Palestinian testimonies reveal how sexual violence, including rape using objects and dogs, is approved by ‘highest levels’ of Israeli leadership
Soldiers lock a gate at Sde Teiman detention facility after Israeli military police arrived as part of an investigation into the suspected abuse of a Palestinian detainee on 29 July 2025 (Reuters)
Published date: 11 April 2026 11:53 BST | Last update:1 day 21 hours ago
Sexual torture of Palestinian detainees from Gaza in Israeli prisons is an “organised state policy”, endorsed by the “highest, political, military, and judicial authorities”, a new report has revealed.
The report, seen exclusively by Middle East Eye, is based on testimonies from Palestinian former prisoners gathered by the rights watchdog Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
It reveals how the scope of sexual violence of Palestinian prisoners, including rape using objects and trained military dogs, constitutes an “organised state policy”, aided and abetted by Israeli institutions and leadership.
One former detainee, a 42-year-old woman from north Gaza who was held in the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre, said she was bound naked to a metal table and repeatedly raped by two masked soldiers over the course of two days.
She recalled that she was left shackled, naked and bleeding throughout the night before the soldiers returned the next day to continue raping her.
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She said she wished for death and likened her experience to “another genocide behind walls”.
Throughout her ordeal, she was filmed. Soldiers later showed her the footage while she was hung by her wrists under interrogation, threatening to publish the videos if she did not “cooperate”.
Amir, a 35-year-old Palestinian man also held at Sde Teiman, recounted how soldiers forced him to strip naked, before their dogs urinated on him and raped him.
He described how the dog “penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten”.
“This continued for several minutes. I felt profoundly humiliated and violated.”
Khaled Mahajna, an attorney with the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, described how a soldier in Sde Teiman inserted a fire extinguisher nozzle into a Palestinian prisoner’s anus and then discharged its contents into his body, resulting in severe internal injuries and intense pain.
‘Etched into their memory’
Another former prisoner, 43-year-old Wajdi, recounted being shackled to a metal bed and repeatedly raped by soldiers and a trained dog.
“I felt severe pain in my anus and screamed, but every time I screamed, I was beaten. This continued for several minutes, while soldiers filmed and mocked me, Wajdi said.
“The soldier left after ejaculating inside me. I was left in a humiliating position. I wished for death. I was bleeding.”
He said he was then untied and raped by the dog. Later, another soldier forced his penis into the victim’s mouth and urinated on him. Over the following days, the abuse continued, with repeated rapes carried out by multiple soldiers.
“This case is particularly devastating because it reflects an accumulation of almost every form of torture, physical, psychological, and moral, layered with systematic humiliation,” Khaled Ahmed, a Euro-Med field researcher, told MEE.
“It also includes the deliberate use of multiple perpetrators and trained dogs as instruments of sexual violence. The result is not a single act of abuse, but an extended pattern of cruelty designed to destroy dignity, bodily integrity, and any sense of safety. These are acts that defy comprehension.”
Victims said the attacks were filmed and often conducted in “well-equipped institutional logistical settings… intentionally designed to enable torture and sexual violence”. The report said this evidenced the institutionalised nature of the violence.
Ahmed, who conducted some of the interviews with the victims, said the process was “by no means an easy task”.
“The soldier left after ejaculating inside me. I was left in a humiliating position. I wished for death. I was bleeding”
-Wajdi, former prisoner
“The details the survivors described and the way they relived the emotions and events were overwhelming,” Ahmed told MEE.
He described how some interviewees broke down in crying fits while recounting their stories, noting that the participants’ fear of reprisals and social stigmas around sexual abuse stopped some of them from speaking altogether.
“But what we noticed was that all of them spoke about what happened as if they were seeing it in front of them,” Ahmed told MEE.
“They remembered every detail, as though the scene had been etched into their memory and could never leave it.”
Ahmed said that most of the victims he spoke to were men, as women who experience sexual violence face a much deeper and more complex stigma in Palestinian society, “making it nearly impossible for a woman or her family to disclose that she has been assaulted”.
He noted that, while the sexual violence used against men and women is largely similar, women’s bodies in particular were used as a means to blackmail men.
“We documented several cases of sexual assault against women due to their familial ties to wanted individuals,” Ahmed said.
‘A complex crime’
Euro-Med monitor concluded that the testimonies are not isolated incidents but stand as evidence “of a policy supported by senior civilian and military leaders, either through direct orders or by tacit approval and a climate of impunity”.
It said that the scale of the abuse was made possible by legislation, military directives and emergency regulations, such as the “Unlawful Combatants Law”, which vastly expanded detention powers without judicial oversight and stripped detainees of any legal protections.
These legal mechanisms turbocharged enforced disappearances of Palestinian detainees and transformed Israeli detention centres into unaccountable “black holes” in the aftermath of 7 October 2023. Notable among them is Sde Teiman prison, where multiple reports have found torture, rape and murder to be rife, while the Red Cross and lawyers are denied access.
The report insists that responsibility for the abuse does not stop with its perpetrators; it is facilitated by the collusion of medical and legal personnel and the Israeli judicial system.
Euro-Med reported that doctors have helped to obscure incidents of torture by hiding the perpetrators’ identities, burying the victims’ injuries in medical records and issuing them “fit for interrogation” certificates.
Meanwhile, the Israeli justice system has shielded perpetrators by restricting evidence given by victims and witnesses, and reclassifying serious incidents as minor offences, resulting in the dismissal of charges.
In Israel, raping Palestinian prisoners is justified. Leaking the footage is betrayal
In March, the Israeli military announced it was dropping charges against five soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman, despite leaked CCTV footage showing soldiers surrounding the detainee as he was pinned against a wall.
The report said that these abuses breach the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as they have caused serious harm to group members and are aimed at preventing births within the group – “all within a larger objective of partially or fully destroying the Palestinian community in the Gaza Strip”.
It emphasised that responsibility for these crimes extends “beyond the direct perpetrators, encompassing leadership and institutions that shelter them”.
Numerous reports by rights groups and investigations by news sites, including MEE, have extensively documented the widespread use of sexual violence and rape of Palestinian detainees across the Israeli prison system.
A United Nations inquiry accused Israel of using sexualised torture and rape as “a method of war… to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people”.
Ahmed emphasised that the proliferation of sexual violence in Israeli prisons serves a specific purpose, “because it encompasses almost all types of torture”.
“It keeps the victim trapped in a cycle of violence, unable to escape it, even after the violence has practically stopped,” Ahmed said.
“It continues to accompany the victim throughout their life. The survivor keeps experiencing both physical and psychological pain, and in many cases feelings of shame, humiliation, self-blame, inferiority, loss of dignity, and a lack of safety.”
He noted that the trauma does not stop with the victim, but spreads to their family and community.
“Especially in a conservative society where anything related to sexual assault is seen as an attack on the dignity of the entire family. It is a complex crime that deeply impacts and fractures the very fabric of society.”
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