New reports confirm months of Israeli torture, abuse, and sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners

Content warning: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault. 

Two new reports came out last week regarding the torture and cruel treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention centers since October 7, including reports of sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls. The reports have renewed conversations around the harsh conditions of Palestinians being held in Israeli captivity, which Palestinian detainees themselves and rights groups have been sounding the alarm over for months. 

On February 19, UN human rights experts expressed their alarm over what they described as “egregious human rights violations” carried out by Israeli forces against Palestinian women and girls in Gaza. In addition to the extrajudicial and arbitrary execution of women and children in Gaza, the UN experts highlighted the treatment of female Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. 

“Many have reportedly been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, denied menstruation pads, food and medicine, and severely beaten. On at least one occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were allegedly kept in a cage in the rain and cold, without food,” the statement said. 

“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the experts said, adding that photos of Palestinian female detainees in “degrading circumstances” were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online.

“Taken together, these alleged acts may constitute grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, and amount to serious crimes under international criminal law that could be prosecuted under the Rome Statute,” the experts said. “Those responsible for these apparent crimes must be held accountable and victims and their families are entitled to full redress and justice,” they added.

On the same day of the UN experts’ statements, Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) released a 41-page report about the condition of Palestinian detainees inside Israel’s prisons since October 7, which the group described as having become “an apparatus for revenge and retribution.”

The PHRI report details the extensive violations of prisoners’ rights by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) and other Israeli security bodies since October 7, including the isolation of prisoners from the outside world,  lack of access to healthcare, the denial of daylight or time outside cells, and the overcrowding of cells which lack basic supplies and resources like mattresses and blankets, as well as water and electricity. 

In addition to such conditions, PHRI also details the “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of prisoners, including sexual harassment and violence. “In dozens of cases…guards entered one or two cells at a time and brutally beat [prisoners] with batons…the individuals in incarceration also reported physical assaults that included punching, slapping, and kicking upon exiting their cells or while being transferred to a different facility — including against sick and disabled individuals,” the PHRI report stated.

“Recently detained individuals detailed that IPS guards forced them to kiss the Israeli flag and that those who refused were violently assaulted.”

Similar to dozens of reports by Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups and human rights experts before it, the PHRI report emphasized that the patterns of abuse and torture indicate that “these are not singular incidents of wayward guards but patterns of systematic violence.”

After October 7, violations begin to emerge

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on October 7, as Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, another campaign began in the occupied West Bank. Israeli military raids, already a nightly occurrence in the territory, accelerated at a rapid pace.

Within weeks, thousands of Palestinians, including trapped day laborers from Gaza, were arrested in the middle of the night. Just as quickly as the prison population began to swell, testimonies from Palestinians began to pour in of aggressive Israeli soldiers beating up detainees and their families and ransacking homes. 

Simultaneously, a disturbing trend began to emerge. On social media, videos and photos began to circulate showing Israeli forces subjecting Palestinian detainees to physical, sexual, and verbal abuse. The footage was being filmed and proudly posted online by the soldiers themselves. 

On October 31, one of the first of such videos began circulating on social media. 

It showed a group of Palestinian men, blindfolded with their hands and feet bound, many of them partially or fully stripped naked, lying on the ground. The men were being thrown around, kicked, and beaten by uniformed Israeli military soldiers. Some of the men cried in pain, others lay limp, their naked bodies piled up on top of one another. 

The harrowing video sent shockwaves within the Palestinian community. Many online compared the disturbing scenes to the infamous photos of piled-up bodies of Iraqi prisoners, tortured by the U.S. military in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq nearly 20 years ago. 

Conflicting reports emerged as to where the torture took place — some reports indicated it took place in the occupied West Bank, while others said it showed scenes of Palestinians being detained in the areas outside the Gaza Strip. Mondoweiss was not able to verify the exact location of the incident. However, two prisoner rights groups verified that it was an authentic video, taken in the West Bank after October 7.

According to Israeli media reports, the Palestinian men being tortured were laborers from the West Bank who were apprehended in the South Hebron Hills area after allegedly attempting to enter Israel without permits. 

