Hamas Soldiers Cut Off Women's Breasts

A Common Propaganda Motif

Dec 12, 2023

Sebastiano del Piombo, *The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha of Sicily*, 1520

You’ve heard the horrifying stories of the brutality of Hamas soldiers. Lucy Williamson, the Middle East Correspondent for the BBC in Jerusalem, for example, quoted an unnamed woman who told someone who told her,

“They sliced her breast and threw it on the street," she says. "They were playing with it."

The headline goes on to note, in passing, so “the BBC hears.”1

I cannot say whether this atrocious incident happened. What I do know is that throughout Google recorded history there have been reports of soldiers cutting off the breasts of women.

Whether such mutilations actually occurred is generally certain but specifically uncertain. Generally certain in that the world and its conflicts have been spinning for a long, long time and the odds are that soldiers somewhere at some time cut off girls’ or women’s breasts. Specifically uncertain because of the propaganda value of these reports: the bad guys’ soldiers are telegraphed as sub-human. The idea is a motif, in other words repeated over and over.

The painting pictured above shows the teenaged virgin,Agatha, daughter of wealthy Christians in the Roman province of Sicily who refused to marry a Roman prefect, Quintianus. Among the many tortures inflicted on her body, which were intended to persuade her to marry the Roman, was the cutting off of her breasts. You can see a novelty in this painting—the twisting off of her nipples with iron clamps. There is a knife at the ready to finish the job. I call it a novelty not because it did not happen or because I think it’s funny, but because it does not seem to be depicted in other paintings of her ordeal.

Francesco Guarino, *The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha*, c. 1640.

For example, the above painting by Guarino shows the Romans and their henchmen getting right to it.

If you google “soldiers cut off breasts”, you will understand why I say this is a motif not necessarily in reality, but for propaganda or persuasive purposes in reporting.

Here are a few.

German Jack the Rippers

During World War I (1914-1918), British tabloid propaganda depicted German soldiers as

one vast gang of Jack-the-Rippers who cut off the breasts of their hapless victims.

This particular depiction was dreamed up by sensationalist fiction writer, William Le Queux, in his “report”, German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds, in 1914.

Historian Nicoletta F. Gullace concludes that such reports were part of a widespread British propaganda effort conjured in both tabloid and official reports. For example, the former ambassador to the United States, Lord James Bryce, headed up the official Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages.

The purpose of both tabloid and government reports, not necessarily stated, was to harness international law and international support to British images of family and society via scandalous depictions of sexual violence. In other words, the collective German “Attila the Huns” were a threat to British family honor and the international community needed to come to Britain’s defense.2

The Allies Massacre at Grischino

Following World War II, Germany, via its Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle criminal investigating authority, asserted that soldiers with the Red Army, the army of the Soviet Union, carried out a massacre at Grischino, a town in Eastern Ukraine. As a reminder, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States formed the Allied Powers, fighting against the fascist Axis Powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan.

According to one of the investigators into Allied atrocities, lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, a total of 596 prisoners of war, nurses, construction workers and female communication personnel were murdered. He asserted, too, that many of the bodies had been mutilated including the cutting off of ears and noses and cut off genitals having been stuffed into the victims’ mouths.

De Zayas reported that the breasts of some of the nurses had been cut off, after having been raped.

Again, I have no way to determine whether the breasts of nurses had been cut off by Allied soldiers, but I can suggest that de Zayas, investigating on behalf of Germany, was not necessarily unbiased.

Allied Soldiers in North Korea

A few years ago, a video was posted on YouTube. It purported to be a North Korean production. Based on the graininess of the video, the cloudiness of the audio, and the nostalgic style which might be described generously as “classical,” it appears to have been made in the 1950s, sometime after 1958. The context is the Korean War between North Korea and South Korea, the two Koreas created by the Allied Powers by dividing the country along the 38th parallel following World War II. The conflict lasted from 1950-1953. The purpose of the video is transparent: to depict socialist North Korea as a benevolent state which actively cares about even the most marginalized of people.

I cobbled together the video with the YouTube headline to come up with the complete, albeit incredible, back story:

a disabled woman, with no family to support her, was raped by US soldiers, her breasts cut off, and became pregnant. With triplets. Who were born in 1958.

