Content warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of cases of extreme sexualised torture, which can be highly disturbing for many people.
After the onset of Israel’s war against the civilian population in Gaza in October 2023, reports of severe torture and mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners and hostages by Israeli soldiers have increased. These include a plethora of allegations of often extreme sexualised violence that is “systematically” used as a method of torture (UN, B’Tselem). These reports shed a shocking light on the conditions in Israeli detention centres, with the infamous Sde Teiman Prison—”Israel’s Guantanamo”—taking centre stage.
The guards moved Amer Abu Halil and several fellow prisoners to another wing. As always, they had to leave their cells with their hands tied behind their backs and in a bent-over position. In the kitchen, the guards took off their clothes and threw them on top of each other: “a pile of 10 naked prisoners”. There they were beaten with clubs and spat on. One guard began ramming carrots into the men’s anuses and raping them. After the ordeal, dogs were let loose on the prisoners. Dogs also repeatedly urinated on the prisoners’ mattresses in the completely overcrowded cells.
Abu Halil has a broken vertebra in his back and can only walk with the help of a walking stick after an attack in prison. His medical report also notes dilated veins in his testicles. Guards hit the prisoners’ genitals with metal detectors. The 30-year-old tells of another day when guards beat up a group of naked inmates, repeatedly kicking them in the testicles. Over a period of 25 minutes. Abu Halil also describes the anal rape of another inmate, which he witnessed, with “an iron baton as thin as a cigarette”.
Amer Abu Halil gave testimony to Haaretz and Le Monde about the ordeal he suffered in Israeli captivity after 7 October.
“Welcome to hell”
A UN commission report published in March made serious accusations against the Israeli state: since 7 October 2023, Israel had “systematically used sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence … intended to retaliate and punish them [the Palestinians] for the attacks [of 7 October]”. The commission speaks of “a pattern of sexual violence” to “humiliate and degrade Palestinians in detention”, including men, women and children. Sexualized assaults are used as a means of oppressing and controlling the Palestinian population. The experts see these crimes as possible evidence of genocide, as they are “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group”. According to Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission, “There is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.” Israel categorically rejects all accusations with the familiar strategies, because according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the UN is an “anti-Semitic organisation” anyway.
This latest UN report is preceded by others that accuse the IDF of the systematic use of sexualised violence as a method of torture. Back in August 2024, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem published the report “Welcome to Hell” on the “Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps”. Based on interviews with 55 Palestinian prisoners and hostages, the NGO documents the most serious abuse and torture, including “repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity” and “gang sexual violence”. The testimonies “uncover a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners”.
Here too, the Israeli authorities categorically denied everything: “We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility,” Reuters quoted a spokesperson for the Israel Prison Service (IPS) as saying. All prisoners are treated in accordance with the law and all their basic rights are fully respected by professionally trained guards, the spokesperson continued, adding that prisoners also had the right to file complaints that would be fully examined and investigated.
Since the beginning of the war, 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons, according to two Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups cited by Anadolu. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission attributes the deaths mostly to starvation and torture. However, there are also multiple allegations of prisoners being “likely raped to death,” including a case raised by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese involving the well-known orthopaedic surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh.
Clubs, metal rods, fire extinguishers, tools, assault rifles, dogs
There are numerous reports according to which, in addition to the carrots and metal batons mentioned at the beginning, Israeli soldiers in torture prisons like the Sde Teiman camp sodomised Palestinian prisoners and hostages with a wide variety of objects.
Israeli +972 Magazine interviewed lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, who testified about a visit to a client in Sde Teiman—the journalist Muhammad Arab, who was abducted by the IDF in March 2024 while reporting on the siege of Al-Shifa Hospital for Al Araby TV. Arab was unrecognisable after 100 days in custody, according to his lawyer; he was covered in dirt and pigeon droppings. The hostages’ hands were cuffed behind their backs around the clock with metal handcuffs, which were removed once a week for a minute-long shower. Arab testified how Israeli guards raped six prisoners with a stick in front of the other prisoners after they had violated the guards’ orders. According to a statement from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission, journalist Arab also testified that one detainee “had a fire extinguisher hose inserted into his rectum, and the extinguisher was discharged inside him”. Other methods of sexual abuse are “difficult to describe”.