In a rare admission of wrongdoing, the Israeli army said it was investigating the incident, saying in one statement, “the [soldiers’] conduct that emerges from these scenes is grave and inconsistent with the values of the IDF.”

But the mountain of evidence of torture, abuse, and harassment of Palestinian detainees at the hands of Israeli forces that has piled up over the past few months has continued to directly contradict the Israeli army’s statements about its “values” and the morality of its soldiers. 

Since October 7, the Israeli military has rounded up and arrested more than 6,000 Palestinians, according to the latest figures from Addameer, a Ramallah-based Palestinian prisoners’ rights group. 

While videos and reports of physical abuse and torture began to surface as early as the end of October, the reports have not stopped, and have continued to pile up, both in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While vast numbers of Palestinians are thrown in arbitrary detention, those who do make it out have shared testimonies of everything from mockery and harassment to physical beating and sexual assault. 

Since October 7, at least eight Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli jails. Rights groups strongly suspect foul play, though it is impossible to confirm, as Israel refuses to release their bodies. 

“Right now is the most dangerous and violent time in many years for people to be arrested in the West Bank,” Abdullah al-Zghari, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club, told Mondoweiss. “They [Israel] are arresting everyone, different ages, young and old, children, women, girls, former prisoners, everyone.”

“It’s very clear from the way they are arresting people, the type of aggression and abuse that we have seen, that this is a revenge campaign,” al-Zghari said. 

“They are carrying out their revenge for what happened on October 7.”

In an in-depth report from January, Addameer painted a similar picture, saying mass arrests and the intensification of brutality against Palestinian prisoners in response to acts of Palestinian resistance are common tactics used by Israel since the beginning of its occupation. 

“With time, the intensity of the brutality and arrests only increases as a form of punishment and as a way to suppress the resistance with an aim to control all aspects of Palestinian lives and punish a whole society,” Addameer said.

Arbitrary arrest and abuse: ‘I was beaten for a hundred years in my life’

Common across all reports from human rights organizations on Israel’s mass arrest and incarceration campaign is the arbitrary nature in which Palestinians are targeted, arrested, and abused.

While Israel deems all Palestinians in its custody as “security prisoners,” close to 3,500 of an estimated 9,000 prisoners are now incarcerated in Israeli prisons without ever being charged with a crime or standing trial. That number includes ordinary civilians, as well as activists, journalists, and human rights workers. 

Hundreds more Palestinians who were arrested but later released detailed being arbitrarily stopped at checkpoints and subsequently arrested and physically and verbally abused.

Such was the case of 19-year-old Mahmoud Dweik, a Palestinian teenager from the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron. 

On November 4, Dweik was hanging out with his friends in Hebron when an Israeli military jeep stopped their car. The Israeli soldiers began searching the vehicle and the boys’ phones.

The soldiers’ search turned up enough evidence for them to arrest the three young men: a stick, a box cutter found in a toolbox in the car’s trunk, and a photo of an Israeli checkpoint on Mahmoud’s phone that he had taken more than a year prior. 

The soldiers then took Mahmoud and his two friends to a military camp at the top of a hill overlooking Hebron city. That’s when the abuse began.

“Approximately 40 soldiers, in groups, took turns beating us from the beginning of our kidnapping, at 7 p.m. until 5 a.m.,” read a testimony written by Mahmoud, shared with Mondoweiss by his father, Badee. The young teen described it as a “party of beatings.”

 “I was beaten [enough] for a hundred years in my life,” Mahmoud said, adding that the soldiers used their hands, feet, rifles, and sticks to beat the boys. After some eight hours of abuse, the boys were taken to an Israeli police station in the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement in the heart of Hebron’s Old City. The boys spent an hour at the police station, before being transported back to the military camp, where they were beaten. 

“We slept on the ground without a cover or anything to protect our bodies. We just slept in the open air,” Mahmoud said. Just hours later, the boys were taken back to the Kiryat Arba police station. Any hopes of being released back home were dashed when, shortly after, the three friends were carted off to the Ofer Military Prison outside Ramallah in the central West Bank. 

A journey that should have taken two hours was dragged on for more than 12 hours, Mahmoud said, describing being transported in “cages” within Israeli military vehicles, where they sat on back-breaking iron benches. They were not given any food and were only provided with water once.

