ISRAELI soldiers have gone on Israeli television to joke about using dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. A video clip posted on X shows an IDF soldier joking about the allegations.
While a great deal of doubt has been cast on the dog allegations, worse are the more credible allegations that the IDF rapes male prisoners labeled as terrorists with heated iron bars.
New York Times investigative journalist Nicholas Kristof, who is based in the West Bank, has written a major report on the issue that has sparked an uproar among Israel’s supporters.
Noting the allegations of atrocities brought against Hamas in the October 7, 2024 attack, Kristof writes: “And yet, in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has advised his lawyers to initiate defamation action against Kristof and the Times, which will be an interesting exercise if and when the court hears discovery.
“They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers,” Netanyahu posted on X. “We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.”
In July 2024 Israeli settlers raided a military base and rioted for the “right to rape” after reservists were arrested for raping a male prisoner to death with a steel bar.
After the right to rape riots a “right wing” member of the Israeli Knesset proclaimed that Israeli soldiers had the “right to do whatever they wanted” to Palestinian prisoners, including rape.
A media officer for the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Maha al-Husseini told Quds News Network that the organization had documented numerous cases involving Palestinian detainees who were subjected to sexual abuse by Israeli prison authorities through the use of attack dogs inside Israeli prisons.
‘This is not the first time we have documented the use of attack dogs to rape Palestinians,” she said.
However, most of the evidence of widespread, systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of the IDF has come from Israelis themselves.
Such evidence includes CCTV footage leaked from Sde Teiman prison by a senior female IDF officer, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi.
The medical report on the Sde Teiman detainee documented broken ribs, a punctured lung, and an internal rectal tear requiring surgery. An Israeli doctor who treated him described signs of severe abuse consistent with an object inserted deep into the rectum.
The arrested soldiers faced charges for aggravated abuse and sexual violence but these were dropped in March 2026. The video shows the restraint phase before several soldiers lifted riot shields to block vision of the alleged rape.
We wonder whether the lawyers for the Times lawyers will bring into evidence the Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky (Likud) shouting that “everything is legitimate” when asked by another member if inserting a metal rod into the rectum was a legitimate a legitimate action for soldiers.
The Likudist, responded: “Yes! If he is a Nukhba everything is legitimate to do to him! Some of you have probably already heard about the events in Sde Teiman concentration camp today…”
How Netanyahu is going to prosecute defamation against the Times and Kristof seems like a tall order. There are ten named and documented individual accounts collected independently across three separate facilities by six unconnected organizations, including B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, the BBC, and Al-Araby TV.
A lawyer witnessed one incident directly. An Israeli analyst confirmed the accounts after speaking with two IDF guards, one of whom called it “too awful to talk about.”
Conservative commentator Scott Jennings claims the allegations are “anonymous, unverified, unwitnessed”.
More than 135 mutilated bodies returned from Sde Teiman under ceasefire terms still had handcuffs and blindfolds attached. An Israeli human rights organization documented 98 deaths in Israeli custody.
The UN Committee Against Torture called the various cases a “de facto state policy of organized and widespread torture.” None of it has been prosecuted but all of it is in the record.
“What once operated in the shadows is now practiced openly: a regime of organised humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels,” committee report notes.