Al Jazeera’s new investigation brings forward what Palestinians have been reporting for years: rape, sexual torture and humiliation are being used inside Israeli detention sites as a deliberate method of control. The film gathers testimonies from former detainees who describe the same pattern of abuse, carried out in the same way, across different prisons and military facilities.
One of the central testimonies comes from Muhammad al‑Bakri, who says he remembers the exact day he was raped. He had already spent weeks beaten, tied up, and forced to sit in his own waste. On that day, he says, soldiers surrounded him with their dogs. “There were six soldiers on the right and six on the left,” he said. “They would ask your name. If you said ‘Muhammad’, they would say, ‘No, say your name is bitch.’”
Al‑Bakri says he was held with seven other prisoners. All of them were stripped, blindfolded and handcuffed. “We were raped after being stripped of our clothes,” he said. “We were shouting, ‘Oh Lord, oh God’, but they were just laughing and filming us.” He also described soldiers using dogs during the assault. “The dogs were following commands from the officers to [attack] us,” he said. The abuse lasted twenty to thirty minutes before the soldiers ordered them to dress and dragged them back to their cells.
The documentary includes multiple testimonies like his. Former detainees describe forced nudity, rape, sexual threats, soldiers filming assaults, and dogs trained to bite genitals. These accounts match what human rights groups such as the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor have documented. They also align with findings raised by UN experts and by International Criminal Court judges, who say the evidence points to widespread and systematic sexual violence by Israeli forces.
The film shows that these are not isolated acts. Survivors describe the same methods, the same insults, the same setup: groups of prisoners stripped together, assaulted together, filmed together. Sexual violence is used to break individuals, but also to send a message to entire communities. The repetition of the same techniques across different locations suggests a system that allows and protects these acts.
Al Jazeera’s investigation forces the issue into the open. Soldiers laugh during the assaults. They record them. They mock the prisoners’ cries. This is not hidden behavior. It is carried out in front of other soldiers, in front of cameras, inside facilities run by the state. The documentary raises the question of how many more people have lived through this and never spoken, and how many never survived.
The film does not claim to be the final record. It is a collection of voices that have finally been heard. It shows that sexual violence is not a side effect of the occupation. It is one of its tools.
