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.
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.
PCHR further warns that thousands of Palestinian detainees face the risk of certain death, as on 3 November 2025 the Knesset’s National Security Committee approved a draft law allowing the application of the death penalty against Palestinian prisoners. According to PCHR’s documentation, Israel has extracted numerous coerced confessions from prisoners as a result of the brutal torture and threats they endured, meaning the death penalty could be applied to all remaining detainees in prisons and camps, and resulting in mass in mass executions in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and human rights law.
PCHR also calls on the international community, the Palestinian Authority, the competent authorities in the Gaza Strip, and all international and local institutions to provide immediate protection and comprehensive psychological and medical care for survivors and victims of torture, and to ensure the confidentiality of their identities and their safety.
PCHR affirms its commitment to continue documenting these crimes, collecting evidence and testimonies, and submitting them to UN mechanisms, the International Criminal Court, and other accountability bodies, in pursuit of justice for victims, accountability for perpetrators, and an end to impunity.
