Imagine being stripped naked, chained to a cold metal table in a dimly lit room, your body exposed and trembling. Two masked Israeli soldiers take turns raping you for hours, day after day. They film every violation. You bleed, you scream, you beg for death, but the pain only gets worse.
When they finally stop, they hang you by your wrists and force you to watch the footage, threatening to release it to destroy what remains of your dignity and your family’s honour.
This is not a scene from a nightmare.
This is the lived reality described by a 42-year-old Palestinian woman from northern Gaza, held at Israel’s Sde Teiman detention centre, which made international headlines after CCTV footage of a Palestinian detainee’s sexual abuse by Israeli soldiers was leaked.
The woman’s words, along with scores of others, echo through the pages of a new report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor — a Geneva-registered, independent nonprofit organisation founded in 2011. It is youth-led and focuses on documenting violations in Europe and the Middle East, particularly in conflict and occupation zones. Its work is cited by UN bodies, and it operates with a regional presence in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The report is a document so raw, so filled with unrelenting horror, that we had to make the decision not to reproduce every graphic detail here.
The full weight of the suffering is simply too much to lay bare in one article.
Titled “Another genocide behind walls”, the report documents what it describes as an organised, state-backed policy of systematic sexual torture and humiliation inflicted on Palestinian detainees, men, women and even the young, inside Israeli prisons and detention facilities since October 2023.
The testimonies are not abstract allegations. They are visceral accounts of rape, object penetration, attacks by trained military dogs, forced nudity, filming for blackmail and calculated degradation designed to break not just bodies, but entire communities.
The researchers who compiled the report describe the material itself as overwhelming.
“We faced a complex professional and psychological struggle while collecting testimonies,” Maha Hussaini, Euro-Med’s Head of Media and Public Engagement told TRT World, explaining that they aimed to maintain objectivity and impartiality to ensure the accuracy of the criminal documentation and to build a solid legal file.
“Listening directly to detainees breaking down in tears while recalling rape or the loss of their genitals generated, in many cases, a profound sense of pain within us.”
The team directly experienced what is known as ‘vicarious trauma’, where the psychological burden of victims transferred onto those documenting the abuse, Hussaini who personally interviewed several women reporting sexual harassment, told TRT World.
Israel, of course, denies systematic abuse. But Euro-Med has piles and piles of credible evidence.
One survivor, Wajdi, 43, recounted being shackled naked to a metal bed while soldiers raped him and a trained dog was set upon him in a “trained manner.”
He screamed in agony as the abuse continued for days; every cry earned him more beatings. Soldiers urinated on him, filmed it all, and mocked him.
“I wished for death,” he said simply. “I was bleeding.”
Other detainees reported soldiers inserting a fire-extinguisher nozzle into a prisoner’s anus and discharging its contents, and forcing men to sit on artificial penises fixed to the ground. Women’s bodies were weaponised to blackmail male relatives.
How the evidence was gathered – and why it is airtight
TRT World interviewed the Euro-Med Monitor team that was directly involved in the report to understand how they went about collecting evidence of such sensitive nature and what kind of safeguards and verification steps were used to gather the testimonies.
The team told TRT World that testimonies were collected through what the organisation describes as a “mixed-mode documentation approach” — a combination of in-person interviews and secure remote conversations.
This was done to maximise access and minimise risk. Survivors were interviewed face-to-face wherever possible, but when safety, mobility or health made that impossible, encrypted calls and secure phone lines were used instead.
In some cases, initial contact was facilitated through trusted intermediaries like family members, lawyers, and medical professionals, but the testimonies themselves were taken directly from the survivors wherever feasible.
Euro-Med told TRT World it collected hundreds of testimonies of sexual violence from October 2023 to October 2025. Of these, 25 were included in the final report as detailed case narratives or direct quotations. The rest were used to establish patterns but withheld due to security risks, verification limits, or at the request of survivors.
To guard against fabrication or duplication, each case was assigned a unique identifier and cross-checked against an internal registry using biographical details, arrest timelines, transfer histories and distinctive elements of the abuse described, Hussaini shared. Any inconsistencies triggered follow-ups or exclusion.
