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Editor\u2019s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.<\/em><\/p>\n The months after<\/span> the October 7, 2023, attacks saw a wave of questionable<\/a> mainstream news stories<\/a> about alleged sexual assault in Hamas\u2019s attacks that day on Israel.<\/p>\n It would be years before the American press began to deal with sex crimes against Palestinians imprisoned by Israel as part of its brutal occupation.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a reckoning that is long overdue.<\/p>\n Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice \u2014 a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective<\/a>, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.<\/p>\n The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent, high-profile<\/a> news stories<\/a> detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of \u201ca wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies\u201d over decades.<\/p>\n The report, \u201cA Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians<\/a>,\u201d brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights<\/a>, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based B\u2019Tselem<\/a>; along with declassified Israeli archival material. (The Israeli government, military, and prison system did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n The United Nations added<\/a> Israel in May to a blacklist<\/a> 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 new Palestinian Feminist Collective report underlines that the U.N.\u2019s findings are merely the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n The compilation of harrowing details from a multiplicity of sources offers a chilling rebuke to those who have sought to discredit Palestinian victims\u2019 claims or dismiss cases of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by Israeli forces as rare aberrations.<\/p>\n Crushed testicles, genital beatings, rapes of detainees including children and the elderly \u2014 the report, like a number<\/a> of the previous human<\/a> rights reports<\/a> it draws<\/a> from, shows that such abuse is, according to the authors, \u201cinstitutional practice rather than individual misconduct.\u201d<\/p>\n A section of the report shared with The Intercept includes the detailed testimonies of multiple released Palestinian prisoners. A 42-year-old woman arrested in Gaza while going through an Israeli military checkpoint in November 2024, for example, described being stripped, blindfolded, and handcuffed to a metal table and raped vaginally and anally by Israeli soldiers.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me,\u201d the woman said, in testimony originally collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n She then recounted subsequent vaginal rapes.<\/p>\n A 41-year-old Palestinian father arrested at Kamal Adwan Hospital<\/a> in December 2023 and held for 22 months in Israeli prison reported, \u201cOne 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Other accounts from boys and men detail anal rape by soldiers and prison guards using carrots, bottles, batons, and other sharp objects.<\/p>\n The report also includes multiple accounts claiming the use of trained dogs as sexual threats and tools of direct sexual violence.<\/p>\n When the New York Times\u2019s Nicholas Kristof last month reported<\/a> on widespread and extreme sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention, including the use of trained dogs to rape detainees, the backlash from Israeli authorities and pro-Israel mouthpieces was as swift as it was predictable.<\/p>\n The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed<\/a> the article as \u201cone of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press\u201d \u2014 a typical<\/a> retort that deems any criticism of Israeli brutality to be antisemitic<\/a>. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened<\/a> to sue the Times for defamation. No such lawsuit has materialized, bound as it would be to fail and risk a court process revealing further horrors perpetrated by Israeli forces.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, for Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian liberation, Kristof\u2019s report was perhaps only surprising for its presence in the New York Times. Reports of rape, sexual violence, and sexual humiliation in Israeli custody have been widespread well established for years<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pro-Israel media outlets like Bari Weiss\u2019s The Free Press attempted to discredit and debunk the testimonies in Kristof\u2019s article, particularly those from formerly detained Palestinians who alleged that trained dogs<\/a> were used to rape prisoners. Such abuse was impossible, the critics claimed<\/a> \u2014 despite the fact that, according to survivors, Augusto Pinochet\u2019s regime<\/a> in Chile, as well as Nazi prison commander Klaus Barbie, reportedly<\/a> used dogs to rape and sexually torture prisoners.<\/p>\n The \u201cPredatory State\u201d report lists 10 specific incidents of rape or severe sexual assault involving trained dogs, as reported to human rights groups by victims themselves or firsthand witnesses.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d one detainee testified, in a report first compiled by Euro-Med and cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. \u201cAt first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey unleashed police dogs on us again, allowing them to tear into our flesh,\u201d a 48-year-old man arrested at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in further testimony cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. He reported that one dog attacked a fellow detainee and \u201cstarted mauling his genitals (penis). He bled to death in my arms.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The report authors note that \u201csexual torture has often preceded the deaths of detainees and prisoners and therefore must be considered part and parcel of the crime of genocide waged against the Palestinian people.\u201d<\/p>\n This statement covers more than just Israel\u2019s genocidal war on Gaza: The Palestinian Feminist Collective report is explicit in including accounts of sexual violence reportedly carried out by soldiers as well as settlers in the West Bank.<\/p>\n \u201cThey zip-tied my penis, tightened it and then dragged me all around the village,\u201d a Palestinian man, Qusai Abu-al Kebash, told B\u2019Tselem of a reported assault at the hands of settlers in his West Bank village earlier this year.<\/p>\n In response to credible claims of sexual assault, particularly in Israel\u2019s Sde Teiman military prison, Israel\u2019s defenders have attempted to downplay incidents as aberrations or outliers in the fog of war.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,\u201d Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesperson, now fellow at the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told<\/a> The Free Press.<\/p>\n He was responding to an incident caught on video<\/a> of Israeli soldiers appearing to beat and brutally sodomize a Palestinian prisoner with a knife. Conricus blamed \u201creservists without the right training\u201d who \u201cwere called up to be prison guards\u201d \u2014 but rejected any claims of systematic abuse.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n All charges were dropped<\/a> against the soldiers accused of sexually assaulting the detainee. Numerous Israeli lawmakers, including far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, condemned the military for even attempting to charge the soldiers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Reports like the Palestinian Feminist Collective\u2019s further give the lie to excuses like Conricus\u2019s.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven until Israeli perpetrators record themselves,\u201d legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat told The Intercept. \u201cStill the debate focuses on whether individual soldiers received direct orders, rather than how a state has sanctioned, protected, and repeated this violence across decades.\u201d<\/p>\n In a statement shared with The Intercept, Loubna Qutami, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, said, \u201cThis report names what Palestinians have long known and what the world has too often refused to hear: Israel\u2019s sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians is systemic, historical, and constitutive of Israeli colonial rule.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Igal Dotan, an Israeli attorney cited in the Palestinian Feminist Collective\u2019s report, \u201cThe situation before the war was very bad, but it is not comparable to what happened in Israeli prisons after October 7.\u201d<\/p>\n Dotan\u2019s clients include a \u201cseverely disabled\u201d 14-year-old Palestinian boy, diagnosed with autism, who was, the report notes, \u201creportedly sexually, physically, and psychologically assaulted while in detention.\u201d<\/p>\nRape by Trained Dogs<\/h2>\n
\u201cViolence Across Decades\u201d<\/h2>\n
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