UN: Palestinians report sexual abuse inflicted by Israelis

“I was humiliated and tortured,” said Said Abdel Fatah, a 28 -year -old nurse arrested in November 2023 near the Hospital Al Shifa de Gaza where he worked.

“It was like a boxing bag”He said in videoconference through an interpreter, remembering a particularly hard interrogation during his custody, which ended that same month.

The interrogator “did not stop hitting me in the genital parts … I was bleeding everywhere, the penis and the anus,” said the young man. “I had the feeling that my soul left my body,” he said.

– Criticisms of Israel –

The nurse testified before the United Nations Independent Research Commission on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, created by the Human Rights Council.

This panel, criticized by the Hebrew State, organized two days of auditions on the alleged gender and sexual violence perpetrated by security forces and Israeli settlers.

“It is important,” Chris Seri, a member of the Commission, told AFP, who argues that the victims of these abuses have “the right to be heard.”

Experts and human rights defenders who testified on Tuesday evoked a “systematic” resource to sexual violence in the detention centers and in identity controls from Hamas attacks on October 7 against Israel that caused Gaza’s war.

Daniel Meron, Israeli ambassador to the UN in Geneva, sees a “objectionable” comparison between these accusations and the “shocking sexual violations (…) perpetrated by Hamas towards the Israeli hostages and the victims of October 7”.

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Before the auditions, the diplomat denounced before the press in Geneva a “loss of time” because Israel will investigate and persecute the authors of these acts.

However, lawyer Palestine Sahar Francis doubts this intention and emphasizes that this violence has become “a generalized policy.”

Practically all people detained in Gaza They are forced to undress to be registered and the soldiers sometimes introduce a baton in the anus of the prisoner, he said.

Sexual abuses were “very expanded”, especially in the first months of the war, according to the lawyer.

– “Try a bullet in my head” –

Mohamed Mata, an inhabitant of the West Bank, told torture hours at the audience at the hands of Shin Bet agents (the internal security service) and Israeli settlers without the police intervening.

Just a few days after October 7, when he went to the aid of some Bedouins attacked by settlers, he and two other men were taken to a stable.

The troop chief was put “About my head and ordered me to eat (…) sheep droppings”, Explained to kill.

Before dozens of settlers, the security agent urinated on top of the prisoners. Submitted to twelve hours of violence, kill implored: “They trigger a bullet in my head!”

Containing tears, The Palestine remembers that the boss jumped on his back and tried to sodomize him with a stick.

It also teaches a photo taken by the settlers in which the three men are seen, with bandados, lying in the dust in underwear, and other images that show their body covered with bruises.

After his statement, he admitted to journalists that months passed “in a state of psychological shock.” “I did not think there were people in the earth with such a desire for ugliness, sadism and cruelty”.