High Rate of Sexual Crimes in the Israeli Occupation Army

The Israeli army has been immersed in a deep crisis during the last two years; while the media is reporting high levels of rape and sexual assault among the soldiers, "others are talking about the insurgency of the regime’s precautionary forces," according to Pak Sahafat News Agency.

While revealing the statistics of the 2020 sexual assault, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) registered 1,542 complaints, including 26 cases of rape, 391 obscene acts, and 92 cases of distributing photos and videos, The Jerusalem Post reports.

 

From Rape to Riots

The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported that the Israeli army had witnessed 1,542 rapes in just one year.

According to the Hebrew newspaper, despite the number of complaints presented to the military prosecutor’s office and the competent military, only 31 cases have since been indicted, ignoring all the rest.

During the meeting of the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee of the Israeli Knesset, horrific information was published about sexual crimes in the Israeli army that happened in 2020, and despite the shocking number of sexual assaults, only 51 Israeli soldiers were condemned, according to the same source.

Nearly 50% of the offenders "were conscript soldiers, 29% were career officers and NCOs, and the rest were civilian employees of the IDF [IOF], reservists or contractors, as mentioned by The Jerusalem Post.

The same source also revealed that 1,239 complaints were registered in 2019, while 514 complaints filed in 2012.

“We’ve recently been exposed to the phenomenon of serious sexual harassment in the IDF [IOF], and it is our duty to make sure that this serious and dangerous phenomenon is eradicated,” said committee chairman MK Ram Ben Bara.

On Tuesday Jan 4, 2021, during the investigation, Labor MK Emillie Moatti underlined the ongoing failures in the Israeli Occupation Force’s conduct of sexual assault within its ranks, like allowing harassers to return to work even though legal proceedings were not yet done.

However, this is not the only problem among the Israeli army groups; the regime’s national network has recently reported that dozens of Israeli army precautionary soldiers refused to attend an unexpected maneuver.

According to Hebrew media, 120 precautionary soldiers refused to be present during a military exercise ordered by their unit commanders; only half of the soldiers attended.

 

A Sexual-Assaults Jump

In May 2021, Israel Occupation Forces Chief of Staff, Aviv Kohavi, said that “the army has a 'zero tolerance' policy when it comes to relationships between officers and subordinates,” in an attempt to slam instances of sexual assault in the Israeli army and promising to root them out, according to The Times of Israel report.

Following a sexual-assaults jump of increased cases of rape in the Israeli Occupation Forces, he pointed out that “any attack on sexual grounds, in speech or in deed, is an attack on human dignity.”

Despite his insistence that the Israeli Occupation policy will never tolerate with such cases, the rate rape in the IOF rapidly increased in the following years.

“There were more than 1,500 complaints a year about sexual harassment in the IDF [IOF], and these are just a few that dare to complain,” said Brig.-Gen. Ella Shad-Shechtman, the chief of staff’s adviser on gender affairs.

“There is no case that comes to our door, from a verbal remark to the most difficult cases, that we do not handle properly,” she added.

 

A Model Officer

Shortly after Kohavi appointment as chief of staff in October 2019, The Times of Israel said that Brig. Gen. Shai Elbaz, “a senior officer resigned from his position as the head of operations for the Israeli Navy as he had inappropriate sexual relationships with some of the crew members."

Since May, 2018, the former senior officer had occupied the head of naval operations and before holding the last position, he previously served as the head of the navy’s elite Shayetet 13 commando unit.

The Times of Israel pointed out that his "illicit" sexual harassment first happened while he held Shayetet 13.

According to Channel 12, “several women came forward and claimed that he maintained improper sexual relationships with them.”

The assumptions against Shai Elbaz were exposed two years after Ofek Buchris, a former brigadier general, found guilty in three charges of maintaining illicit sexual relationships “as part of a deal in exchange for having far more serious charges dropped.”

There were various cases of sexual assaults where Israeli former heads and officers, supposed to be models for their crew, found guilty of sexual harassment and rape, like Buchris, the former head of the Golani infantry brigade, seen as a rising star in the IOF, who had been accused of rape by two female cops working among his group.

Buchris directly denied the accusations, but later on, he took public responsibility for undeclared sexual offenses as he was promised in a bargain that he will not go to jail.

In March 2016, allegations against Buchris came into light and shocked the army brass because he had been seen as “a model officer,” and the scandal forced him to resign from the IOF in July 2016, according to The Times of Israel.