Opinion
Nicholas Kristof
The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians
Male and female Palestinians describe brutal
sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and
interrogators.
Nicholas Kristof
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist, reporting from the West Bank
May 11, 2026
It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of
the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.
Supporters of Israel made that point after the
brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on
Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu and many
U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, condemned that sexual violence, and
Netanyahu rightly called on “all civilized leaders” to “speak up.”
And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians
have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against
men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin
Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.
There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order
rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual
violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of
Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill
treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human
Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel,
concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely
practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
What does this standard operating procedure look
like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken
to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to
the ground.
“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my
head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my
boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat
prisoners.
“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and
I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with
increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he
said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding
that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was
praying for death.”
Al-Sai was blindfolded, he said, and heard
someone say in Hebrew, which he understands, “Don’t take photos.” That
suggested to him that someone had pulled out a camera. One of the guards was a
woman who, he said, grabbed him by the penis and testicles and joked, “These
are mine,” and then squeezed until he screamed from pain.
The guards left him handcuffed on the ground, and
he smelled cigarette smoke. “I realized it was their smoking break,” he said.
After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded
that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other
people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.
Al-Sai said that he had been asked to become an
informant for Israeli intelligence, and he believes that the purpose of his
arrest and imprisonment under the administrative detention system was to
pressure him to agree. Because he prided himself on his journalistic
professionalism, he said, he refused.
I’ve had a career covering war, genocide and
atrocities, including rape, sometimes in places where the scale of sexual
violence is far greater than anything committed by either Hamas militants or
Israeli guards or settlers. In the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia a few years ago,
100,000 women may have been raped. Mass rape is now unfolding in Sudan.
Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the
Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United
States is complicit.
I became interested in reporting on sexual
assaults against Palestinian prisoners after Issa Amro, a nonviolent activist
sometimes called the Palestinian Gandhi, told me when I previously visited that
he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this
was common but underreported because of shame.
By one count, Israel has detained 20,000 people
in the West Bank alone since the Oct. 7 attacks, and more than 9,000
Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged
but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have
been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.
“Israeli forces systematically employ rape and
sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report
said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a
metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while
other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of
her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with
Israeli intelligence.
It’s impossible to know how common sexual
assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on
conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted
by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family
members, investigators, officials and others.
I found these victims by asking around among
lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves.
In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by
talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided
in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was
not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse
even to loved ones.
Save the Children commissioned a survey last year
of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half
reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said
that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to
acknowledge what had happened to them.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a respected
American organization, surveyed 59 Palestinian journalists who had been
released by Israeli authorities after the Oct. 7 attacks. Three percent said
they had been raped, and 29 percent said they had endured other forms of sexual
violence.
We journalists ask a lot of our sources, and
that's rarely so true as for this article. You may have found this piece
difficult to read, but it was 1,000 times more difficult for the sexual assault
survivors to share their stories. I was asking them to discuss the most
intimate and wrenching experiences imaginable, those that already gave them
nightmares, and then in fact-checking we went through it all over again.
The Israeli government rejects suggestions that
it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women.
Israel welcomed a United Nations report documenting sexual assaults against
Israeli women by Palestinians but rejected the report’s call to investigate
Israeli assaults against Palestinians. Netanyahu has denounced “baseless
accusations of sexual violence” made against Israel.
Israel’s Ministry of National Security declined
to comment for this article. The prison service “categorically rejects the
allegations” of sexual abuse, said a spokesman who declined to be named, adding
that complaints are “examined by the competent authorities.” The spokesman
declined to say whether any prison staff member had ever been fired or
prosecuted for sexual assaults.
The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various
kinds of abuse beyond rape. Many reported that they often had their genitals
yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to
probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some
men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according
to the Euro-Med monitor.
One reason these abuses don’t receive more
attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on
release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another
reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages
discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and
undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.
Conservative social norms also inhibit
discussion: Two victims told me that a prisoner who acknowledges being raped
would harm the ability of his sisters and daughters to find husbands.
One farmer initially agreed to let me use his
name in this article. Released early this year after months in administrative
detention — with no charges filed — he related what he said happened one day
last year: A half-dozen guards immobilized him by holding his arms and legs
while pulling down his pants and underwear and inserting a metal baton into his
anus. The rapists were laughing and cheering, he said.
Several hours later, he said, he fainted and was
taken to the prison clinic. After he woke up, he said, he was raped once more,
again with the metal baton.
“I was bleeding,” he recalled. “I broke down
completely. I was crying.”
After being returned to his cell, he said, he
asked a guard for pen and paper to write a complaint about the assaults. The
request was denied. And that evening, a group of guards came to the cell.
“Who is the one who wants to file a complaint?”
one guard jeered, he said, and another guard pointed him out. “The beating
started immediately,” he recalled. And then they raped him with the baton for a
third time that day, he said.
He recalled one saying, “Now you have even more
to put in your complaint.”
A few days after I interviewed him, the farmer
called to say that he didn’t want his name used after all. He had just been
visited by Shin Bet and warned not to cause trouble, and he also feared that
his family would react badly to the attention.
“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is
a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human
rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against
Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s
persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not
stopping it.”
Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me
that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented,
rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”
Bashi said her organization has filed hundreds of
complaints detailing horrific abuse against Palestinian detainees — and not in
a single case did these lead to charges filed. Impunity, she said, creates a
“green light” for abusers.
One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was
hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a
punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the
abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s
right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including
politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last
charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military
approved the soldiers’ return to duty.
Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the
end of a “blood libel.” “The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies — not
its heroic fighters,” he said.
Bashi described the outcome this way: “I would
say that dropping the charges — that’s giving permission to rape.”