Paramedic Walid Khalili told Human Rights Watch (HRW) about sexualised torture in the al-Naqab camp, in addition to other extreme forms of physical and psychological torture he had been subjected to in Sde Teiman, and the executions he had witnessed. There, a man who was visibly “bleeding from his bottom” was placed next to Khalili by Israeli soldiers. The man confided in Khalili and told him that “three soldiers took turns raping him with an M16 [assault rifle]“. Out of shame, the man did not tell anyone else about his ordeal, but he apparently placed a special trust in Khalili as a medic. “He was terrified. His mental health was awful, he started talking to himself,” Khalili told HRW.
Palestinian Ibrahim Salem was abducted by Israeli forces from the intensive care unit of Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza in December 2023 and taken to Sde Teiman. He was released after almost eight months without charge. Published by CNN, the photo of the 36-year-old went around the world—it was one of the first ever to be leaked from the torture prison (the cover picture of this article [see here]). Salem told Middle East Eye about months of humiliation, sadistic soldiers and constant torture, including various forms of sexualised torture: “He [a soldier] electrocuted me in sensitive spots and hit me in these spots.” Various objects were rammed into his rectum. When the thick iron baton “is inserted inside you, it feels like your brain is exploding“, he describes the torture to the British Channel 4 News.
He reports the “rampant” rape of Palestinian hostages; the shame among the men was particularly great when they were raped by “female soldiers, who were sometimes in their teens”. One prisoner was bent over a table and handcuffed. The female soldier behind him “would insert her fingers and other objects into his rectum.” If he flinched, the soldier in front of him would hit him on the skull. “Most of the prisoners will come out with rectum injuries,” Salem testified to Middle East Eye. The human rights NGO Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor also reported, based on witness testimonies about “placing sharp objects in the victim’s buttocks“.
Several witnesses told B’Tselem about “blows to the genitals and other body parts of naked prisoners”, according to the aforementioned report. “Metal tools and batons” were used “to cause genital pain”. A former Palestinian hostage told the British Channel 4: “When the female soldier grabbed me by the balls and penis, she injured me with her nails, digging them into my penis. I started screaming and biting the wire like a dog.” According to a statement by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission, journalist Muhammad Arab told his lawyer that “another detainee was completely stripped and electrocuted, his genitals were yanked“. Shortly after the war began, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on the testimonies of several witnesses from Megiddo Prison in northern Israel. Among many other abuses, guards there had been “hitting their testicles, and humiliating prisoners”. “They tell people to spread their legs and then kick them between the legs,” Haaretz quotes 41-year-old Israeli prisoner Ahmed Khalifa.
In June last year, the New York Times uncovered extremely disturbing events at Sde Teiman. In November 2023, 39-year-old senior nurse Younis al-Hamlawi was abducted by Israeli forces outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and taken to the torture prison. Al-Hamlawi was repeatedly tortured during interrogation with electric shocks that caused uncontrolled urination, followed by an inability to urinate at all for several days. He described an incident in which an officer ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum onto a metal bar attached to the floor. He experienced “unbearable pain” and bled from his anus. A 41-year-old Palestinian described variations of this ordeal to the UN. He too was rammed with his anus on a metal rod attached to the ground, but it was extremely hot: “it felt like fire – I have burns [in the anus]“. Another Palestinian abductee was reportedly killed by soldiers ramming an electric metal rod into his anus. “He got so sick; we saw worms coming out of his body and then he died.”
A Palestinian prisoner told the Israeli +972 Magazine that he had personally witnessed cases of Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting prisoners with dogs. Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor quotes Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr, a lawyer who was detained for 45 days, as saying that police dogs were used to rape Palestinians in Israeli captivity. “This was among the most awful things that I witnessed,” says Bakr, “this was just one more [incident] added to the heap of torments. I was hoping to die so that this would not happen to me.” 45-year-old Palestinian Adham Mansour from Jabalia also “revealed shocking details about the conditions and suffering of prisoners in Israeli jails”, according to the Israeli-Arab magazine Arab 48: “There are prisoners who were raped by dogs.”
