A video has been released showing the gang rape of a Palestinian female prisoner by guards at the Sde Teiman detention center in the Negev desert in southern Israel.
The video, verified by Tel Aviv Tribune, shows the prisoner being selected from a larger group and tied to the ground. The victim is then escorted to a wall, where guards, using their shields to hide her identity from the camera, proceed to rape her.
The attack was reportedly so brutal that after he was taken to hospital, Israeli media reported the victim was unable to walk.
Ten soldiers were eventually arrested on July 29 for the rape, a case that has shaken Israeli society. The soldiers belong to a unit known as Force 100, which is tasked with guarding the Sde Teiman site, according to Haaretz.
Military prosecutors released three of the arrested soldiers on August 4, adding to the two previously released by investigators following a hearing before a military court in Kfar Yona on July 30, during which protesters gathered in support of the arrested soldiers.
The video shocked many Israelis. Some observers, including a local human rights group and two UN agencies, expressed concern about the treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
However, for some, including the country’s far-right finance minister, the outrage has focused on the “crime” of recording the video, rather than the alleged rape itself.
Taking to X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday night, Bezalel Smotrich demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the perpetrators of the leak of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and caused enormous damage to Israel worldwide and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.”
Others, including far-right and ultranationalist politicians such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in Israel, have argued that any action – even gang rape – is permissible if undertaken for state security.
Defending the indefensible
Following the arrest of the reservists on July 29, far-right groups, some of which included government ministers, stormed the center of Sde Teiman in southern Israel later the same day.
Unable to locate and free the imprisoned soldiers, they then turned to the Beit Lid base, 60 km away, where the soldiers were being held for interrogation, to demand their release.
Unrest continued at a hearing before the High Court, convened on Wednesday to consider the petitions of prisoners from Sde Teiman who were allegedly tortured. The proceedings were interrupted by protesters, including victims of the October 7 Hamas attack, who shouted “Shame” and “We are sovereign.”
Israeli lobby group Guarding the Soldiers, a new organization set up to defend soldiers accused of rape, said in Israeli media: “The hearing in the High Court this morning is absurd and a gift to (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar and the murderers.”
Israeli politicians, including members of the government, have also defended the defendants. Ben-Gvir, head of the prison service, told Israeli media on the day of the reservists’ arrest that it was “shameful” that Israel was arresting “our best heroes.” The same day, Smotrich, who was part of the far-right mob that stormed the prison, released a video message in which he said that “IDF soldiers deserve respect” and should not be treated as “criminals.”
Asked last week by Ahmad Tibi, one of the Arab members of the Israeli Knesset, whether it was legitimate to “stick a stick up a person’s rectum,” Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, replied: “If it’s a Hamas (Nukhba) activist, everything is legitimate! Everything!”
“Just the tip of the iceberg”
The video of the alleged gang rape in Sde Teiman is the latest piece in a growing body of evidence of abuse, sexual assault and systematic deprivation of food and medical care suffered by Palestinians in the Israeli prison system.
A report titled Welcome to Hell, released this week by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, includes interviews with 55 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention centers since October 7. In first-hand accounts, the prisoners, the majority of whom were later released without charge to locations across the occupied Palestinian territory, Gaza and Israel, describe being assaulted, insulted and sexually abused by guards.
“The living conditions in Sde Teiman are not unique. They are just the tip of the iceberg,” the organisation’s spokesperson, Shai Parnes, told Tel Aviv Tribune by telephone from Jerusalem.
“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from prisoners held in 16 different locations across Israel. It was depressing. As we collected the testimonies, we realized that all the testimonies were almost identical, regardless of age, gender or place of detention. There is no doubt. This type of abuse is systematic,” he said.
“In contradiction with international law”
Allegations of systematic abuse of prisoners within a justice system that critics say is fundamentally at odds with international law were also detailed in a separate report released on Monday by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), and in an unpublished report – seen by Tel Aviv Tribune in March – by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
In response to warnings from the Shin Bet security agency about overcrowding in the prison system in early July, Ben-Gvir reiterated his call for the execution of Palestinian prisoners, tweeting that one of his main goals since coming to power was to “deteriorate the conditions of detention of terrorists and reduce their rights to the minimum required by law.”
He said: “Everything that was published about the abominable conditions” of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons “was true.”
Human rights at the heart of the debate
The United States, Israel’s main ally, has called allegations of sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners “horrific,” saying Israel must investigate “promptly” and “fully.”
US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told the media on Wednesday: “There should be zero tolerance for sexual abuse and rape of any detainee. Period. That is a core belief of the United States.”
On Thursday, the European Union also expressed its dismay. Peter Stano, a spokesman for the EU’s diplomatic service, told Politico: “The EU is seriously concerned by allegations of human rights violations and abuses, including torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees at the Sde Teiman military base in Israel and elsewhere.”
However, many in Israel continue to defend the conditions of detention of Palestinian prisoners, as well as the rapes allegedly committed by soldiers in Sde Teiman.
“The issue is not really rape,” Ori Goldberg, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst, told Tel Aviv Tribune. “The issue is whether Israel or Israelis can be accused of doing anything to defend the state.”
In the view of some, Goldberg explains, no act, no matter how immoral it may appear to the outside world, is taboo if it is done to enhance Israel’s security.
“We even had a TV reporter criticize not the rape but the ‘disorganized’ way it was carried out,” Goldberg added.
This view remains in the minority, he warned. Yet even among Israeli liberals who oppose this view of their country and its actions, there is little thought given to Palestinian victims.
“Oh, it has nothing to do with the victims,” Goldberg said, “it’s all about Israel.”