United Nations Aid Workers In Gaza Make Women Trade Sex For Food
JUN 8, 2024 4:00 PM
BY HUGH FITZGERALD
8 COMMENTS
The latest disturbing news from Gaza, not reported anywhere in the mainstream media, is about women in Gaza who have been forced to turn to prostitution, trading sex with aid workers for access to food. And some women, who have refused that hideous bargain, won’t stand in line for food anymore because they are tired of the constant harassment by men who want sex. More on this woefully under-reported scandal can be found here: “The UN admits aid workers are forcing Gaza women into prostitution. Where’s the outrage?,” Elder of Ziyon, June 6, 2024:
It has now been two weeks since the UN Protection Cluster reported that aid workers and others in Gaza are forcing women into prostitution, presumably in exchange for food.
nsufficient and unreliable aid, distributed under conditions of insecurity that do not allow adequate targeting, expose vulnerable groups to violence, exploitation and abuse, trafficking and forced prostitution, including by aid workers. Specific risks observed in Gaza associated with aid include the presence of unofficial humanitarian workers without identification [in] mixed distribution lines for men and women. There are reports of individuals adopting harmful coping mechanisms, such as reducing food and liquid intake, to minimise such risks.
This has been reported on by exactly no one besides Elder of Ziyon.
The report also mentioned that Gaza women prefer to go without food rather than stand in line together with men for food, because they know they will be sexually harassed,. [sic]
And that young girls are being raped and married off to older men in the camps….
This isn’t “Zionist propaganda.” This is the UN. They buried the information in the report but it is there, and if anything, they are downplaying the extent of the problem….
This forcing of women into prostitution in Gaza has been going on for some time. But finally the problem has become too big for the UN to completely ignore, especially since there are now many more Western journalists in Gaza covering the war, and while in the Strip, some of them have learned about the sex-for-aid scandal that Hamas had managed to keep hidden for so long.
In the UN Protection Cluster Report, which was issued in mid-May, the story of this prostitution, forced on women who want only to obtain enough food to feed their families, received only three sentences. No one wants to point the finger at Hamas, whose operatives seize far more of the humanitarian aid — food and medicine — than they had any right to, deserve, then sell some of what they and their extended families do not consume to other Gazans, those without Hamas connections or, as we know now, they trade some of the aid that remains in their possession to Gazan women for sex.
You won’t see a single mention of this prostitution in Gaza at meetings of the UN General Assembly, or at the UN Human Rights Commission. No one will mention it at the European Union, or at the Commission on the Status of Women. And the reason, as Elder of Ziyon notes, is because there is no way to lay the blame for this phenomenon on Israel and the Jews. It might even help Israel, if the important role of Hamas operatives in this hideous practice were to become better known.
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