In an Al Jazeera documentary, a young man had his say and had to testify to something almost unbearable:
Let me tell you about the worst thing I experienced at Sde Teiman prison. They called the names of three people, and I was one of them. We came out into a cement courtyard, dedicated to one form of torture. They removed our blindfolds. We were crouching on our knees. They came and took one of the other men. They beat him. After they beat him, they forced him to the ground on his belly. They tied his hands and tied his feet. There were about eight or nine soldiers. They stripped him of his underpants. A captain came and sprayed something on his backside. There was a dog there. They unleashed the dog on him. The dog raped the young man. It raped him, literally speaking. Rape.
A video circles the globe
In the summer of 2024, a case from the Sde Teiman torture prison caused an international outrage. As video footage of the alleged crimes was leaked, this one case could not be swept under the carpet as usual. The Israeli Channel 12 published footage from a surveillance camera showing several soldiers in Sde Teiman taking one of around 30 prisoners lying on the ground to one side. He is then apparently raped while other soldiers try to conceal the violence from the cameras with their shields. As a result of the ordeal, the prisoner suffered “a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs“, according to information obtained by Haaretz. The Palestinian was taken to the hospital for treatment.
The video circled the globe. On 29 July 2024, masked officers from the Israeli military police entered Sde Teiman and arrested nine reservists who were allegedly involved in the crime, Haaretz reported. Right-wing and fascist politicians and activists then called for protests and blockades. Dozens of demonstrators—including Knesset members of the ruling coalition such as Zvi Sukkot (Religious Zionist Party) and Nissim Vaturi (Likud)—broke through the fence and stormed the base. Masked men chanted: “We will not abandon our friends, certainly not for terrorists.” Soldiers barricaded themselves inside the detention centre. When the military police arrived to arrest the suspects, violent clashes broke out and some soldiers inside used pepper spray against their colleagues.
After their arrest, the suspects were taken to the Motta Gur military base in Beit Lid for interrogation, and there too right-wing extremist demonstrators gathered, some 1,200 in number, chanting “Release the warriors“. At the protest, Revital Gotliv of Netanyahu’s Likud party took on the role of mob inciter. Several people broke into the base, some in IDF uniform, some armed. They first broke into the military court and laid siege to the base’s prison. The police dispersed the mob, but no one was arrested. The following day, a special session was held in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, in which the manner of the initial arrests was sharply criticised and assurances were given that this would not happen again. “Our soldiers are not criminals and this contemptible pursuit of our soldiers is unacceptable to me,” said committee chairman Yuli Edelstein (Likud).
Three of the detainees were released shortly afterwards, Times of Israel reported. Five others were at first placed under house arrest. Prof Yoel Donchin, a doctor in Sde Teiman who had examined the Palestinian prisoner, was shocked by the man’s condition: he “couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing”, according to Haaretz. “If the state and Knesset members think there’s no limit to how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the Nazis did, or close the hospitals,” Donchin continued. According to a medical report published by Channel 14, the pro-government surgeon Alon Pikarsky came to the strange conclusion that the “foreign body” was not inserted “by any external party”, but that the man had raped himself.
On 19 February, the military prosecutor’s office filed charges against the five military police soldiers, Times of Israel reported: a team commander, a security guard, an interpreter and two other members of “Force 100”, two of them officers. The three soldiers who covered the others with their shields and the two who secured the area were not charged. The indictment reads: “For 15 minutes, the accused kicked the detainee, stomped on him, stood on his body, hit him and pushed him all over his body, including with clubs, dragged his body along the ground, and used a taser gun on him, including on his head.” Then, the blindfold came off the detainee, and one of the soldiers “stabbed the detainee in his buttock with a sharp object”. The man had screamed in pain during the attack. The soldiers took the prisoner back to the others after the torture. It was not until an hour later that he was taken to the hospital because of the heavy bleeding from his anus. While the military prosecutors accused the soldiers, among others, of “aggravated sodomy” (equivalent to rape) in court on 22 August last year, this accusation is not included in the indictment. “IDF troops and commanders act in accordance with the law and IDF values,” reads a military statement on the indictment.
