Read my report, based on a Freedom of Information request that took *seven months* of wrangling and an ICO case for the Foreign Office to finally (partially) grant it, here novaramedia.com/2026/03/02/u...
Meanwhile, an Israeli government-aligned group received 75% of its funding from the UK government to produce a report that Israel made central to its genocide propaganda.
Backbench Labour MP Abtisam Mohamed hosted the group at a parliamentary reception attended by several MPs. And still, the UK has only ever acknowledged Israel’s well-documented sexual violence towards Palestinians in passing in speeches.
This is not for Palestinians’ want of trying. In October 2024, a group of Palestinian women’s rights groups met with senior UK officials and sexual violence teams to discuss Israeli sexual violence.
The UK has not to date responded to the UN report. Nor has it funded any equivalent attempts to The Dinah Project to investigate Israel’s sexual violence.
In March last year, the UN published a report on Israel’s use of sexual, reproductive and gender-based violence during the Gaza genocide, noting that the IDF systematically destroyed IVF clinics, raped and tortured Palestinian prisoners.
While evidence of systematic sexual violence by Hamas is thin, evidence of Israel’s systematic sexual violence against Palestinians is plentiful.
The Knesset wasn’t trying to hide this: they put it in a press release main.knesset.gov.il/en/news/pres...
“This is an important and significant project that serves as a significant public diplomacy tool for us,” Gal Ilan, an official in Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, told the Knesset, adding that “the campaign was disseminated by all the means we have as a state”.
The Israeli state immediately seized on The Dinah Project’s report for hasbara. It made the report central to its $45m (£33m) Google Ads campaign to salvage its reputation during the genocide, which included attacks on the UN refugee agency Unrwa and denying famine in Gaza.
The report also lowers evidentiary standards for studying CRSV, deprioritising forensic evidence and placing heavy emphasis circumstantial evidence as part of what it calls a “tailor-made evidence model”.
Though presented as an academic paper, the report’s tone is clearly inflammatory: it refers to Hamas fighters as “a violent horde that lacks any moral restraint”.
You can read the full 84-page report here thedinahproject.org/wp-content/u...
‘A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond’ was published in July 2025, as pressure mounted on Israel to end its genocide in Gaza. Sure enough, the report concluded sexual violence on 7 Oct was “widespread and systematic”.
The Dinah Project’s application to the FCDO makes clear its intention to a) “operate in parallel” with the Israeli government and b) benefit Israeli society, as well as a redacted first beneficiary.
The org's co-founder is a former IDF chief military prosecutor. Its board includes a former Israeli ambassador and the ex-president of Israel’s supreme court. The Israeli government later admitted it had been in touch with the report’s authors pre-publication. So, hand in glove.
In Sept 2024, The Dinah Project applied to David Lammy’s Foreign Office (FCDO) for funds to establish the “systematic and premeditated nature” of Hamas’ sexual violence. They said they had “no formal connection” with the Israeli government. That’s a fudge.
“Our goal is to propose a scheme of deducing premeditation from circumstantial evidence, including through comparison to forms of violence that are typical to CRSV [conflict-related sexual violence],” The Dinah Project said in an early, since-deleted, mission statement.
[cont] “the [sic] sexual violence was part of Hamas' attack but argues that it was not premediated or systematic. Now, our project is even more critical to counter these arguments.” In other words, the org seemed to be trying to prove a readymade conclusion.
“Since Oct.7,” the org wrote in its FCDO funding application, “the denialism of Hamas' sexual violence has evolved into the second, and more sophisticated, phase of denialism, which accepts the fact [cont]
The problem is, while there is evidence that sexual violence on/after 7 October may have occurred, there’s little to indicate it was systematic. That’s where The Dinah Project comes in. From the outset, the org sought to fill Israel’s evidential gap.
The claim that sexual violence wasn’t scattergun but systematic has been central to Israel’s narrative of 7 October and its justification for genocide. Hamas ordering rape as policy is worlds apart from its militants individually committing rape.
Patten's full report can be read here www.un.org/sexualviolen...
In March 2024, UN special rep Pramila Patten found that there were “reasonable grounds” to say there were “instances of sexual violence” on 7 October in “multiple locations”. She did not conclude the violence was systematic, and added it didn’t justify further hostilities.
SCOOP: The UK gave £90,000 to an Israeli report claiming that Hamas used sexual violence as a “weapon of war”.
The Israeli government used the UK-funded report in a massive propaganda campaign, while Israeli officials called it a “significant public diplomacy tool”.
The EHRC’s interim guidance was withdrawn last year, following a legal challenge by the @goodlawproject.bsky.social. Its redraft has been delayed following reports that equalities minister @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social is unhappy with its even more trans-exclusionary bent. So we'll see.
But all this may be by the by. Though the law is technically determined in the courts, in practice, most employers will look to the EHRC for guidance about how to include trans people in their workplaces.
This shows one of the limits of these lower-court judgements: none is the final word. The legal battles will inevitably roll on, with contradictory judgements.
