Sexual violence against Palestinian detainees

The line comes from “Three Years of Genocide,” a paper by the Palestinian prisoners’ organizations. It is one item in a list of “the principal policies employed against Palestinian political prisoners.” The Arabic version of the paper describes the list as an integrated system of practices that turns prison into a place of slow killing.

The commission’s sentence is about Palestinians in general, not about detainees alone. In the same statement, on March 13, 2025, the commission said that other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, “including rape […], were committed either under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement by Israel’s top civilian and military leadership.” Its full report is U.N. document A/HRC/58/CRP.6.

Tamer Qarmut was arrested after Israeli tanks surrounded Kamal Adwan Hospital on Dec. 12, 2023. He was later moved from Sde Teiman to al-Naqab (Ketziot) prison. On Oct. 13, 2025, he returned to the Gaza Strip.

His testimony does not say where he was raped, or where a doctor later examined him. B’Tselem field researcher Muhammad Sabah recorded it on Nov. 8, 2025, and B’Tselem published it in January 2026 in its report “Living Hell,” on Israeli prisons as a network of torture camps.

The Arabic page of that report opens with a content warning that the testimonies that follow describe cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence. The first testimony after the warning is Tamer Qarmut’s.

After his arrest, he and other detainees were moved by bus “to a place whose name we didn’t know.” There he was taken for a medical exam.

He was weighed, and the doctor asked whether he had any chronic illnesses. “I told him I did not, but that I had a disability in my leg and now it hurt even more because of the severe beating I had taken,” he says. Afterward he was held in what he calls “the shack” from Dec. 13 to Dec. 22, 2023.

Sometime between March 10 and 12, 2024, Border Police officers transferred him from the detention facility in Huwarah to Megiddo prison. At the infirmary, a doctor asked him about Hamas and then examined him. After that, he was handed over to the Israel Prison Service, and the assault followed.

Afterward he was taken to wing 10. It was the time of the iftar meal in Ramadan, he recalls.

He was released at the al-Dhahiriya checkpoint on June 10, 2025. The Committee to Protect Journalists describes him as a Palestinian freelance journalist. B’Tselem field researcher Abdulkarim Sadi recorded his testimony on July 22, 2025.

After the assault, the officer ordered the soldiers to take him down and brought him tea and water. He refused to drink them, he says. Then came the threat to send him back to Sde Teiman, and he was taken back there.

B’Tselem field researcher Muhammad Sabah recorded his testimony on Nov. 12, 2025. The testimony does not say where the interrogation room was.

When he gave his testimony, in November 2025, he was still displaced in Deir al-Balah, living in a school building near the sea.

Sde Teiman is an Israeli military detention facility, the same place where Muhammad Khader was held. The detainee in this case is a different man, searched by a group of soldiers on July 5, 2024.

The diagnosis is that of the physicians who later examined him, as Lawfare reported it in an article by Yuval Shany and Amichai Cohen on April 2, 2026, after the indictment in the case was withdrawn.

The detainee was released to Gaza in the October 2025 ceasefire “without him testifying on the matter,” The Times of Israel reported.

The indictment was filed by the former military advocate general, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. Her successor, Maj. Gen. Itay Ofir, withdrew it in a decision he published on March 12, 2026. The charges, according to Lawfare, were abuse and causing serious bodily harm “under aggravated circumstances.”

Among the reasons for the withdrawal, The Times of Israel reported, were “procedural difficulties,” “the accumulation of all these exceptional circumstances” and their impact on “the fundamental and basic right to a fair trial.” The decision also cited an “abuse of process” claim by the defendants.

The U.N. secretary-general’s report on conflict-related sexual violence (S/2026/321, April 21, 2026) notes that “a charge of sexual violence or rape was absent from the indictment” and that “in March 2026, all charges were dropped.” These developments, the report says, “risk reinforcing a climate of impunity that may enable the commission of conflict-related sexual violence.”

On April 16, 2026, Israeli Army Radio reported that the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, had approved the five reservists’ return to duty.

In August 2025, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wrote to Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Danny Danon, that the United Nations had “credible information” of sexual violence against detained Palestinians. Guterres said he was “gravely concerned” about reported violations in several prisons, a detention center and a military base. He warned that Israeli forces could be listed in his next report “due to significant concerns of patterns of certain forms of sexual violence that have been consistently documented by the United Nations.”

The listing came in the secretary-general’s report S/2026/321, dated April 21, 2026, and released in May. It was the first time Israeli forces had been listed “since the review began more than 15 years ago,” The Associated Press reported. The report says that in 2025 the U.N. was able to document “patterns of sexual violence against Palestinians detained in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Of the cases it verified, 13 occurred in 2025 and 18 in 2023 and 2024.

Netanyahu’s words come from a statement his office issued on the day the commission’s report came out: “… the UN has again chosen to attack the State of Israel with false accusations, including baseless accusations of sexual violence.”

In August 2025, Danon also said the secretary-general’s allegations “are steeped in biased publications.”

After the blacklisting, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it had “comprehensively, thoroughly, and unequivocally refuted these allegations.”