Report details decades of sexual violence in detention

sexualized and – A new 188-page report says sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both systematic and decades-old, drawing on witness testimony, prior human rights investigations, United Nations findings, and declassified archival material.

Blindfolded and handcuffed, a Palestinian prisoner held at a detention facility on the Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel described being stripped and dragged to a metal table before being raped vaginally and anally by Israeli soldiers after a November 2024 arrest in Gaza.

In testimony collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and cited in a new 188-page report, the 42-year-old woman said she began screaming as she was beaten while blindfolded and that she felt a man raping her “ejaculate inside my anus.” She later recounted additional vaginal rapes.

The same report—“A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians. ” compiled by the Palestinian Feminist Collective—argues that what survivors describe in Israeli custody is not a set of isolated incidents tied to the chaos after October 7. 2023. Instead, it presents sexual violence as an institutional practice that the group says has been carried out for decades.

Israel’s government, military, and prison system did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The report’s authors say their compilation of testimonies. news coverage. academic research. United Nations reporting. and findings from human rights groups including the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. and Israel-based B’Tselem is meant to counter attempts to dismiss allegations of rape and sexual assault as rare aberrations.

In their view, the recent wave of attention in U.S. and international media did not create the pattern—it only made it harder to ignore.

The United Nations, meanwhile, has treated the issue as far more than an allegation. In May. the United Nations added Israel to a blacklist of countries found to be committing sexual violence in war zones. citing 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated in the last two years by Israeli forces against Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Palestinian Feminist Collective report says the U.N.’s findings reflect only a portion of what survivors describe.

Accounts in the report include graphic allegations of severe physical assault and sexual torture. Among the details described by the authors: crushed testicles, genital beatings, and rapes of detainees including children and the elderly.

Several of the testimonies the report highlights involve detainees allegedly subjected to sexual violence using objects. A 41-year-old Palestinian father arrested at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023 and held in Israeli prison for 22 months said. according to the report. that “one of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my anus.” The report says he told investigators the soldier removed the stick after about a minute and then inserted it again more forcefully.

Other accounts from boys and men described anal rape by soldiers and prison guards using carrots, bottles, batons, and other sharp objects.

The report also details multiple accounts that claim trained dogs were used as both a threat and a tool of sexual violence.

When the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof reported last month on widespread and extreme sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention—including allegations involving trained dogs — the backlash from Israeli authorities and pro-Israel media was swift. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the article as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press. ” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for defamation. No such lawsuit had materialized by the time the Palestinian Feminist Collective report was discussed in the source material. and it was framed as unlikely to proceed.

For Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian liberation, Kristof’s report was, as the article put it, perhaps only surprising because it appeared in a major U.S. outlet. The text describes these allegations as widespread and established for years.

Pro-Israel media outlets like Bari Weiss’s The Free Press attempted to discredit and debunk Kristof’s claims, particularly accounts alleging trained dogs were used to rape prisoners. The criticism, as presented in the source material, argued such abuse was impossible.

The report counters that by pointing to historical precedents, referencing Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile and Nazi prison commander Klaus Barbie—both described in the source material as having reportedly used dogs to rape and sexually torture prisoners.

Within “A Predatory State,” the authors say they document 10 specific incidents of rape or severe sexual assault involving trained dogs. The report says those incidents were reported to human rights groups by victims themselves or firsthand witnesses.

One detainee. as quoted in a section shared with the Intercept and attributed to a report first compiled by Euro-Med and cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. described the moment they say became clear only after it was already happening: “The shock came when they forced me to lie down. and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me.” He said he initially did not understand. then realized “I was being raped.”.

A 48-year-old man arrested at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in testimony cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective that police dogs were used to tear into detainees. He reported that one dog attacked a fellow detainee and “started mauling his genitals (penis). ” and that the detainee bled to death in his arms.

The report situates sexual torture as part of the broader mechanism of control and violence, arguing that such abuse often precedes the deaths of detainees and prisoners. The authors say sexual torture therefore must be considered part of the crime of genocide waged against the Palestinian people.

The report also expands beyond allegations in Gaza detention. including claims that soldiers and settlers in the West Bank committed sexual violence. It cites an account from a Palestinian man named Qusai Abu-al Kebash. who told B’Tselem that settlers “zip-tied my penis. tightened it and then dragged me all around the village” in his West Bank village earlier this year.

Defenders of Israeli conduct. the source material notes. have tried to frame such incidents as aberrations caused by events after October 7. Jonathan Conricus. a former Israeli military spokesperson now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. was quoted responding to an incident captured on video in which Israeli soldiers appear to beat and brutally sodomize a Palestinian prisoner with a knife. Conricus attributed the conduct to “reservists without the right training” who “were called up to be prison guards. ” while rejecting claims of systematic abuse.

All charges were dropped against the soldiers accused of sexually assaulting the detainee, according to the source material. Numerous Israeli lawmakers condemned the military for attempting to charge the soldiers, including far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The Palestinian Feminist Collective report. as reflected in the source material. rejects explanations that focus only on individual misconduct or whether perpetrators acted on direct orders. Legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat said. in a quote included in the source material. that “The Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven until Israeli perpetrators record themselves.” She added that the debate still turns on whether individual soldiers received direct orders rather than how a state has sanctioned. protected. and repeated the violence across decades.

In a statement shared with the Intercept. Loubna Qutami. a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. said the report names what Palestinians have long known and what the world has “too often refused to hear”: that Israel’s sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians is systemic. historical. and constitutive of Israeli colonial rule.

A further quote in the source material comes from Israeli attorney Igal Dotan. who is cited in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report as saying the situation before the war was very bad but “it is not comparable to what happened in Israeli prisons after October 7.” Dotan’s clients. the source material says. include a “severely disabled” 14-year-old Palestinian boy diagnosed with autism. who the report says was “reportedly sexually. physically. and psychologically assaulted while in detention.”.

The report’s account of how far back the pattern goes does not begin with October 7, 2023. It traces sexual and gendered violence through oral histories. declassified archives. and historical documents dating back to the Nakba in 1948. when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from what are now internationally recognized borders of Israel.

In that telling, the long history of systematic displacement and dehumanization is interwoven with sexualized violence, described as common in oppressive, militarized violence and population control.

Erakat, quoted in the source material, said, “Sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule,” and argued that accountability must reach beyond “a handful of soldiers” to dismantle the legal, military, and political structures that “command and then protect these crimes.”

At the United Nations, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. said in a statement that the report was a call for responsible citizens “not just to end genocide. but to fight once and for all this testosteronic model of power that roots and grows through subjugation and repression.”.

For many of the people who say they survived these acts. the fight now is not only against violence. but against the skepticism they say has followed them for years. The Palestinian Feminist Collective report frames the issue as a question of what counts as evidence—and who is allowed to deny it. Its central claim is that what survivors describe in Israeli detention is not new, and not occasional.

It has, the report argues, been happening for decades.

Palestinian Feminist Collective Sde Teiman sexual violence detention UN blacklist Gaza West Bank trained dogs human rights Noura Erakat Loubna Qutami