When he arrived at the prison, he was stripped of his clothes and searched by prison guards, who forced him to “move up and down several times with my face facing the wall,” Mahmoud said. 

Mahmoud was eventually charged with “possession of a substance on the phone that threatens the security of the state of Israel.” The substance in question was the photo of a military checkpoint Mahmoud had taken on his mobile phone more than a year and a half prior. After 12 days in prison, he was released on a 1,000 shekel ($272) bail.

Mahmoud says he was released at a checkpoint near the city of Ramallah in the middle of the night with no phone, wearing only his boxers and an oversized pair of prison pants.

By the kindness of strangers, Mahmoud was clothed and borrowed a phone to call his cousin who lived in Ramallah. He spent the night at his cousin’s house, before returning to Hebron the next day, where he was reunited with his parents. 

“Those were the most hellish days of my life,” he said. 

Trending on social media: Soldiers document their own abuse

When a Palestinian is arrested by Israeli forces, it can often be several days before their family becomes aware of where their loved one is being held, and what conditions they are being kept under.

While that reality remains true, since October 7, more and more Palestinian families have come to discover updates on their loved ones through social media, when they come across photos and videos recorded and posted by Israeli soldiers, of their family members being degraded, tortured, and humiliated. 

Wajd Jawabreh, 33, is a mother of three girls under the age of 10, and a resident of a Bethlehem-area refugee camp. Jawabreh was at home sleeping with her husband, Khader Lutfi, and their daughters on October 31 when Israeli forces raided their home and arrested her husband. 

Around 30 minutes after his arrest, a shaken-up Wajd was sent a link to a video on social media. What she saw made her heart drop.

The video showed her husband, Khader, blindfolded with his hands bound, kneeling before an Israeli soldier. In the video, the soldier, who is seemingly the one filming the video, can be heard yelling expletives at Khader, saying in Arabic, “Good morning bitch,” while kicking him in the stomach.

“I was shocked and overwhelmed. It destroyed my heart. I couldn’t stop crying,” Wajd told Mondoweiss in December, more than a month after Khader’s arrest. “It’s incredibly difficult to see the person you’ve spent your life with in this situation.”

Wajd told Mondoweiss that the video was “taken with a purpose,” to humiliate her husband, who is well-regarded in their community. “Since I saw the video until today, I’ve tried not to let the video break my determination, because that’s what the occupation wants.”

The video of Khader was widely circulated on social media, accumulating hundreds of thousands of views. Wajd said she’s tried more than anything to make sure her daughters never see the video, and that every new view and share on the video hurt her even more. 

“I don’t want my husband to be seen or remembered this way. I want him to be remembered as the kind and strong person he is,” she said. 

The humiliation and shame that Wajd felt when watching the video of her husband being beaten and degraded is exactly the goal of such content, Palestinian rights groups say. 

“The Israelis are trying to humiliate the prisoners and the detainees after what happened in Gaza [October 7]. They are testing them in disgusting ways, they are stripping them of their clothes, beating them on the ground naked, releasing them back without any clothes so that they feel shame and humiliation amongst the community,” Abdullah al-Zghari told Mondoweiss. 

“This is also part of a collective torture and fear being instituted by the occupation into the Palestinian population: to make people fearful of being arrested. This is proof of how much they dehumanize us and don’t view us as human beings,” he said. 

Torture & sexual violence inside the prisons

While the abuse of Palestinian detainees begins from the moment of arrest, reports from rights groups and prisoners themselves indicate that some of the worst torture and mistreatment takes place once Palestinians are imprisoned within Israeli prisons and detention centers. 

Harrowing testimonies have repeatedly come out from Palestinians in Gaza who have been detained during Israel’s ground invasion, with detainees recounting being denied access to food, water, and bathrooms. Videos and photos have shown deep set marks and cuts on the wrists and ankles of released detainees from Gaza, who have said they were tied up for days on end with no relief. In some instances, Israeli forces reportedly used army dogs to threaten detainees. 

In January, upon a visit to Gaza, Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office in the  Occupied Palestinian Territory, said he visited a number of Palestinian detainees who were detained “in unknown locations” for between 30-55 days.  

