes, she added.
“None of us complied, so they took us to al-Farid Hall, where they ordered us to remove our hijabs, but we also refused. Male soldiers then came and began pulling my hair over my hijab, doing the same to the other women,” she told MEE.
Throughout the assault that continued for several hours, Alaa said Israeli soldiers “hurled vile insults and cursed us in front of the men, while beating and humiliating us.”
Soldiers said they wanted to teach those who did not comply with the evacuation orders a lesson, and mocked women and men for “trying to act like heroes” by staying in the north.
Alaa added that the soldiers assaulted “even the elderly”, forcing them to undress and making fun of them.
“One elderly woman with us was wearing a two-piece prayer dress, consisting of a hijab and a skirt. The soldiers, at gunpoint, forced her to remove both without any apparent reason.”
“After she had undressed, they mockingly told her to put her clothes back on.”
The latest ground offensive in northern Gaza has been ongoing since early October. Israeli forces have killed, wounded and arrested thousands of people as part of it.
Since the start of the war following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israeli forces have killed over 46,500 people and wounded nearly 110,000 more, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Experts believe the actual death toll is likely much higher.