In the rhetoric of “Free Gaza," few embody the hypocrisy of stage activism better than Bella Hadid.
At the latest Cannes Film Festival, under the flashes of photographers, Bella glided forward like an oriental princess stepped out of a fairy tale. Her father, Mohamed Hadid, a California real estate billionaire, meanwhile lives among villas, infinity pools, and American fortunes. Yet, in the midst of all this luxury, they do nothing but endlessly repeat the magic word: “Palestine."
Call it “Gaza the Beautiful".
There is this mythological Gaza, the one of the flotillas, of the influencers, of the Hadid sisters posing for glossy magazines. Then there is the other Gaza, which escapes ideological frameworks because it reveals their structural lie.
Fawzia Sido, kidnapped on an Iraqi mountain and ending up in Gaza, is its uncomfortable face. Hamas and ISIS, two sides of the same totalitarian ideology, passed the baton in the destruction of this Yazidi girl.
In the summer of 2014, ISIS massacres and kidnaps thousands of Yazidis in Iraq. A real genocide, with the rape of thousands of women and girls turned into sex slaves and mass graves full of men. Fawzia Sido is one of them. She was eleven years old, kidnapped, sold five times, drugged and raped, and from Syria she would end up in Gaza in 2020. She passed from hand to hand - “a Syrian, a Saudi, another Syrian" - and finally to a Gaza jihadist fighter, who “married" her.
She knew him by his battle name, Abu Amar al Makdisi. “Makdisi" is a favorite term among Palestinian jihadists. She had two children with her rapist, a Hamas leader. After the October 7 massacre, Fawzia was forced to work in a hospital used as a terrorist base.
On October 1, 2024, Fawzia was rescued by the Israeli army in Gaza. Today she is in Germany, where she is slowly rebuilding a life thanks to European hospitality. On June 26, Fawzia Sido spoke at the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council at the invitation of UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer.
“I stand before you today not to provide numbers and statistics that will end up buried in reports and forgotten, but as a human being who has endured what no one on this earth should ever have to endure," Fawzia said in Geneva. “At dawn on August 3, 2014, the sun did not rise over Sinjar: we breathed death."
The night ISIS arrived, Fawzia fled holding the hand of her five-year-old little brother. “I was only ten years old, I was sold from one man to another as if I were a piece of furniture, without feelings, without dreams, without dignity. They chained me. They beat me. They violated my innocence and subjected my body to electric shocks.
"In 2020, I was kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip, where I was sold to a jihadist and, under threat of violence, forced to marry him and give birth to two children. I lived there for years in slavery. I was so exhausted and terrified that they forced me to sleep standing up. I was locked in a dark room without windows for three months and I attempted suicide several times to escape that hell. Today I am just a body without a soul."
Meanwhile, in a tunnel under Gaza, Agam Goldstein-Almog was an Israeli girl held hostage by Hamas. Like Fawzia, she was forced to wear a full veil and a long dress, made to always look at the ground, forced to recite Islamic prayers, and given a Quranic name by the terrorists: “Salsabil."
For half her life, Fawzia was a slave to ISIS and Hamas.
Yet pro-Palestinian women fight to support those who enslaved this Yazidi girl. The woke West, master at inventing microaggressions, safe spaces, and imaginary genocides, meets a real victim - a child, an “infidel," reduced to a sex object by a theocratic regime - and chooses silence. (Let alone the story of the Israeli female hostages or those raped and killed on October 7.)
Because her liberation carries the Star of David. Because her story cracks the dogma of the oppressed. Because admitting that Gaza hides Islamist rape camps means acknowledging that evil also dwells in the heart of the political project that governs the Strip.
Gaza is not just war rubble. It is also kilometers of underground prisons. There are those who kidnap child hostages and those who free them.