Israel Engages in "Organized and Systematic Practice of Sexual Torture" Against Palestinian Hostages, Human Rights Group Says
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says victims' testimonies reveal "a systematic policy practiced in the context of the ongoing crime of genocide."
Content warning: This story contains graphic depictions of sexual violence and torture.
Israel is engaging in “an organized and systematic practice of sexual torture, including rape, forced stripping, forced filming, sexual assault using objects and dogs,” the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said in a report released yesterday, November 10.
PCHR’s findings are based on testimonies from Palestinian hostages who were abducted from the Gaza Strip and recently released from Israel’s prisons and detention camps, referred to throughout the rest of the piece as torture camps.
“[T]he testimonies do not reflect isolated incidents but constitute a systematic policy practiced in the context of the ongoing crime of genocide against more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” the group writes.
PCHR is calling for the international community, the Palestinian Authority, and authorities in the Gaza Strip to provide the victims with protection, and psychological and medical care.
PCHR shares the harrowing testimony of one woman, identified as N.A. in the report, who was abducted at an Israeli checkpoint in Gaza in 2024. She told the group that she was raped by Israeli soldiers, stripped and filmed naked, electrocuted, and beaten:
The soldiers moved me to a place I didn’t know because my eyes were blindfolded, and they ordered me to take off my clothes. I did so. They put me on a metal table, pressed my chest and head against it, cuffed my hands to the end of the bed, and pulled my legs apart forcefully. I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me. I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus. I kept screaming and being beaten, and I could hear a camera — so I believe they were filming me. The rape lasted about 10 minutes. After that, they left me for an hour in the same position, with my hands cuffed to the bed with metal handcuffs.
An hour later, she was raped and beaten again. She said she could hear several soldiers laughing and the click of a camera.
“On the first day I was raped twice; on the second day I was raped twice; on the third day I remained without clothes while they looked at me through the door slit and filmed me,” she said. “One soldier said they would post my photos on social media. While I was in the room, my period started; then they told me to put on clothes and transferred me to another room.”
A.A., a 35-year-old Palestinian man, was abducted from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in March 2024, and held hostage for 19 months. The victim told PCHR that he was anally raped by a dog while soldiers beat and pepper sprayed him.
“I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation; I lost control because I could never have imagined experiencing such a thing,” he said. “Afterward, a doctor stitched a wound in my head caused by the torture—seven stitches without anesthesia. I also suffered bruises, fractures in my limbs, and a rib fracture.”
Another man, T.Q., was abducted while displaced at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023. During his 22 months in captivity, soldiers raped him and threatened to rape his wife. He told PCHR staff:
One of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my anus. After about a minute he removed it and then inserted it again more forcefully while I screamed loudly. After another minute he removed it and forced me to open my mouth and put the stick in my mouth to lick it. From sheer anguish I lost consciousness for minutes, until a female officer came and forced them to stop beating me. She untied my hands, gave me a white overall to wear, and brought me a cup of water which I drank.
He was moved to another room with several other hostages about about hours, “during which soldiers periodically returned to beat and insult us brutally.”
An 18-year-old hostage who was abducted near a humanitarian aid distribution point run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the Gaza Strip, said soldiers repeatedly raped by inserting a bottle into his anus. During one incident, he said:
The soldiers ordered me and six other detainees to kneel, and they raped us by inserting a bottle into the anus, pushing it in and pulling it out. It happened to me four times, with about ten in-and-out motions each time. I screamed, and so did the others with me. Of the four times, twice it was just me, and twice it was with others—once with six people and once with twelve people.
He continued: “They violated our dignity and destroyed our spirits and our hope for life. I had wanted to continue my education; now I am lost after what happened to me.”
Israel’s well-documented use of sexual torture against Palestinians has not garnered the same attention or outrage as the false claims that Hamas soldiers mass raped Israeli women during the October 7, 2023 attack. In fact, within Israel there is more outrage that soldiers’ crimes against Palestinians are exposed than the crimes themselves.
Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi is facing charges of “breach of loyalty,” “breach of trust,” “dereliction of duty,” and “disrupting investigative operations,” for leaking a video last year that allegedly shows Israeli soldiers gang raping a Palestinian hostage at Sde Teiman torture camp.
“Anyone who falsely spreads blood libels against IDF soldiers and prefers the welfare of the Nukhba terrorists over theirs is not worthy of wearing the IDF uniform and belongs in prison,” the Israeli Defense Minister said of Tomer-Yerushalmi.
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