In May 2026, the State of Israel was added to the United Nations (UN) blacklist of governments that commit sexual violence in conflict zones. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reported that the agency had verified at least 31 cases from 2023 to 2025, emphasizing that the report should not be seen as comprehensive but instead as “indicative of incidents and patterns.”
The special representative of the UN secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, presented the evidence that led to Israel’s addition to the list (along with Russia and several non-state actors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), identifying actions of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Israel Prison Service (including the Keter Special Forces), and Yamam, the Police National Counter-Terrorism Unit.
The allegations included verified incidents of “rape, including with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, physical violence to the genitals, instances of targeted shooting of the genitals, touching of breast and genitals, strip and cavity searches conducted without apparent security justification, forced nudity, and threats of rape.” Patten stressed that these incidents were not isolated but “part of a pattern of sexual violence against Palestinians, including as a form of torture.”
In response, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Danny Danon, moved to cut ties with the UN Secretary-General’s office, calling the report “disconnected from facts and from reality.” Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs argued that Israel’s inclusion on the list was merely “an attempt to create a fake symmetry between Israel and the real sexual atrocities committed by Hamas.” Weeks later, on the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, Danon publicly confronted the UN secretary-general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, Vanessa Frazier, accusing her of having “caved to the secretary-general’s obsession with targeting Israel.”
Although Israel’s addition to the UN blacklist has heightened current tensions, credible allegations of sexual violence against Palestinians long predate October 2023. Such allegations must be assessed within the established frameworks of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and international criminal law, rather than treated as exceptional events or byproducts of political conflict.
The Historical Use of Sexual Violence in Settings of Colonialism and War
Sexual violence has long been used as a tool of domination and humiliation. As the UN notes, “Sexual violence in conflict is often employed to instill fear, humiliate, dominate and break down the social fabric of communities.” The UN has verified more than 51,000 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in the past decade alone, while cautioning that the true number is substantially higher because most cases go unreported.
During colonial rule, imperial powers often relied on sexual violence to intimidate Indigenous populations, reinforce racial hierarchies, and weaken resistance. During Belgian King Leopold II’s colonial rule in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1885–1908), widespread abuses included rape and other forms of sexual violence committed by colonial agents and soldiers.
In Australia, Aboriginal women and girls experienced extensive sexual exploitation and abuse by European settlers and colonial authorities, reflecting broader systems of dispossession and racial oppression. In both settings, sexual violence was closely connected to policies designed to establish and maintain political control over colonized populations.
Sexual violence has been used to terrorize civilians, displace communities, and destroy social cohesion.
In war, sexual violence has likewise been used to terrorize civilians, displace communities, and destroy social cohesion. During the Bosnian War (1992–1995), Serbian forces systematically raped thousands of Bosnian women and girls, leading international tribunals to recognize rape as a crime against humanity and an instrument of ethnic cleansing. A similar pattern occurred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when women and girls, primarily from the Tutsi ethnic group, were subjected to widespread sexual violence by militias and government forces. The UN estimates that 100,000–250,000 mostly Tutsi women were raped during the genocide’s three months.
More recently, conflicts in Ukraine and Ethiopia have generated credible reports of conflict-related sexual violence, demonstrating that this tactic remains a persistent feature of modern warfare. In Ukraine, investigations have found credible evidence of sexual violence against women, men, and children in occupied areas and detention facilities, often alongside unlawful detention and torture. In Ethiopia, sexual violence against Tigrayans has included forced pregnancy, sexual enslavement, and gender-based violence. One survivor, after Amhara militiamen raped her and then burned her uterus with a heated rod, recalled asking, “What wrong have I done to you?” They replied, “Our problem is with your womb… A Tigrayan womb should never give birth.”
These examples demonstrate that sexual violence in settings of colonialism, genocide, and armed conflict is often organized and strategic rather than incidental, producing lasting physical, psychological, and societal consequences. These crimes are increasingly recognized under international law as serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law, although accountability remains elusive for many victims.
Sexual Violence Against Palestinians
Sexual violence has often been an underreported component of the many indignities suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces since the 1948 Nakba, which also include killing, maiming, movement restrictions, discriminatory policies, statelessness, mass incarceration, property destruction, and land seizure.
Yet as early as one of the most well-known massacres of Palestinians by Zionist militias during the Nakba, in the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, hundreds of murders were accompanied by reports of mutilation and sexual violence, including rape. One survivor recounted, “I screamed, but around me other women were being raped, too.” Survivors also described women and girls being stripped of their clothing and paraded through Jerusalem, where they were mocked, insulted, and pelted with stones.
The day after the massacre, Britain’s Assistant Inspector-General of the Criminal Investigation Department, Richard Catling, visited survivors to collect testimony, accompanied by a doctor and nurse who conducted medical examinations. In his report, he wrote there was “no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking [Zionist militias]. Many young schoolgirls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested.”
Since the Nakba, reports of sexual violence, especially within Israeli detention centers, have persisted. In 2015, scholars from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel collected thousands of testimonies from Palestinian prisoners from the previous decade alleging that “sexual ill-treatment is systemic.” Organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, have called Israeli prisons “an apparatus of retribution and revenge,” while B’Tselem has described the prison system as “a network of torture camps.”
