How researchers are building an airtight case on Israeli sexual torture of Palestinian detainees

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.