A flood of devastating new testimonies documenting the systemic sexual abuse of Palestinian men and women by Israeli soldiers has surfaced in recent weeks. Yet, as these harrowing accounts gain traction amongst human rights groups and international organizations, Western media has conspicuously turned its focus elsewhere—amplifying Israel’s poorly corroborated claims against Hamas.
Following a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on December 28, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published a report documenting harrowing testimonies of sexual assault by Israeli soldiers. Eyewitness accounts described how female medical workers and patients were rounded up at gunpoint, coerced into removing their headscarves, and forced to strip naked. Witnesses also reported that these women were subjected to degrading verbal abuse throughout the ordeal.
“A soldier forced a nurse to take off her trousers, then placed his hand on her. When she tried to resist, he struck her hard across the face, causing her nose to bleed,” a female survivor of the Kamal Adwan Hospital raid recounted to a Euro-Med Monitor team. Eyewitness testimonies further detailed male soldiers engaging in groping, beating, and forcibly sexualizing women, as well as ripping clothes from women’s chests when they refused to strip.
These harrowing testimonies align with a documented pattern of abuse. In February 2024, Euro-Med Monitor reported similar accounts from female detainees in Gaza. Among them, a 45-year-old woman identified as N.H. recounted how she “was threatened with rape and told that I would not see my children if I disobeyed the soldier’s orders.”
In February 2024, United Nations officials formally acknowledged the growing body of evidence pointing to sexual violence against Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. They confirmed that at least two cases of rape had been documented, marking a critical official recognition of the abuse.
On June 12, the United Nations released a human rights report that detailed systematic sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) perpetrated by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians since October 7. The report concluded that Palestinians had been subjected to a range of abuses, including “forced public nudity, forced public stripping, sexualized torture and abuse, and sexual humiliation and harassment,” both online and in person.
In March, Canadian physicians who had worked in Gaza came forward with harrowing evidence of rape against Palestinian women, urging an investigation into the atrocities. One physician recounted a particularly devastating case in which a woman was reportedly “raped for two days until she lost her ability to speak.”
At the notorious Sde Teiman detention center, where Israeli soldiers detain Palestinian civilians from Gaza without charge, UNRWA documented a harrowing testimony from a female prisoner:
They asked the soldiers to spit on me, saying ‘she is a b****, she is from Gaza.’ They were beating us as we moved and saying they would put pepper on our sensitive parts [genitals]. They pulled us, beat us, they took us in the bus to the Damon prison after five days. A male soldier took off our hijabs and they pinched us and touched our bodies, including our breasts. We were blindfolded and we were feeling them touching us, pushing our heads to the bus. We started to squeeze together to try to protect ourselves from the touching. They said ‘b****, b****.’ They told the soldiers to take off their shoes and slap our faces with them.”
The Sde Teiman detention facility became the center of international outrage after 10 Israeli soldiers were arrested for the brutal gang rape of a Palestinian detainee held without charge. The attack, which was captured on film, was further compounded by widespread Israeli public support for the perpetrators. This support came from members of the government, media, and the so-called “right to rape” protests, which defended the soldiers’ actions.
Adding to the disturbing nature of the incident, Israel’s Honenu legal aid organization, which represented four of the accused soldiers, claimed their clients were acting in “self-defense.”
Sde Teiman was not alone in facing accusations of systemic sexual abuse. As early as January of 2024, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) provided testimonies in a report about “systemic” torture. One prisoner held in Ketziot Prison revealed the following:
Wardens would conduct searches while the prisoners were naked, place naked prisoners against each other, and place the aluminum device used in the searches in their buttocks. In another instance, the wardens passed a card in a prisoner’s buttocks. All of this took place in sight of other prisoners and wardens, while the wardens took pleasure in beating the prisoner’s genitals.”
Palestinian lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, an Israeli citizen, revealed a harrowing account from a survivor of Ofer Detention Center in the West Bank. He cited the testimony of a 27-year-old Palestinian inmate who was subjected to brutal sexual violence:
A pipe from a fire extinguisher was used on a handcuffed prisoner. Forcing him to lie on his stomach, stripping him of all his clothes, and inserting the pipe of the fire extinguisher into the prisoner’s rectum. Then, activating the extinguisher … in front of the eyes of the other prisoners.”
The numerous reports by ostensibly objective human rights groups and international organizations documenting Israel’s systemic sexual abuse against Palestinians are supported by survivor testimony, eyewitness accounts, video footage, photographic evidence and admissions from Israeli sources. Israel’s claims of mass rape by Palestinians lack similar evidence. In fact, several of the purported Israeli eyewitnesses making these accusations have been exposed for fabricating their stories.
Israeli emergency workers have been implicated in manufacturing hoaxes, including the widely circulated claims of 40 beheaded babies, babies hung on clothing lines, and fetuses removed from mothers’ wombs. According to a UN report by Pramilla Patten on October 7, 2023, one such “crime scene” had been altered by a bomb squad, and the bodies were moved. Additionally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fabricated a story about two boys killed in an attic, which he used in his address to the U.S. Congress in July 2024.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy was given a prominent platform in Western corporate media for her ‘Civil Commission,’ formed to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by Hamas against Israelis. Israel’s most trusted news outlet, Haaretz, even reported that she had collected ‘testimony after testimony,’ despite later acknowledging that no direct testimonies had been taken.
After the ‘Hamas mass rape’ allegations spread across U.S. media and were echoed by Western politicians, Elkayam-Levy, previously cited as an expert, was exposed by Israeli media for ‘fraud and scamming donors.’ Ultimately, nothing emerged from her alleged investigative efforts.
A new Israeli government report submitted to the UN relies on second-hand accounts from physicians and healthcare workers who interacted with former Israeli captives but does not directly quote or name the individuals involved. While the report aligns with some previous findings, it introduces a new and striking claim: two Israeli teenagers were allegedly forced to perform sexual acts on one another. Notably, this claim was absent from the initial submission by the Israeli Health Ministry and did not surface during the year-old prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel.
Israel’s claims about mass sexual violence lack any hard evidence, victims or testimonies to corroborate them. Yet, each new claim is covered uncritically by the Western corporate media. On the other hand, mountains of evidence documenting the systematic sexual violence committed against Palestinians are ignored in what can only be described as a deliberate cover-up.
Feature photo | A Palestinian woman observes the site of an Israeli airstrike on tents sheltering displaced people at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, October 14, 2024. Majdi Fathi | AP
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47