GAZA — Recently released Palestinian detainees who were abducted from the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces have described an “organised and systematic practice of sexual torture,” including rape and sexual assault with objects and dogs, as well as deliberate psychological humiliation, part of a growing series of reports of sexual abuse in Israeli prisons.
In a new report by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) depending on testimonies from a number of Palestinian detainees from Gaza who were abducted by Israeli forces during the genocide in Gaza and recently released from Israeli prisons and detention camps, the accounts reveal an “organized and systematic practice of sexual torture.”
This include 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 has affirmed that the “harrowing” 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 people.”
The PCHR noted that the arrests, including women, 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.”
N.A., a 42-year-old Palestinian woman, was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint in northern Gaza in November 2024. She reported to the PCHR that she was repeatedly raped, beaten, electrocuted, verbally abused, stripped, and filmed by Israeli soldiers during her detention. She remained in these conditions for several days before being moved to another room.
“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,” she said, adding “I wished for death every moment.”
These accounts confirm long-reported and well-documented incidents of sexual abuse and rape by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian detainees. — QNN
