Israel’s Institutional Machinery of Humiliation

Israel’s Institutional Machinery of Humiliation

Sexual Abuse and Torture

21WIRE

In the weeks following their release from Israeli prisons and military camps, dozens of Palestinian detainees have begun to speak haltingly and painfully about what happened to them behind locked doors. Their voices, gathered by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), form a devastating mosaic of suffering: rape, sexual torture, forced nudity, dogs set upon naked bodies, humiliation broadcast for amusement. These are not isolated acts of cruelty but, as the testimonies suggest, elements of an organised system of degradation.

The stories have a haunting sameness. Detainees recount being stripped and beaten in front of others, genitals burned with electric batons, and women threatened with rape to extract confessions. Many describe the deliberate use of sexual violence to break their sense of self, to erase dignity as thoroughly as physical freedom. “They made us believe we were no longer human,” one survivor told PCHR investigators.

Such accounts echo warnings from United Nations officials and independent experts for months. In July 2024, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that Palestinian detainees, men and women alike, were being held “arbitrarily and secretly,” subjected to “torture and mistreatment, including sexual abuse.”

The UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory went further. Its March 2025 report concluded that “the frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory” point to the use of sexual violence as a deliberate method of war, a tool to humiliate, dominate, and destroy the Palestinian people.

Human rights organisations have reached similar conclusions. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has gathered over 100 testimonies of detainees describing forced nudity, electrocution of genitals, sexualised threats, and the release of attack dogs during interrogations. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have long documented comparable practices in Israeli detention facilities, including torture, sexual humiliation, and threats of rape, particularly against Palestinian minors and women.

Taken together, these findings outline a grim and coherent picture: the use of sexual violence as a weapon of domination and control.

DOCUMENT: Report from the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner for the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the Detention context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza (Source: OHCHR)  >>>CLICK HERE TO VIEW

The Law: What Should Never Be Permitted

International law could not be clearer. Sexual abuse, rape, and torture are absolutely prohibited, in war and in peace, against all persons, without exception.

The Convention against Torture (CAT), to which Israel is a party, defines torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted for purposes such as intimidation or coercion. Sexual violence by state agents squarely meets that definition. Under Article 2 of CAT, no “exceptional circumstances whatsoever”, not war, not security, not orders from superiors, may be invoked to justify it.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols extend that prohibition to armed conflict. Common Article 3 forbids “violence to life and person” and “outrages upon personal dignity,” explicitly including rape and sexual assault. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits torture and “any other form of cruel or degrading treatment,” while Additional Protocol I (Article 75) and Protocol II (Article 4) reinforce these prohibitions for both international and internal conflicts.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) codifies rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and other forms of sexual violence as both war crimes and crimes against humanity when committed systematically or on a large scale. Under customary international law, such acts are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that any state may prosecute them, regardless of where they occurred.

Together, these legal frameworks establish a universal truth: sexual torture and rape in detention are not disciplinary tools, not unfortunate side effects of war; they are crimes.

The Context: Impunity and Silence

Despite the clarity of the law, survivors’ voices are rarely heard. Israel’s military detention system operates largely beyond the reach of independent monitors. Since October 2023, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been denied full access to several detention sites, leaving detainees invisible to outside scrutiny. Many are held without charge under “administrative detention,” often incommunicado, without access to lawyers or family. This secrecy breeds impunity.

As the PCHR report we are featuring today shows, the result is a cycle of violation and denial. Victims who attempt to report abuse are threatened or silenced; officials dismiss allegations as “enemy propaganda.” Yet each new testimony strengthens the pattern: identical methods, similar sites, and often the same interrogators. What emerges is not chaos but choreography, an institutional machinery of humiliation.

The Imperative: Accountability and Dignity

The PCHR’s new report does not merely collect stories; it demands response. The survivors’ accounts constitute evidence, evidence of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, possibly rising to the level of crimes against humanity.

Accountability must begin with an investigation: independent, transparent, and insulated from military command. Survivors must receive medical, psychological, and legal support, and international bodies must insist on access to detention sites. Most importantly, the world must listen, not out of pity, but out of obligation.

Sexual violence in detention is designed to silence. By documenting it, this report refuses that silence. It insists that the victims’ words, their bodies, and their memories matter. It reaffirms what international law was built to protect: the inviolable dignity of the human being.

IMAGE: Members of an Israeli Prison Service response unit stand over Palestinian detainees at a prison in southern Israel. February 14, 2024. (Source: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports…

PCHR Documents Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Detention against Released Palestinian Detainees

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documents one of the most heinous crimes that can be committed against human beings and their dignity in the modern era. In recent weeks, PCHR staff collected new testimonies from a number of Palestinian detainees from the Gaza Strip who were recently released from Israeli prisons and detention camps.