“They described being beaten, humiliated, subjected to ill-treatment, and to what may amount to torture. They reported being blindfolded for long periods — some of them for several consecutive days,” Sunghay said. “One man said he had access to a shower only once during his 55 days in detention. There are reports of men who were subsequently released — but only in diapers, without any adequate clothing in this cold weather.”

It is estimated that some 600 Palestinians from Gaza are being held in Israeli prisons. In contrast, hundreds more are being held in Israeli detention camps, though the exact number of the latter category is unknown. In the detention camp, Haaretz reported that the prisoners sleep practically unclothed and exposed to the harsh winter cold, are constantly blindfolded, and subjected to constant torture at almost every hour of the day. 

In December 2023, it was reported that an undeclared number of detainees from Gaza “died” inside Israeli detention camps. Those reports did not include at least eight other Palestinians not from Gaza who have also died inside Israeli prisons since October 7.  

While Gazan prisoners are likely facing extreme torture and abuse due to their identity, similar torture tactics and widespread abuse, including sexual violence, have also been employed against Palestinians from other parts of the occupied territories who are being held in Israeli prisons. 

Quoting a Palestinian lawyer who has been visiting Palestinian detainees every week since October 7, Amnesty International said, “Palestinian detainees have been denied their right to outdoor exercise and that one of the forms of humiliation to which they are subjected during inmate count is being forced to kneel on the floor.”

The lawyer, Hassan Abadi, added that Palestinians in detention “have had all their personal belongings confiscated and at times burned, including books, diaries, letters, clothes, food and other items. Palestinian women prisoners in al-Damon prison have had their sanitary pads confiscated by prison authorities.” According to Abadi, a client he was representing told him that when she was detained and blindfolded, an Israeli officer “threatened her with rape.”

In its January report, Addameer detailed several instances of Israeli forces using sexual threats and violence against Palestinian men and women in detention. The group said that such violence is employed by the Israeli occupation, which is “well aware of the stigma around Palestinian men and women and the importance to their body’s integrity and honor. This is especially important in Arab societies.”

“Many victim testimonies coming from women include aspects of sexual harassment, threatening of rape, and forceful strip searching of women inside the prisons and even often in front of their own children during house invasions. These are all methods of coercion and carried out to make the women feel powerless and give the occupation the sense of control of the women and their body. It is abuse of power and authority and playing on the victims’ fear,” the group said. 

Addameer noted the case of a male prisoner from Jerusalem, referred to as “O.J.” in the report, who says that he was subjected to a strip search during which Israeli officers “caressed his private parts repeatedly with the excuse of a thorough search. They would make him sit and stand multiple times while being nude. In addition, while he was nude and undergoing the search, the room he was kept in had windows with no glass protection, thus allowing the cold wind to enter the room.”

In another case documented by Adammeer, Israeli forces raided the home of a woman in Jerusalem, threatened her with rape, spat in her face, and forced her to strip naked her newborn two-week-old granddaughter. 

“These acts of forcing men and women to strip naked and inappropriately touch them under the excuse of security searching them is done with intent to embarrass and sexually harass Palestinian men and women,” Addameer said. 

In the report by Physicians for Human Rights, a prisoner by the name of “A.G.” who was held in Israel’s Ktzi’ot prison said Israeli special forces entered their cell and beat everybody inside, yelling sexually explicit insults including “you whores”, “we will fuck all of you,” “we will fuck your sisters and wives,” etc. A.G. was then taken to a bathroom where Israeli forces urinated on them.

A.G. also detailed incidents of violent strip searches, when the prison guards would “pin naked individuals together and insert an aluminum search device in their buttocks. In one case, the guards swiped a card through one person’s buttocks. This occurred in front of the other incarcerated individuals, as well as the guards — who expressed their delight.”

“Under the guise of war in Gaza, the Ministry of National Security, its minister, and the Defense Ministry, with the active and passive support of additional Knesset members and ministers, have promoted unprecedented abuse of the rights of Palestinians in military and IPS custody,” the PHRI report concluded. 

“The state has repeatedly insisted that these are necessary measures adopted as part of the emergency ordinances to maintain national security. Yet, in reality, these measures violate local and international law as well as international treaties.”