During a hearing on the case in early July, the head of the military court at Beit Lid, Judge Meir Vigiser, repeatedly urged both sides to strike a plea deal for the five accused in order to avoid a full trial, Haaretz reported. The prosecution has expressed willingness to consider mediation.
From perpetrator to national hero
In addition to the protests protecting the alleged perpetrators, the publication of the Sde Teiman video also triggered a wave of solidarity on the political right. In September 2024, a video was released showing the extreme right-wing Rabbi Meir Mazuz blessing one of the suspected soldiers, saying he was “completely innocent”, following whichthere was a heated exchange of words in the Knesset. When asked by Ahmad Tibi, chairman of the Arab Ta’al party and a trained doctor, “To insert a stick into the rectum … Is it legitimate?”, MP Hanoch Milwidsky (Likud) shouted at Tibi: “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas special forces unit], everything is legitimate to do to him! Everything! Everything!”
Some ministers also backed the suspected soldiers in reaction to the arrests. Justice Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Yariv Levin (Likud) said he was “shocked to see harsh pictures of soldiers being arrested”, and that it was “impossible to accept this”. The extreme right-wing Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir (Religious Zionist Party), described the arrest of the soldiers as “nothing less than shameful. […] Soldiers need to have our full support.” Ben-Gvir also stated that: “Gang rape is permissible for the security of the state.” Economics Minister Nir Barkat (Likud) also made his position clear: “I support our fighters and call on the defense minister to immediately put a stop to the despicable show trial against them.” Transport Minister Miriam Regev (Likud) warned that the arrests of Israeli soldiers in the war were “a dangerous step”, and urged the military judges to “focus on protecting our soldiers, not appeasing our enemies”. MP Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit) went further, accusing the military’s attorney general, who had ordered the arrests, of being a “criminal“.
One of the alleged perpetrators was invited to Israel’s Channel 14 shortly after the chaotic scenes outside the Sde Teiman to defend his “Force 100”, wearing a balaclava to disguise himself. He was cheered and said that the IDF was “a very healthy army“. To applause, he portrayed himself and his unit as the real victims. A few days later, the man revealed his identity in an online video: Meir Ben-Shitrit. This was followed by further interviews and appearances, now unmasked, including on the satirical show “Fathi and Shai”, where he was celebrated as a national hero. Ben-Shitrit defamed Guy Peleg, the Channel 12 journalist who originally published the surveillance camera footage from Sde Teiman, saying that he had “split the nation”. In the scene shown in the video, the soldiers acted according to standard procedure, he claimed. They did not rape the man, but only searched him and “kept a very, very high level of morality”. The shields held up were merely intended to prevent other inmates from seeing how such a search was carried out—because: “They peek.”
Hosts and soldiers are mutually exalting each other in their glorification and fantasies of violence. The whole nation should “kiss our hands”, says the Sde Teiman soldier, as they are doing “holy work“. He continues: “We could have just cocked our weapons and killed them all on the floor, from the nature of things, because you want to kill that person with a machete.” The soldier lamented that the state had betrayed him, which was “very offensive”. The media had also treated him unfairly. The people in Israel were different: “A lot of love and warmth” he received from people in the streets after coming out; “many hugs, a lot of love, we get many gifts, I got a holiday package”. A link to fundraising for the “Force 100” is shown. The show ends with a handshake: “Meir Ben-Shitrit, a hero! A hero of Force 100! Success to you!”
One of the main suspects in the only investigation into a large number of serious allegations of sexualised torture against Palestinians is celebrated as a hero on Israeli television.
