In a moment when the night's stillness collapses, doors are broken and homes are invaded. The scene is brief, but it leaves an impact that transcends its duration: soldiers enter, rampage, tamper, then wear women's private underwear—lingerie—and photograph themselves inside a space that has been violated at gunpoint. The goal here is not inspection, nor even material destruction, but rather to redefine the place itself: transforming the home from a private sanctuary into a stage for control and intrusion.
What is happening in Gaza and Lebanon is not an anomalous behavior, but a colonial technique: intimate colonialism—that form of domination that is not content with controlling land, but extends to the body, privacy, and meaning. When intimate clothing is worn and displayed on strange bodies, not only are possessions violated, but the psychological boundaries that separate the public from the private, the safe from the threatened, are breached. The intimate becomes material for colonial harm, and privacy transforms into a space susceptible to subjugation.
More dangerous than the act itself is its re-broadcasting. The photos and videos that are later published are not fleeting social media posts, but part of a deliberate strategy: delayed shock through the screen. Displaced people watch their homes violated, not at the moment of the event, but afterward—when they are powerless to act, and forced to receive. Here, the invasion does not end with the soldiers' departure; rather, another form of violation begins, settling in memory and being re-evoked whenever the image is re-watched.
This behavior, which may seem sarcastic or perverse, is at its core an organized practice of power restructuring: humiliation, subjugation, and the redefinition of the human being in relation to themselves and their body. It is a systematic occupation act, which is only complete with its reproduction and dissemination, as a means to prolong the harm and generalize it to the displaced and the entire occupied society. This aligns with the approach of liberation psychology, which views psychological violence not as an individual symptom, but as the product of an oppressive structure that must be understood in its political and social context.
The psychological impact is distributed, but it integrates into the dismantling of the social fabric:
On men: Violence manifests as complex humiliation—inability to protect, exposure of private space, and a threat to identity associated with the role of protection.
On women: The body becomes a symbolically penetrated space; anger intertwines with shame and fear, not only because of the act itself, but because of what it implies about domination over the body and the possibility of its subjugation.
On children: The boundary between what is private and what is public collapses. What was hidden from their eyes suddenly appears, not as knowledge, but as a shock that confuses their perception of safety, and plants a deep rift in their sense of the stability of the world around them.
Here, not only the individual is targeted, but the gender structure of society is targeted: humiliating men by exposing their helplessness, and violating women by desecrating their intimacy, in an integrated process of dismantling roles and relationships. It is armed intimate violence, using everyday symbols to reproduce domination.
This act extends through time. It does not happen once, but is repeated in memory, in images, in the retrieval of small details: a house door broken into, a drawer opened, a piece of cloth snatched, an order disrupted. Even if the house remains standing, it is no longer as it was. It becomes laden with the memory of violation, as if the occupation never left it.
Despite this, transforming these experiences into testimony against the occupation is not just a news narrative, but an act of resistance. Turning this testimony into a public space not only exposes the violation, but also reduces the isolation of the victims, and reconnects the experience to its collective context instead of leaving it as a silent individual burden. Thus, the ability to understand is restored, possibilities for confrontation are opened, and dignity and social relations that are intended to be torn apart are repaired.
These practices are not a marginal detail of war, but one of its precise techniques: dismantling the human being from within, by transforming their most private spaces into tools for controlling them. And confrontation begins by recognizing and naming it, not as a fleeting incident, but as a continuous structure of symbolic violence, which does not end with the event, but continues unless we succeed in dismantling it and neutralizing its impact.
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Desecration of Intimacy: When Our Private Belongings Become Tools of War