These accounts reveal an organized and systematic practice of sexual torture, including rape, forced stripping, forced filming, sexual assault using objects and dogs, in addition to deliberate psychological humiliation aimed at crushing human dignity and erasing individual identity entirely. PCHR affirms that the 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, including thousands of detainees held in prisons and military camps closed to international monitoring bodies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Testimonies documented by PCHR’s lawyers and field researchers contain harrowing testimonies relating to cases of rape perpetrated by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) against Palestinian civilians, including women, who were arrested from different areas across the Gaza Strip over the past two years. These testimonies indicate that arrests were carried out without any legal justification other than the victims being residents of the Gaza Strip, as part of a policy of collective punishment designed to humiliate Palestinians and inflict maximum psychological and physical harm on them. These practices are part and parcel of the ongoing crime of genocide against the Palestinian people in the Strip.

Among these cases is N.A., a 42-year-old Palestinian woman and mother who was arrested while passing through an Israeli checkpoint set up in northern Gaza in November 2024. In her statement to PCHR staff, N.A. recounted multiple forms of torture and sexual violence, including being raped four times by Israeli soldiers, repeatedly subjected to obscene insults, stripped and filmed naked, electrocuted, and beaten across her body. She told PCHR’s lawyer:

“At dawn, I heard the soldiers shouting, saying that morning prayers were forbidden, and I think it was the fourth day after my arrest from Gaza. 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, my face on the bed, my feet on the floor, and I was completely naked.”

Again, after an hour, I was raped fully in the same position, with penetration into my vagina, and I was beaten while I screamed. There were several soldiers; I heard them laughing and the camera clicking as it took pictures. This rape was very quick and there was no ejaculation. During the rape they beat me with their hands on my head and back.

I cannot describe what I felt; I wished for death every moment. After they raped me, I was left alone in the same room, hands still cuffed to the bed and without clothes for many hours. I could hear the soldiers outside speaking Hebrew and laughing. Later, I was raped again vaginally. I screamed, but they beat me whenever I tried to resist. After more than an hour, I’m not sure about the time, a masked soldier entered, removed my blindfold, lifted his face covering; he had white skin and was tall. He asked if I spoke English; I said no. He said he was Russian and ordered me to masturbate his penis. I refused, and he hit me in the face after raping me.

That day, I was raped twice. I was left naked the whole day in the room where I spent three days. 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. 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.”

In another incident, A.A., a 35-year-old Palestinian man and father, was arrested while at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in March 2024. He told  PCHR’s field researcher about the brutal torture he endured during 19 months of detention, including forced stripping, obscene insults, threats of rape against him and his family, culminating in his rape by a trained dog inside the Sde Teiman military camp. He stated:

“I was moved to a section I didn’t know inside Sde Teiman. During the first weeks there, amid repeated suppression operations, I was taken with a group of detainees in a degrading manner to a place far from the cameras—a passage between sections. We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me. Then one of the dogs raped me—the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces. The dog’s assault lasted about three minutes; the overall suppression lasted about three hours. Because of the severe beating, all of us sustained injuries across our bodies. I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation; I lost control because I could never have imagined experiencing such a thing. 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.”

T.Q., a 41-year-old Palestinian man and father, was arrested while displaced at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023. He was subjected to sexual torture during 22 months in Israeli detention, including obscene insults, threats to bring his wife to the detention site to rape her, and rape with a wooden object. In his testimony to a PCHR researcher about the rape incident, he said:

“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. I felt blood flowing from my anus and asked to go to the bathroom. She gave me tissues and I went to a plastic toilet there. They removed the blindfold; when I wiped my anus there was blood. After I finished and the bleeding stopped, I put the white overall back on. As soon as I came out, they blindfolded me again and tied my hands behind my back with plastic ties. I was then moved to a room where I was held with several detainees for about eight hours, during which soldiers periodically returned to beat and insult us brutally.”

PCHR also documented the testimony of M.A., 18 years old, who was re-arrested this year near a humanitarian aid distribution point run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the Gaza Strip, after having previously been arrested and released. He told PCHR’s field researcher that he was sexually assaulted when soldiers raped him with a bottle forcibly inserted into his anus, a practice repeated against him and other Palestinian detainees. 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. I saw what they were doing to the others while they did it to me, and I realized it was a bottle. There was also a dog behind us, as if the dog was raping us. 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.”

PCHR notes that in May 2025 it issued a detailed report, based on the testimonies of 100 released detainees, on the brutal methods of torture, degrading treatment, and inhumane detention conditions faced by detainees inside Israeli prisons and detention camps. The report concluded that the treatment inflicted by IOF, intelligence services, and Israel Prison Service employees not only meets the elements of torture under international law, but also rises to the level of genocide, specifically the following genocidal acts: (1) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; and (2) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

DOCUMENT: May 2025 report from The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) – Torture and Genocide: The Shattered Futures of Former Palestinian Detainees in Gaza (Source: PCHR)  >>>CLICK TO VIEW DOC

In light of these grave crimes against Palestinian detainees, PCHR calls on the international community, including States Parties to the UN Convention against Torture and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the UN Secretary-General, the UN Special Procedures, and all relevant human rights and humanitarian institutions, to take immediate action to end the systematic policy of torture and enforced disappearance against Palestinian detainees. PCHR urges concrete measures to pressure Israel to release all Palestinians arbitrarily detained, to disclose the fate and whereabouts of all forcibly disappeared persons, and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross immediate and unrestricted access to all detention facilities.

Continue reading the PCHR report here…

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