There is overwhelming evidence that the Israeli military is raping Palestinian detainees with dogs.
We don’t just have repeated testimonies from Palestinians – but that of Israeli soldiers, too.
Last week, Euro Med Monitor, an NGO based in Geneva, released a report headlined “Another genocide behind walls”: Sexual violence in Israeli prisons and detention centres and engineered impunity.
They carry the testimony of 35-year-old Amir, who was detained by the Israeli army in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp. He testifies the following:
I was detained in Sde Teiman. They took a group of detainees and me to a corridor between the sections and forced us to strip completely naked. The soldiers brought in several dogs. One of them urinated on me. One of the dogs then raped me, penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten. This continued for several minutes. I felt profoundly humiliated and violated.
They then report the testimony of another 35-year-old Palestinian former detainee in the same camp, who says the following:
We heard dogs barking in the area, and from time to time, the dogs would urinate on us while we were detained in the metal cages. The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me. At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.
I was completely naked, with no clothes on. I felt the dog’s fluids on my body. I tried to resist, but I was handcuffed, and the space was so small that I could not move. Two of them were holding me down tightly. This went on for three to four minutes.”
Last November, another NGO, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, also released a report carrying the Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Detention against Released Palestinian Detainees.
They detail the case of a Palestinian man named A.A. who reports being tortured during 19 months of his detention including forced stripping, obscene insults, threats of rape against him and his family, culminating in his rape by a trained dog inside the Sde Teiman military camp.
He says:
I was moved to a section I didn’t know inside Sde Teiman. During the first weeks there, amid repeated suppression operations, I was taken with a group of detainees in a degrading manner to a place far from the cameras—a passage between sections. We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me. Then one of the dogs raped me—the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces. The dog’s assault lasted about three minutes; the overall suppression lasted about three hours. Because of the severe beating, all of us sustained injuries across our bodies. I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation; I lost control because I could never have imagined experiencing such a thing. Afterward, a doctor stitched a wound in my head caused by the torture—seven stitches without anesthesia. I also suffered bruises, fractures in my limbs, and a rib fracture.
In October 2024, Al Jazeera aired the video testimony of a Palestinian detainee.
Here is what the Palestinian detainee says:
“Sde Teiman wasn’t just a normal prison. It was a place for exacting vengeance.
Let me tell you about the worst thing I experienced at Sde Teiman prison.
They called the names of three people, and I was one of them. We came out into a cement courtyard, dedicated to one form of torture. They removed our blindfolds.
We were crouching on our knees. They came and took one of the other men.
They beat him. After they beat him, they forced him to the ground on his belly.
They tied his hands and tied his feet. There were about eight or nine soldiers.
They stripped him of his underpants. A captain came and sprayed something on his backside.
There was a dog there. They unleashed the dog on him.
The dog raped the young man. It raped him, literally speaking. Rape.
In another article published by The New Arab in 2024, a detainee is interviewed:
MA: Yes…one day after your visit, a group of soldiers came with dogs, they came to where we were. They selected prisoners at random from every age group … children, young men, old men. They made them lie on the ground, face down, their hands tied behind their heads.
They made the dogs attack them, tearing at the skin and flesh of the prisoners […], then they stood them up and put them in a corner where there was a big “iron window”. They put [the prisoners’] hands on the window, then began beating them on their backs, their buttocks, and their legs from behind.
Then they set the dogs on them again, and then one of the soldiers tried to get one of the dogs to rape one of the prisoners! They teach their dogs to have sex with prisoners! Can you imagine?
[…]
They attacked another prisoner called “J.M.” in the same way – they beat him and abused him, and brought in dogs to rape him. They stripped him naked and put the dogs on top of him, they were ripping at his flesh, then a soldier came carrying an “electrical baton”, which emitted high-voltage electric shocks, and they started beating the prisoner on his genitals.
They also electrocuted his backside, then they stood him up on his feet and took hold of his genitals and started yanking them down violently until he fainted. Then they took him to an unknown location.
Now, Shaiel Ben-Ephraim is an Israeli academic and former soldier, who has sources in the Israeli military. He says the following:
I talked to two guards in Sde Teiman, on more than one occasion. One had seen this happen and said it was too awful to talk about. The other said that he had heard about it from others and believed it was true. This happened. This is happening still. The evidence is too overwhelming.”
This is a level of depravity that the vast majority of people would struggle to imagine anyone even thinking up, let alone enacting. And yet the evidence is overwhelming: that the Israeli military is systematically using dogs to rape Palestinian detainees.