That prisoner, who afterward reportedly required
a stoma bag to collect his waste, was returned to Gaza, and an acquaintance of
his said that he spent months in a hospital recovering from his internal
injuries. The acquaintance said that the former prisoner declined to be
interviewed.
Prosecutions and public attention can curb such
violence. In 1997, police officers in New York City raped a Haitian immigrant,
Abner Louima, with a stick so brutally that he required hospitalization and
surgeries. New Yorkers were outraged, Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Louima in the
hospital, and police officers were prosecuted in a landmark case. That sent a
powerful message throughout the police force: Those who assault detainees may
be punished. And that’s the message that must be sent throughout the Israeli
security forces.
If the Trump administration insisted on a
resumption of Red Cross visits to prisoners, if the U.S. ambassador visited
rape survivors with cameras in tow, if we conditioned arms transfers on an end
to sexual assault, we could send a moral and practical message that sexual
violence is unacceptable, no matter the identity of the victim. For starters,
the ambassador could ensure that those Palestinians who dared to speak for this
article are not brutalized again for their courage.
How does this kind of violence happen? Decades of
covering conflict have taught me that a combination of dehumanization and
impunity can propel people into a Hobbesian state of nature. I’ve encountered
this drift toward savagery in killing fields from Congo to Sudan to Myanmar,
and I think it also roughly explains how American soldiers came to sexually
abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
The blunt reality is that when there are no
consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are
taught to scorn as subhuman.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security
minister, called detainees “scum” and “Nazis” and boasted of making prison
conditions harsher for Palestinians. When such attitudes prevail, sexual abuse
can become one more tool to inflict pain and humiliation on Palestinians.
Ben-Gvir declined, through a spokeswoman, to
comment on sexual assaults by security services.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization,
documented “a grave pattern of sexual violence” toward Palestinians. It cited
the account of a Gaza prisoner, Tamer Qarmut, who said he had been raped with a
stick. Torture, B’Tselem said, “has become an accepted norm.”
A former Israeli officer in a prison infirmary
described in testimony to the Israeli group Breaking the Silence what that kind
of acceptance means in practice: “You see normal, pretty ordinary people
reaching a point where they abuse people for their own amusement, not even for
an interrogation or anything. For fun, to have something to tell the guys or
revenge.”
Most of the rape and other sexual violence has
been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90
percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age
of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who
arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison
ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male
soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.
For the next few days, she said, she was
repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female
guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women
together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands
behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head
into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she
said.
“They had their hands all over my body,” she
said. “To be honest, I don’t know if they raped me,” she said, because she
sometimes lost consciousness from the beatings.
The aim of the abuse was twofold, she thinks: to
crush her spirit and also to let Israeli men molest a naked Palestinian woman
with impunity.
“I’d be stripped and beaten several times a day,”
she said. “It was as if they were introducing me to everyone who worked there.
At the beginning of each shift, they would bring the guys to strip me.”
When she was about to be released from prison,
she said, she was called into a room with six officials and given a stern
warning never to give interviews.
“They threatened that if I spoke up, they would
rape me, kill me and kill my father,” she said. Not surprisingly, she declined
to be named in this article.
Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have
been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his
account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.
“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not
all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy
sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles
and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he
urinated blood.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down and
stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned.
With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
“They were using cameras to take photos, and I
heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he
said, but it penetrated him.
Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights
monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape
prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official
warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the
media.”
So why was he willing to speak?
“There are moments when remembering feels
unbearable,” he said. “My heart felt it might stop while talking to you about
it just now. But I remember there are people still in there. So I speak up.”
Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence
has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned
for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been
detained, and all described being sexually abused.
One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15
years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also
witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do
this, or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”
The other boys told very similar stories of
sexual violence as part of beatings and noted that the threats of rape were
directed not only at them but also at their mothers and siblings.
Israeli settlers are not an official arm of the
state in the same way that the prison system is, but the Israel Defense Forces
increasingly protect settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers and use
sexual violence to drive Palestinians to flee. “Sexualized violence is used to
pressure communities” to leave their land, according to a new report by the
West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of international aid groups led by
the Norwegian Refugee Council.
The consortium surveyed Palestinian farmers and
found that more than 70 percent of households that had been displaced reported
that threats to women and children, particularly of sexual violence, were the
decisive reason for leaving. “Sexual violence,” said Allegra Pacheco of the
coalition, “is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land.”
In a remote Jordan Valley hamlet of Bedouin
farmers, I met a 29-year-old farmer, Suhaib Abualkebash, who recounted how a
gang of about 20 settlers rampaged through the homes of his family, beating
adults and children alike and stealing jewelry and 400 sheep — and also cut off
his clothes with a hunting knife and then tightly zip-tied his penis and
yanked.
“I was afraid they would cut off my penis,”
Abualkebash told me. “I thought this was the end for me.”
Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated
accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched
because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was
speaking to and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that
Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and
Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.
“For six months I couldn’t speak about it, even
to my family,” said Mohammad Matar, a Palestinian official who told me that
settlers stripped him, beat him and poked him with a stick in the buttocks
while talking about raping him. During the attack, the assailants posted a
photograph on social media of him blindfolded and stripped to his underpants.
With time, Matar decided to speak out to try to
break the stigma. He now keeps a blown-up print of the settlers’ photo of him
on the wall of his office.
To try to make sense of what I found, I called up
Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t
know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by
the accounts I had heard.
So we return to the point I noted at the
beginning of this column: Supporters of Israel were right in 2023 that whatever
our views about the Middle East, we should be able to repudiate rape.
“Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu asked the
international community then, demanding that it condemn sexual violence
committed by what the Israeli government has called the “Hamas rapist regime.”
Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights.
Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well — in particular
at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s
“systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with
at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military
leadership.”
Think of it this way: The horrific abuse
inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.
It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and
Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?
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