Her Story
UN verifies Israeli sexual violence against Palestinian women in detention
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
The United Nations verified conflict-related sexual violence, including as a form of torture, against 14 men, seven women, nine boys and one girl from Gaza and the West Bank, according to the Secretary-General's annual report on conflict-related sexual violence, S/2026/321, dated 21 April 2026 and published at the end of May. Thirteen of the cases occurred in 2025 and 18 in 2023 and 2024.
For female detainees, the report records that the violence consisted mostly of threats of rape, forced nudity, unwanted touching, and humiliating or degrading strip searches carried out without justification. Men and boys were subjected to rape, attempted rape and violence to the genitals, with severe injuries to five male victims.
The report places the violations primarily in detention and interrogation, across military camps including Sde Teiman, Etzion detention centre and Majnunah camp, and one unidentified base; Israel Prison Service facilities including Megiddo, Ofer, Ramla, Hasharon, Shatta, Nafha and Damon, the prison where Palestinian women are held; and Gush Etzion police station.
It also documents violations at checkpoints and during Israeli military operations. Survivors included journalists and human rights defenders. Most cases involved several forms of sexual violence used at once, and in some cases the violations were filmed or photographed, including one rape.
The report is explicit about the limits of its own count. The verified cases, it states, should be read as indicative of patterns over several reporting periods rather than comprehensive, because the Israeli government continues to deny UN bodies access to detention facilities and to Gaza. It also records that detainees were explicitly threatened by Israeli armed and security forces to stop them reporting abuse.
On the basis of those findings the Secretary-General added the Israel Defense Forces, the Israel Prison Service and the border police Counter-Terrorism Unit to the report's annex of parties credibly suspected of patterns of sexual violence in armed conflict.
In a letter to Israel's ambassador reported by Fox News, António Guterres wrote that an increasing number of cases of rape and other sexual violence against Palestinians detained in Israel and the occupied territory had continued to be verified over the past year.
Israel rejected the listing outright. Ambassador Danny Danon called it "a political decision" and said Israel had invited UN representatives to examine the allegations on the ground and they had not come.
The Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein described the decision as shameful and absurd and said the ministry would cut contact with the Secretary-General's office, as reported by Al Jazeera. The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel had supplied documents, data and a detailed response to the claims before publication.
Pramila Patten, the Special Representative who authored the report, told reporters in New York that she had received no information on measures taken by Israel to implement the preventive measures required of it. The Secretary-General's spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said his door remained open.
The pattern was set out in more detail a year earlier.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found in its 13 March 2025 report, A/HRC/58/CRP.6, that forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, and sexual assault form part of Israeli security force standard operating procedures towards Palestinians, and that other forms, including rape and violence to the genitals, were committed under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement from Israel's top civilian and military leadership.
Every incident it documented, the Commission said, was met with impunity.
At the Geneva press conference that day, Commissioner Chris Sidoti said the Commission had asked Israeli authorities repeatedly for information on specific serious cases and had received nothing about prosecutions of security force members or settlers for sexual violence committed since October 2023. Israel dismissed the report; Ynet reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked the Human Rights Council rather than address the findings.
Where accountability was tested, it collapsed.
The 2026 report records that five reserve soldiers from Unit 100 were indicted on 19 February 2025 over a severe assault at Sde Teiman in July 2024 that, according to the Commission of Inquiry, involved the insertion of an object into a detainee's anus causing serious rectal injury — and that despite video and medical evidence, no charge of sexual violence or rape appeared in the indictment.
All charges were dropped in March 2026. The UN says it has still received no information on any indictment in Israel for sexual violence against a Palestinian detainee.
On 30 April 2026, UN special procedures experts said sexual violence had become embedded in Palestinians' daily lives under occupation and functions as a tool of control and dispossession, listing detention, checkpoints, house raids and encounters with soldiers and settlers as the settings.
In the West Bank, they said, adults and children face sexual harassment, invasive searches including anal and vaginal searches, and threats of sexual assault, often in or near their homes.
The Commission of Inquiry's report of 9 June 2026 found that settlers committed or threatened sexual violence to instil fear and harassed Palestinian women, within a wider finding that Israeli authorities enabled settler attacks.
Israel's mission in Geneva rejected the report as resting on unsubstantiated allegations and drawing a false moral equivalence, and the Israeli military said any alleged misconduct by soldiers is thoroughly reviewed, Reuters reported.
The Geneva-based group UN Watch has separately disputed the underlying settler-violence data, citing research by the Israeli organisation Regavim that it says overstates the number of incidents. Before the Committee against Torture in November 2025, Israel's delegation said claims against it formed part of a mass disinformation campaign.
Palestinian monitors report continuing violence inside Damon.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society said in May that Israeli prison forces carried out at least ten raids on women's sections in March and April, involving beatings and prisoners being forced to the floor and cuffed behind their backs, and that strip searches have been routine since 2023, particularly during transfers through Hasharon.
The Palestine Center for Prisoners Studies says 91 women remain held, including two girls under 18, and that a woman arrested while seven months pregnant gave birth in Damon in September 2025 and is still held there with her infant.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor notes the International Committee of the Red Cross has not visited any Palestinian detainee since 7 October 2023.
OHCHR figures cited in the Secretary-General's report put more than 9,000 Palestinians in Israeli detention, over 4,000 of them without charge or trial. How many are women, and how many of the 2025 cases will ever be investigated, is not on any public record, and with monitors still barred from the prisons the UN's own count remains a floor rather than a total.
%20(cropped).jpg?width=640)
