Groups ostensibly devoted to protecting women have been accused since Oct. 7 of prioritizing attacking the Jewish state over that mission.

UN Women took some eight weeks to note “numerous accounts” of Hamas’s gender-based violence, Amnesty International did not fully acknowledge such violence until December 2025 and feminist and human rights activists wrote in February 2024 of Israel “weaponizing the issue of rape” after Oct. 7.

Meanwhile, the Gaza “flotilla” and other anti-Israel entities are said to have overlooked sexual violence in their ranks, and Hamas is accused of sexually abusing children as a recruitment tactic and sexually extorting widows for aid or money.

David Azerrad, assistant professor and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s graduate government school, told JNS that people who purport to care about women show their true colors when they prioritize attacking Israel.

“The cause is so important to them that they will overlook injustices for fear that drawing attention to them would hurt said cause,” he told JNS. “More importantly, it reveals what bad people they are.”

“They hector and claim the mantle of justice while committing vicious acts and preying upon others,” Azerrad added.

Mika Hackner, research director at the North American Values Institute, told JNS that anti-Israel activists overlook sexual misconduct accusations, because they have “a necessary and willing blindness, so that they can continue to believe that the cause is just.”

“Any action in its service must be just, too,” she said. “They have fully accepted the idea that it is not for the privileged or the oppressors to question how the oppressed ‘resist.’”

‘Dangerous precedent’
Taryn Thomas told JNS that she participated in an encampment at Stanford University but changed the way she looked at Israel, and Hamas, after seeing an exhibit about the Nova music festival in Los Angeles.

Thomas said that she went to the exhibit looking for ways to discredit the Jewish state but instead came to sympathize more with Israel after seeing “the reality of kids my age hunted mid-dance.”

“There is no propaganda in a half-finished text message from a dying girl,” she told JNS. “It forced me to acknowledge the suffering on the other side that the movement required me to ignore.”

Thomas, who said that she has visited Israel twice since then, said that at the Stanford encampment, “there was certainly a willingness to look away from various forms of misconduct.”

She experienced racism and saw “blatant antisemitism” at the encampment, where “physical or verbal abuses could be sidelined if addressing them threatened the group’s cohesion,” she said.

“This environment was undoubtedly influenced by the broader denial of sexual violence occurring on Oct. 7,” she said. “When leaders publicly rationalize, victim-blame or dismiss such violence, it sets a dangerous precedent.”

Thomas showed JNS screenshots of what she said was a conversation with a leader of the encampment. The images appeared to show the encampment leader saying that Zionists own “much of the porn industry” and that “the Israeli propaganda machine tries to use sexual appeal to make people want to settle, and there’s some connections between Jeffrey Epstein and Israel.”

The screen captures also seemed to show that encampment leader suggesting that Hamas attackers may have thought the Nova festival was a “sex cult, given how little dressed people are at those types of events.”

Thomas told JNS that she shared verified reports of sexual assault against Oct. 7 victims with the encampment leader, who, she says, responded that “there may have been certain cases. Those need to be fact checked. The official Hamas stance is that committing such acts is prohibited.”

“When the people in charge hold these views, it creates an environment where sexual misconduct within their own ranks is far more likely to go unchecked,” she told JNS.

Anti-Israel groups “don’t have any interest in anything except advancing their revolutionary activism and certainly not anything like creating a paper trail of evidence of the wrongdoing within their own movement,” according to James Lindsay, a political commentator and author.

“It’s a common mistake people make expecting radical leftists to be consistent with their stated values and causes,” Lindsay told JNS. “They never are. They’re only consistent with advancing revolutionary activism by any means necessary.”

‘A bad name’
A series of since-deleted Instagram posts alleged, anonymously, that a member of the steering committee of the 2025 Gaza flotilla, which left Sicily and aimed to enter Gaza before being stopped by Israeli forces, engaged in “sexual relations with multiple activists while on the boat heading towards Gaza.”

Organizers failed to act in response to the complaints, the social media posts allege.

The Global Sumud Flotilla denied receiving such complaints and said that it probed the matter. “None of the women targeted as victims confirmed any inappropriate behavior,” it stated, in Portuguese. “No evidence has been found, and the case is formally closed.”

Anonymous accusers have also alleged sexual misconduct at an anti-Israel encampment at University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, where four women say that no one responded to their allegations, and in Australia, where the head of a pro-Palestinian group was accused of being sexually aggressive at a private meeting.

Thomas, who told JNS that she changed her mind about Israel after being part of the anti-Israel group at Stanford, said that she didn’t witness any sexual misconduct at the school’s encampment.

Student activists, who chose to report misconduct anonymously, did so only to organizers and would have been “terrified of identifying themselves to authorities,” for fear of the school suspending them, Thomas said.

Participants feared giving the movement “a bad name,” she told JNS.

Jacqueline Carroll, a former sexual crimes prosecutor in Cook County, Ill., and founder of a group that consults on extremism, hate crimes, propaganda and Jew-hatred, told JNS that fear can silence victims.

“There’s shame involved, but there’s also a belief that they might not be believed. There’s also fear of retaliation,” she said. “You’re going to be called a ‘liar.’ You’re going to be targeted for coming forward to say something bad about a group or a leader.”

“You’re going to be called a ‘Zionist,’” she said.

Targeting Jewish and Israeli women, who came forward with their stories after Oct. 7, deterred victims, according to Carroll.

“You would have to be worried about people saying negative comments on your feed, harassing you, doxing you,” she said.

Students abused at anti-Israel encampments might not report the violence to their schools, because people in a position to help were “very much in alignment with the pro-Palestinian cause,” Carroll told JNS. “There was also a defense of what Hamas did as being resilient freedom fighters.”

Out to sea
Sexual misconduct accusations aboard a boat, or the Gaza flotilla, on international waters are tricky, because it’s not clear to which authorities to report the matter, according to Carroll, who thinks that dynamic allows those in authority to abuse their power and for a cult-like environment to develop.

“In these types of cases, no one wants to believe that they’re being taken advantage of,” she said. “That they’ve been indoctrinated and propagandized.”

Miri Bar-Halpern, a clinical psychologist in Boston and Harvard Medical School instructor, told JNS that a victim might stay quiet or anonymous due to past trauma and fears of retaliation.

“Maybe they lost trust in authority from before,” she said. “Maybe they’re afraid of what will happen to them.”

“If the group has become their source of belonging, identity, purpose or protection, speaking up can feel terrifying,” Bar-Halpern told JNS. “They may fear not being believed, being blamed, losing their community or being seen as betraying the cause.”

Bar-Halpern told JNS that people might stay quiet in “some openly pro-Hamas spaces” even if abuse has occurred, “because high-control groups reward loyalty and punish dissent.”

“When a protest space starts to function like a high-control group, abuse gets hidden, because the cause becomes more important than the person,” she said. “Cognitive dissonance, shame and loyalty to the cause make the truth feel unbearable.”

Activist leaders often identify vulnerable people, with histories of trauma or mental health issues, and “groom” them via online platforms, according to Bar-Halpern.

“They will sit in those chat rooms for people that struggle with mental health problems and try to give them a sense of friendship and trust as part of the grooming process,” she said.