Witness credibility was assessed through a process aligned with international standards, including the Istanbul Protocol.
The Istanbul Protocol is a United Nations–endorsed set of guidelines for detecting, documenting and investigating torture and ill-treatment. It helps doctors, lawyers and investigators properly record evidence so it can be used in court or human rights cases.
Euro-Med investigators relied on non-leading interview techniques, reconstructing timelines and cross-checking accounts across multiple sessions and independent sources, the team shared.
Where possible, identities were verified through documentation or confirmation from family members and legal representatives, though sensitive materials were not copied in high-risk cases. Interviews were documented in detailed, time-stamped notes, and recordings were only made with explicit consent and when doing so posed no additional risk, Hussaini shared.
Even the locations described by detainees, including detention facilities like Damon, Zikim and Anatot, were not taken at face value. Instead, they were verified through triangulation: matching multiple independent testimonies describing similar layouts, routines and transfer routes, and cross-referencing these with legal records, lawyer-tracked transfers and available documentation. Where certainty was not possible, the report explicitly labels locations as “reported by the witness.”
The evidence they gathered is raw, corroborated and overwhelming.
A repeating pattern of state policy
This is not the first time such horrors have surfaced. Multiple rights organisations, UN inquiries and even some Israeli media have documented sexualised torture in Israeli prisons stretching back years.
What has changed since October 2023 is the scale, the brazenness and the legal scaffolding that now makes accountability almost impossible.
The “Unlawful Combatants Law” and emergency regulations have turned detention centres into black sites where Red Cross staff and lawyers aren’t allowed to visit and no judicial oversight exists.
Despite these extraordinary restrictions, Israeli officials, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have entered prisons such as Ofer accompanied by media, with footage showing stun grenades and police dogs used near prisoners’ cells.
In one of his highly publicised prison visits, a Palestinian rights group said Ben-Gvir “stepped on prisoners’ heads” at Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank.
The Euro-Med report details how even illegal Israeli settlers have been permitted to enter these detention centres “to observe detainees, often naked and shackled, photograph them, and mock them”.
According to the testimony of 43-year-old A.A., “Israeli soldiers brought Israeli civilians to witness the abuse while we were naked and beaten”.
A separate report released this week by the Norwegian Refugee Council further underscores the increasing use of sexual abuse against Palestinians.
Focusing on the occupied West Bank, it documents how sexualised violence by illegal Israeli settlers functions as a tool of coercion, driving Palestinian families from their homes. More than 70 percent of displaced households interviewed said threats against women and children, particularly sexual violence, were a decisive factor in their decision to flee.
The Euro-Med report repeatedly stresses that these crimes exist on a continuum. They form a part of a deliberate strategy of subjugation, backed at the highest political, military, and judicial levels, and protected by a climate of engineered impunity.
It cites the UN Committee Against Torture’s conclusion that such practices amount to “de facto State policy.” It references leaked footage, Israeli soldiers’ own admissions, medical evidence from bodies returned to Gaza, and earlier UN commissions that found sexual and gender-based violence used systematically “to punish and destroy the entire Palestinian people.”
The pattern extends to children, even.
Save the Children, an international NGO that works with children and monitors detention conditions in Palestine, told TRT World that conditions have deteriorated further since the war began. The organisation confirmed a "shocking rise" in cases involving detained children, including forced stripping and sexual violence “sometimes multiple times by multiple individuals.”
Israeli authorities have responded to previous exposés by dropping charges, shielding perpetrators and, in some cases, celebrating the accused as “heroes.” The result, the report argues, is engineered impunity.
The Euro-Med report provides evidence that will be hard to ignore.
But behind the documentation of such cases lies a heavy human cost.
“What exhausted us the most was the ethical burden of documenting incidents of sexual violence,” Hussaini shared.
“From an evidentiary perspective we needed precise details to meet standards, yet from a humanitarian perspective we feared that direct questioning would itself cause renewed psychological harm.”
She says that the work demanded a delicate balance “between the duty to document and the protection of the victim.”
