The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has released a harrowing report documenting what it describes as “systematic sexual torture and rape” committed by Israeli forces against Palestinian detainees, including women and men from Gaza, during their detention in Israeli prisons and military camps over the past two years.
Groundxero | November 17, 2025
*This article contains sensitive material related to sexual violence.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has released a harrowing report documenting what it describes as “systematic sexual torture and rape” committed by Israeli forces against Palestinian detainees, including women and men from Gaza, during their detention in Israeli prisons and military camps over the past two years.
According to PCHR, field researchers and lawyers, collected testimonies from a number of Palestinian detainees from the Gaza Strip who were recently released from Israeli prisons and detention camps revealing 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 by Israeli forces.
PCHR asserts 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.
The testimonies, gathered in late October and early November of 2025, include accounts from both male and female detainees who were arrested from hospitals, checkpoints, and shelters across the Gaza Strip since late 2023.
PCHR said that many arrests occurred “without legal justification, solely because the victims were residents of Gaza.” It characterized the detentions as a form of collective punishment designed to inflict maximum psychological and physical harm on Palestinian civilians.
Over the past months, the PCHR and other human rights groups have documented dozens of testimonies from survivors of sexual violence in Israeli prisons and camps. While individual testimonies cited in the latest PCHR report are deeply disturbing, PCHR emphasized that it verified these accounts through direct legal interviews, medical evidence, and cross-checking with multiple released detainees.
A 42-year-old Palestinian woman was arrested while passing through an Israeli checkpoint set up in northern Gaza in November 2024. In her statement to PCHR staff, she 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 said:
“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.”
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.”
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 an 18 years old youth, who was re-arrested this year near a humanitarian aid distribution point in Gaza. He described being raped anally with a bottle along with other detainees.
“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.”
In May 2025, PCHR had released a broader report documenting testimonies from over 100 released detainees. That report also detailed widespread torture, inhumane detention conditions, and denial of medical treatment inside Israeli prisons and military 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.
The new testimonies, according to PCHR, provide further evidence of the “sexualized dimension” of torture and psychological warfare being used against Palestinians under detention.
Under international law, including the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute of the ICC, and the UN Convention against Torture, sexual violence and rape committed in armed conflict are recognized as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have previously raised concerns about the treatment of Palestinian detainees, though systematic sexual violence has rarely been documented at this level.
In light of these grave crimes against Palestinian detainees, PCHR calls on the international community, including 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 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 executions of Palestinian prisoners, many of whom, PCHR says, were tortured into coerced confessions.
It 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 said it would continue to collect and submit evidence to the ICC and relevant UN mechanisms “to ensure justice for victims and accountability for perpetrators.”
In its concluding appeal, PCHR urged the Palestinian Authority, Gaza health authorities, and international humanitarian agencies to provide immediate psychological and medical support to survivors, stressing the need for confidentiality and protection.
“These victims are enduring unimaginable trauma. The international community must not remain silent,” the statement read.
The Israeli authorities have not yet issued a response to the latest allegations made in the report. However, Israel has previously denied accusations of systematic torture, and resorts to its usual defense: anyone criticizing its inhumane treatment of Palestinians is labelled anti-Semitic. As that label has lost its force and fails to intimidate critics, Israel reverts to its favourite defence: accusing anyone who dares to oppose its genocide and war crimes of being pro-Hamas or, at least, supportive of its agenda.
Israeli rulers are more concerned about Israel’s reputation and the army’s legal standing than about the fact that an atrocious crime has taken place. Israel’s long-held brag of having “the most ethical army in the world” collapsed earlier this month. A horrifying incident took place in July 2024, when surveillance footage from the Sde Teiman detention centre captured Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian detainee, who later suffered severe injuries. Earlier this month, the IDF’s top legal officer, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, was arrested after admitting that she had authorised the release of the footage. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted by ICC for war-crimes, commented that the leaking of the video—not its content—was “perhaps the most serious public relations attack that the State of Israel has experienced since its establishment.”
When the criminal soldiers were arrested back in 2024, Israelis took to the streets—not to condemn the crime, but to support the soldiers. Among the demonstrators were politicians, including the extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who declared that the soldiers should be treated as heroes.
This systemic defence mechanism ensures that atrocities on Palestinians are treated as public relations crises rather than legal or moral failures.