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Ramallah, occupied West Bank – Qusay Abu al-Kabash, 29, continues to suffer physically and psychologically from a sexual assault allegedly perpetrated by a group of settlers who attacked the Bedouin community where he lives in the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.
On March 13, in the middle of the night, more than 70 settlers attacked Khirbet Hamsa al-Fawqa.
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Qusay told Al Jazeera that the settlers divided themselves into groups to attack the Palestinian tents. Five of the settlers attacked his tent – where he had been asleep – and began beating him severely with their hands and sticks. They also assaulted two foreign female activists who were sleeping in the same tent.
“The settlers then forcibly removed my pants while tying my hands and feet, binding my body with my belt, and stripping me of my underwear,” Qusay said. He recounted that the settlers then beat his genitals, tied his limbs and genitals with plastic zip ties, and humiliated him, before threatening to repeat the assault if he did not leave the area.
The assault on Qusay and all the residents of the area lasted for approximately 45 minutes. During that time, many residents, including children, reported being beaten, and said they were threatened with death if they didn’t leave immediately. The settlers also stole hundreds of livestock.
At the end of the assault, Qusay said that the settlers dragged him along the ground without his underwear and severely beat him all over his body, including his eye, which later became swollen.
“The psychological effects of the sexual assault on me far outweighed the physical impact,” Qusay said. “After the assault, I felt extremely angry and irritable, and I preferred to sit alone, distressed.”
Forced from their homes
Sexual violence and deliberate harassment have become increasingly common in the occupied West Bank, perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. According to observers, these acts are no longer isolated incidents but rather systematic tools used by Israel to pressure Palestinians and force them to leave their homes.
On April 20, the West Bank Protection Consortium – led by the Norwegian Refugee Council and funded by the European Union and several European states – published a report titled, Sexual Violence and Forcible Transfer in the West Bank, documenting cases of conflict-related sexual violence over a period of nearly three years in the Palestinian territory.
The report documented forced nudity, invasive body searches, threats of rape, and sexual harassment. The report concluded that more than 70 percent of the displaced families interviewed said threats against women and children, particularly sexual violence, were a decisive factor in leaving their homes.
But the problem could be even larger in scale than the report describes, due to the difficulty of documentation, fear, and social stigma associated with sexual violence.
Strip searches
Abeer al-Sabbagh, 60, was one of the women the Israeli army allowed to enter Jenin refugee camp for a limited time on April 13 to check on their homes after a yearlong Israeli closure of the area following a deadly weeks-long raid last year. But Abeer didn’t know she would be subjected to a strip search.
The soldiers forced the women into a house at the camp’s entrance that they had occupied. Inside, female soldiers were waiting to conduct thorough searches.
“We didn’t know they were going to search us. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone at all,” Abeer said. “The female soldiers started by searching us with their hands, then they told me to lift my dress. After that, they ordered me to take it off, then they ordered me to take off all my clothes. I hesitated, and they started yelling at me. I told them I didn’t want to enter the camp and wanted to leave immediately. One of the female soldiers yelled at me and said, ‘You will be searched whether you want to enter the camp or not.'”
Abeer began pleading with the female soldier not to strip her, but the soldiers shouted at her.
“At that moment, I cried a lot and wished I hadn’t gone to the camp,” she added.
“I felt truly humiliated,” Abeer said. “Perhaps of everything we’ve experienced as residents of Jenin camp, this is the worst thing that has happened to me.”
Widespread phenomenon
Violence and sexual harassment have had a devastating effect, with women and girls particularly affected. To reduce the likelihood of encountering Israelis who might assault or harass them, Palestinian girls have sometimes dropped out of school, and women stopped working, according to the West Bank Protection Consortium report.
Coordinator of the Youth Against Settlements group in Hebron, Issa Amro, told Al Jazeera that Israel uses sexual harassment as a tool to make life difficult for Palestinian citizens and to retaliate against their presence in areas of friction.
According to Amro, sexual violence before October 2023 was the result of individual acts by some soldiers, but now, it has become a widespread phenomenon, used as a tool to harass citizens and residents, especially in the Old City of Hebron. Many Palestinian families have left their homes, and many women avoid crossing checkpoints to avoid being humiliated.
“Israel, of course, doesn’t respect that we are a conservative society. Soldiers force women to undress in front of them at checkpoints, try to reach sensitive areas, ask them sexual questions, and make sexual innuendos,” he explained.
Harassment has become a daily occurrence in the Old City of Hebron, with women and young boys being harassed as they pass through the Israeli checkpoints erected around the Ibrahimi Mosque.
In December 2024, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem published a detailed report containing numerous testimonies of mistreatment and humiliation at the hands of soldiers, including men, women, and children, in their daily lives or while passing through the southern part of Hebron.
The testimonies described detention, humiliating body searches, filming victims during assaults, and unjustified physical and verbal abuse.
Amro cited a case widely reported on a year and a half ago, when a soldier pulled down his pants in front of a 17-year-old Palestinian girl at a checkpoint in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron and asked her to go with him into the small room designated for soldiers.
Israel says that cases of sexual violence by its soldiers are isolated incidents, and not part of a wider policy.
Rape in prisons
Sexual assaults against Palestinians in Israeli prisons have also been reported.
A Human Rights Watch report published in August 2024, based on interviews with detainees, documented torture and ill-treatment in detention centres and included testimonies of sexual violence, including rape and sexual assault, according to detainees.
One of the most famous cases is the sexual abuse of a Palestinian detainee from Gaza at the Sde Teiman prison by Israeli soldiers. Five soldiers were charged after footage emerged of the incident, and an Israeli doctor reported the incident to the press, but the charges were dropped in March after a campaign led by the Israeli far right to exonerate the soldiers.
Sexual assault has not been limited to attacks on detainees from the Gaza Strip. Journalist Sami al-Sai from Tulkarem in the northern West Bank told Al Jazeera that he was raped with a metal object during his detention.
In his testimony, al-Sai explained that he was detained from February 2024 to June 2025 and was subjected to severe beatings by prison guards for almost the entire duration of his detention in Megiddo and Rimon prisons.
He said that there are several cases of prisoners being raped and subjected to sexual violence in Israeli prisons, but not all of them dare to speak about what happened to them for their own reasons.
“During one of the physical torture sessions, the guards took me to another location and forced me to sit on the ground and bend over while they beat me severely. Then they quickly and forcefully removed my clothes and inserted a solid object into my rectum. I felt excruciating pain and began screaming loudly, but they beat me again,” he added.
Sami began bleeding, but the guards ignored him and returned him to his cell, beating him severely. Other prisoners rushed to his aid and tried to stop the bleeding.
“They wouldn’t let me see a doctor or even go to the clinic,” he said. “I bled for two weeks and treated myself. I still suffer from pain, even after all this time, and of course, the psychological damage is still there.”