Women and girls as targets
The case made public by the video leak was the first and only time after 7 October 2023 that Israeli soldiers were prosecuted for sexual crimes allegedly committed in Israeli detention facilities (as reported), although extreme allegations of sexualised torture were widely made. Sde Teiman was quickly nicknamed “Israel’s Guantanamo”—which, from what we know, is a clear understatement. Guy Shalev, director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, told CNN that he was aware of at least ten cases of Palestinians being sexually abused in this prison alone. The number of unreported cases is probably much higher. When asked why soldiers were arrested in this particular case, Shalev replied:
This got out. This person was hospitalised in a civilian hospital where doctors and nurses, and other staff members could see what happened to the person while he was incarcerated in Sde Teiman. So, the information leaked out. And I don’t think the military or other apparatuses in Israel were able to keep it silent anymore.
And yet officials refer positively to this arrest to show that the system is supposedly working: A military spokesperson stated that the Israeli military “rejects allegations of systemic abuse, including sexual abuse, in its detention facilities” and abides by Israeli and international law. The military pointed to the arrest of the soldiers suspected in Sde Teiman as proof of the functioning of the Israeli rule of law.
In addition to all the documented cases of physical violence, cases of psychological sexualised violence against Palestinian prisoners and hostages were also documented. For example, Palestinian detainees were forced to insult their mothers and sisters obscenely. Others were threatened that their female family members in Gaza would be raped.
There are also numerous allegations of rape and sexualised violence against Palestinian women. Several UN Special Rapporteurs stated in February 2024 that there was evidence of at least two cases of rape in Israeli captivity, as well as other cases of sexualized humiliation and threats of rape. Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said that the true extent of sexual violence could be much higher. Women were also stripped naked and examined by male soldiers. In other cases, women were photographed in degrading conditions, and the photos were then posted on the internet.
And also in the occupied West Bank, “Israeli forces committed acts of sexual violence” against Palestinians, the UN stated in a June 2024 report. “Palestinian women were targeted and subjected to sexual violence and harassment online and in person,” Navi Pillay, the author of the report, told the UN Human Rights Council. Public sexualised humiliation “intended to humiliate the community at large and accentuate the subordination of an occupied people”.
Protection of perpetrators
In addition to the categorical denial of all allegations of sexualised torture, the Israeli government is also actively taking action against the prosecution of alleged perpetrators. Most prominent is the Israeli blockade of a UN investigation into sexualised violence by Hamas during the 7 October 2023 attack of January 2025. As this would also require an examination of allegations of sexualised violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians, and for Pramila Patten—the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict—to be granted access to Israeli detention facilities, Israel refused this investigation.
In addition, the Israeli state creates conditions of comprehensive impunity for itself internally. For example, at the end of November 2024, Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara decided not to initiate criminal investigations against high-ranking officials who had publicly called for extreme violence against people in Gaza or made inflammatory statements—i.e. those relevant to the genocide proceedings at the International Criminal Court—explicitly mentioning, among other things, the remark by the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Amihai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit), who brought up the dropping of an atomic bomb on Gaza. In the same month, the Knesset’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation advanced a bill that would extend legal immunity of Knesset members and would de facto “put MKs above the law“, the Committee’s legal adviser Arbel Esterhan warned. The bill has since passed through further parliamentary hurdles.
In January this year, Israeli State Attorney Amit Isman dropped the investigation into five soldiers suspected of raping and killing a handcuffed Palestinian after 7 October 2023—despite video footage, the victim’s body being found in a suspect’s vehicle, and confessions. One reportedly shows how one of the five soldiers stabbed the Palestinian in the face with a knife, killing him. Another confessed that he had tortured the man in a sexualised manner. The five alleged murderers are free men.
Sexualised violence is deeply rooted in the everyday practice of the Israeli armed forces. In addition to the comprehensive dehumanisation of Palestinians, this is based on the knowledge of absolute impunity, protection by the courts and encouragement from politicians. The systematic nature of the mounting accusations leads to the conclusion that Israel is using rape as a weapon of war against the civilian population in Palestine.
This article was originally published in German on etos.media and translated by Jakob Reimann.
Jakob is an independent journalist focused on international politics—primarily in the WANA region—and serves as the foreign affairs editor of the online magazine etos.media.
