What Hamas Referred to as Its Feminine Captives, and Why It Issues

May 25, 2024
This week, Israel launched an appalling video that includes 5 feminine Israeli troopers taken captive at Nahal Oz navy base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the ladies beg for his or her lives whereas Hamas fighters mill round and alternately threaten to kill them and praise their look. The captors name the ladies “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “ladies who can get pregnant.” Virtually instantly, others disputed the interpretation and mentioned sabaya referred merely to “feminine captives” and included no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic phrase sabaya doesn’t have sexual connotations,” the Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian wrote in a publish on X, taking exception to a Washington Publish article that mentioned that it did. She mentioned the Israeli translation was “enjoying on racist and orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.”These are actual ladies and victims of ongoing battle crimes, so it does appear excessively lurid to recommend, with out direct proof, that they've been raped in captivity for the previous a number of months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis famous, permitting readers to do the gestational math. “Consider what meaning for these younger ladies.”) However to say that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation displays ignorance, at finest. The phrase is nicely attested in classical sources and refers to feminine captives; the selection of a classical time period over a contemporary one implies a passion for classical modes of battle, which codified sexual violence at scale. Simply as concubine and consolation lady carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly related to what we moderns name rape. Anybody who makes use of sabaya in fashionable Gaza or Raqqah could be assumed to have particular and disgusting causes to need to revive it.The phrase sabaya just lately reappeared within the fashionable Arabic lexicon via the efforts...

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