One of the most infamous recent incidents occurred at the Sde Teiman detention facility, where leaked video from July 2024 appeared to show the violent abuse and rape of a male Palestinian detainee. The detainee, who was never charged with a crime, reportedly suffered multiple severe injuries, including rectal damage.
Since the Nakba, reports of sexual violence, especially within Israeli detention centers, have persisted.
The outcomes of the incident were, unfortunately, unsurprising. In October 2025, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, Military Advocate General of the IDF, who took responsibility for leaking the video, was publicly criticized by Defense Minister Israel Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was forced to resign. In March 2026, charges against the five reserve soldiers were dropped, and Netanyahu later referred to them as “heroic warriors.”
Sexual violence does not only take place in prisons. In March 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel documented a “deplorable increase in sexual and gender-based violence” since October 7, 2023, arguing that it was being used “as a strategy of war for Israel to dominate and destroy the Palestinian people.” The Commission found that forced public stripping, forced nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, and sexual assaults were not isolated incidents but part of “standard operating procedures toward Palestinians.” It further concluded that these acts were often directly ordered or at least implicitly encouraged by civilian and military leadership.
Multiple journalists and organizations have also found and documented sexual violence against Palestinians, even as the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls warns that Palestinian victims often do not report incidents because of fear of reprisals. As one example, the BBC reported the accounts of two Palestinian men formerly held in Israeli detention. One said he was stripped and raped with a baton by prison guards while they laughed and threatened his family.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about multiple similar accounts in May 2026, describing, in graphic detail, testimonies by Palestinian men, women, and children who experienced sexual violence by Israeli soldiers, settlers, security agents, and prison guards. In response, Netanyahu threatened to file a libel lawsuit against the Times. The paper defended Kristof’s reporting, saying “this threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative.”
An April 2026 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)-led West Bank Protection Consortium documented multiple cases of sexual violence by Israeli settler as part of efforts to displace Palestinians. Victims described being stripped, sexually harassed, and otherwise abused while Israeli soldiers present did not intervene. In one widely reported March 2026 incident, a Palestinian man recounted how dozens of settlers entered his home, bound him, zip-tied his genitals, and paraded him through the village. Other family members were also restrained, and the settlers threatened to rape the women. The NRC report concluded that such attacks successfully use sexualized violence to pressure communities to flee, finding that more than 70 percent of displaced households interviewed identified the threat of sexualized violence as the decisive reason for leaving their homes.
Widespread Impunity for Sexual Violence
The establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1993) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994) transformed international criminal law by systematically prosecuting wartime sexual violence. In 1998, Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu became the first international case to recognize rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide. Akayesu, a former Rwandan mayor, was convicted of genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity after the tribunal found he facilitated and failed to prevent murder, torture, and widespread rape committed by those under his authority. Importantly, although he did not personally commit every crime, the tribunal found that he encouraged and permitted atrocities, including widespread rape, by those under his authority. His life sentence was upheld on appeal in 2001.
Subsequent cases, including Prosecutor v. Anto Furundžija (1998) and Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac and Vukovic (2001), further developed legal precedents about rape, while the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) provided the broadest jurisdiction over sexual and gender-based crimes of any judicial body in international law. In 2008, UN Security Council Resolution 1820 affirmed that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide,” with later resolutions strengthening implementation. Although these developments transformed the legal framework, accountability has remained inconsistent, leaving a significant gap between legal standards and enforcement.
Internal Israeli investigations are frequently not opened, closed prematurely, or find no wrongdoing.
Israel has argued that its own legal system is capable of investigating and prosecuting alleged violations, making external intervention unnecessary. Yet internal investigations are frequently not opened, closed prematurely, or find no wrongdoing. Since October 2023, despite extensive videos, testimonies, and reports alleging abuses by Israeli soldiers and settlers, the conflict monitoring group Action on Armed Violence found that 88 percent of alleged war crimes or abuse cases were closed or left unresolved within the Israeli legal system, creating a “pattern of impunity.”
November 2025 polling also found that a majority of the Israeli public opposes investigating soldiers suspected of abusing Palestinians from Gaza. A member of Netanyahu’s political party reflected this sentiment when asked whether abuse of Palestinian prisoners, including “insert[ing] a stick into a person’s rectum,” was justified, responding, “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”
Conclusion
The historical record and growing body of contemporary documentation suggest that conflict-related sexual violence cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate byproduct of war. Credible evidence points to recurring patterns, institutional involvement, and persistent impunity. Allegations concerning Palestinians should therefore be examined under the same legal and moral standards applied in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Despite some progress in these settings, sexual violence remains widely underreported, overlooked, denied, or even accepted. Palestinian victims, like victims in all settings and contexts, should expect prompt, independent investigations with meaningful consequences for perpetrators regardless of political affiliation. In the Palestinian context, the link between this insidious form of violence and Israel’s broader, explicitly stated goals of land seizure and forced displacement, cannot be overlooked.
International humanitarian law does not recognize exceptions based on the identity of the perpetrator or victim, nor does it permit accountability to depend on political alliances. For survivors, acknowledgment, independent investigation, and meaningful justice remain essential. Whether through legitimate and independently verified domestic proceedings, or the overdue enforcement of robust international mechanisms, allegations of sexual violence require thorough, impartial scrutiny so that those responsible—regardless of rank, nationality, or affiliation—can be held accountable, and longstanding impunity can finally be challenged.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Haaretz/Breaking the Silence
