“Everything Is Legitimate”: How Israel Uses Rape as a Tool of Genocide by Sophie Lewis

In July 2024, a surveillance video leaked out of a military facility in the Negev desert – then, it persistently eluded Israel’s attempts to suppress it. The footage appeared to show a group of masked Israeli military reservists gang-raping a Palestinian detainee under the cover of riot shields at Sde Teiman, a makeshift detention camp that has elicited growing horror from human rights organizations and onlookers since the start of the genocide. The victim was hospitalized with a ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage. Military police arrested nine soldiers in connection to the attack on July 29.

Sde Teiman is an army base in an arid expanse about half an hour’s drive from the Gaza perimeter. After October 7, 2023, it was quickly converted into a detention facility for Palestinians from Gaza abducted by Israeli forces. What it promptly became – documented through survivor testimony, medical reports, and the findings of multiple human rights investigations – is a torture facility rife with sexual abuse. Not only are detainees held for days in stress positions, blindfolded and shackled, denied food, water, hygiene, and medical attention, but they are also raped.