Without getting into all the complications about whether it was theoretically possible for a US soldier to have raped and impregnated a North Korean woman whose triplets were born in 1958, a crucial fact to consider, again, is that the conflict ended in 1953.

To believe the story, you have to accept that the conflict ended in 1953, that during the conflict a disabled woman without family had her breasts cut off by vicious US soldiers sometime prior to July, 1953, was raped by one of those soldiers at the same moment, survived both the gang rape and the mutilation, then went on to survive a five year long pregnancy (we remember the babies were born in 1958).

Its easier to believe that the North Korean socialist government, as the video calls it repeatedly, took the triplets under its wing, provided them with milk, honey, food, clothing, college educations, then gave them expensive gifts out of the great magnanimity of its communist heart.

Now, the video is one thing. Propagandistic to the core. But the YouTube title emphasizes one thing: “U.S. Soldiers Cut Off Her Breasts”. Well, that and the triplets part: “North Korean Woman Gave Birth to Triplets.” The comments indicate that the breast cutting off detail was the part the readers notice. They ask, predictably, how can people be so cruel?

Continuing. . .

Ethiopian Soldiers in Somali Ogaden

In 2010, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom [Peace Women] issued a report on the fate of Ogaden Somali women by Ethiopian soldiers.3

The rape of women . . . with breasts cut off after being raped by the Ethiopian army and security forces is a common practice in Ogaden.

The Peace Women’s report states that it based its assertion on the 130 page report by Human Rights Watch on human rights abuses by Ethiopian forces published in 2008.4 I have scanned the report, reading reasonably carefully the portions on rape and sexual abuse, yet I found no language regarding the cutting off of women’s breasts. The report is filled with horrors, including rapes and other tortures of a sexual nature as well as the names of victims, perpetrators, and places.

What accounts for the language of breasts being cut off in the Peace Women’s report, especially in light of the assertion that it was a “common practice,” I cannot say. I don’t think it is outside the realm of possibility that it was inserted for propaganda purposes, in other words to make the atrocities, which are shocking enough, seem even more atrocious.

Myanmar Genocide of Rohingyas

In 2018, the PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] documentary show, “Frontline”, aired a documentary called Myanmar’s Killing Fields.5 It was about the alleged genocide by the military of the majority Buddhist country, Myanmar, of the country’s Muslim minority ethnic Rohingyas. Its newsletter promoting the special ran this headline: A Soldier Cut Off Her Breast: Rohingya Survivors Recount Atrocities.6

Whether it was true that a soldier cut off a Rohingya woman’s breast, I cannot say. What I can say is that the newsletter includes the name of only one village among the number of villages which it says was burned to the ground—Chut Pyin. It quotes only one woman, Nur Begum, who says she witnessed a soldier cut off a woman’s breast. She is quoted as having said she witnessed a woman who tried to fight back being shot in the head by a soldier.

‘A soldier cut off her breast,’ Begum says, sobbing. ‘He held it up like this and showed us and it was shaking. He said if we screamed, they would do the same to us.’

The woman whose breast was cut off is not named. Nor does the newsletter say anything like, “we are not naming the woman out of respect for the privacy of her family.” Further, there is no mention of that particular mutilation having been common. Yet, this one non-specific incident becomes the headline and the take-away for readers of headlines only. Curiously, the headline on the trailer which is posted in the article reads,“ Rohingya Survivors Speak Out About Mass Rape.” It is hardly nit-picking to point out that mass rape and cutting off women’s breasts are related, to be sure, but they are not the same thing. Each is an atrocity, but they are not the same thing. They make for click-bait headlines, but they are not the same thing.

This is not a complete list by any means.

I want to emphasize that one of the givens of war or any armed conflict is rape. Rape on a massive scale. Rape of girls and women but also of men and boys. My purpose is not to discount rapes in armed conflict. Nor is any part of my purpose to suggest that women suffering the mutilation of their breasts by a soldier or soldiers is unimportant.

What I’m getting at is that rape and especially mutilations of women’s breasts have great click-bait potential. They have great propaganda material serving primarily to depict the enemy as sub-human. There becomes a false inevitability about it as does about war itself. We are customers. Especially in the digital age, when information, whether real or manufactured, is so abundant and the product of real journalism so perilously scarce, I believe we have a moral imperative to question the headlines and read the content closely.

Ellin Jimmerson

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