Rights and Accountability 13 November 2025
Survivors of Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp and other detention sites have described horrific sexual attacks and rapes by their Israeli captors.
ZUMA PressContent warning: This article contains explicit accounts of extreme torture and sexual violence.
Palestinians from Gaza, recently released from Israeli detention, have given harrowing descriptions of sexual torture by their Israeli captors.
Victims described rapes by groups of soldiers, forced stripping, forced filming and sexual assaults and rapes using objects and dogs.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which collected the testimonies in recent weeks, said they reflect a systematic policy as part of Israel’s genocide, rather than isolated incidents.
Thousands of Palestinians are still in detention camps and prisons to which international monitors, including the Red Cross, have no access.
PCHR warns that detainees face the risk of death and coerced confessions extracted through torture – especially as Israel is advancing plans to impose the death penalty on Palestinian detainees.
These detainees were arrested solely for 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,” PCHR said.
PCHR published harrowing, detailed testimonies of four victims, referred to by initials.
N.A, a 42-year-old mother detained while passing through an Israeli checkpoint in northern Gaza, recounted being the victim of brutal sexual torture and violence, including being raped by multiple Israeli soldiers four times and repeatedly being beaten, electrocuted, insulted, stripped naked and filmed.
She recalled being taken about four days after her arrest and tied to a metal table naked and face down for three days as Israeli soldiers repeatedly raped her anally and vaginally.
“After they raped me, I was left alone in the same room, hands still cuffed to the bed and without clothes for many hours,” she recalled of one incident.
“I could hear the soldiers outside speaking Hebrew and laughing.”
She told PCHR that she heard the sound of the camera clicking, and was told her photos would be posted on social media.
A.A., a 35-year-old Palestinian father detained from Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital for 19 months, described extreme torture, including being raped by a trained dog at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp.
“One of the dogs raped me – the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing,” he told PCHR.
A.A. described the psychological terror he experienced, as well as severe physical injuries, including a head injury that a doctor stitched without any anesthesia.
T.O., a 41-year-old Palestinian father, detained from Kamal Adwan Hospital for 22 months, was subjected to sexual torture including rape with a wooden object and threats by his captors that they would bring his wife to the detention site and rape her as well.
“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,” he recounted.
“After another minute he removed it and forced me to open my mouth and put the stick in my mouth to lick it.”
After the attack, T.O. described bleeding from his anus. Restrained with a blindfold and plastic ties, he was moved to another room “where I was held with several detainees for about eight hours, during which soldiers periodically returned to beat and insult us brutally.”
M.A., an 18-year-old Palestinian male detained near an “aid” distribution point run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, described being repeatedly raped with a bottle and witnessing similar attacks against others detained with him.
“There was also a dog behind us, as if the dog was raping us,” M.A. said. “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.”
The now defunct US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid sites were used to attract starving Palestinians, where they were often murdered, injured or disappeared.
Well-documented crimes
These are not the first testimonies of systematic rape and sexual torture by Israeli personnel.
Palestinian victims had already provided many horrific accounts to human rights groups and the United Nations during the genocide.
In May, PCHR published a detailed report based on the accounts of 100 former detainees documenting “brutal physical and psychological torture, including beatings, electrocution, suspension, sexual violence, extremely tight handcuffing and forced stress positions.”
Despite many firsthand and eyewitness testimonies and videos, Israel’s sexual crimes against Palestinians have been largely ignored by Western media and governments – which instead focused their outrage on Israel’s fabricated claims of mass rapes by Palestinians on 7 October 2023.Israel’s lies about Palestinians raping Israelis are atrocity propaganda aimed at mobilizing support for its genocide.
To date, not a single Israeli victim of an alleged rape on 7 October – living or dead – has been identified, and there are no credible eyewitness accounts and no video or photo evidence corroborating rapes that supposedly took place systematically across a wide area where extensive filming took place.
Rapists celebrated in Israel
One of the few cases of a Palestinian victim drawing mainstream attention involved a detainee gang-raped and severely injured by a group of Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman detention camp.
It came to light last year after several soldiers were arrested for the attack and leaked video of the assault was broadcast on Israeli television.
After the video’s release in August 2024, the UN Human Rights Office stated that it has “documented a number of videos in recent months which show gross violations of the rights of Palestinians detained by Israel, including acts of ill treatment, torture, sexual violence and rape.”
The Sde Teiman video led to outrage in Israel – not about the attack it showed, but in defense of the soldiers. It sparked “right to rape” protests by Israelis demanding the soldiers’ release, while senior officials justified their actions.
Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi – the Israeli military prosecutor who leaked the video in a failed effort to tamp down the outrage over the soldiers’ arrests – resigned last month and has been arrested and placed in home detention.
Meanwhile, the soldiers accused of the rape continue to be treated as heroes.
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