Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor: published the report “Another genocide behind walls” on sexual violence as a tool of torture in Israeli detention facilities

In April 2026, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published a report titled “Another genocide behind walls”. Sexual violence in Israeli prisons and detention centres and engineered impunity. October 2023 - October 2025.” Drawing primarily on testimonies from Palestinian former detainees from the Gaza Strip, the report documents how systematic sexual violence perpetrated by Israeli forces inside detention facilities is being deployed as a deliberate instrument of subjugation and destruction of the Palestinian people, compounding the broader assault against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip that has escalated since October 7, 2023. 

The report paints a harrowing picture of detention conditions that are inhumane by design. Beyond the structural violence of harsh detention policies, including sleep, food, and water deprivation, degrading conditions, and persistent threats, Israeli soldiers are documented inflicting severe and lasting sexual physical and psychological harm, deliberate humiliation, and the deliberate impairment of detainees' reproductive capacity. The abuses catalogued are explicit and extreme: rape, including gang rape, rape involving animals and objects, sexual abuse filmed by perpetrators, beatings, urination on detainees, electric shocks, and targeted strikes to the genitals severe enough to cause permanent loss of reproductive or excretory function.

These acts of violence are perpetrated against both male and female Palestinian persons. Speaking out is never easy, but the report notes that its testimonies come primarily from male former detainees, reflecting the reality that in Palestinian society, the consequences of disclosure fall with far greater weight and complexity on women, whose voices remain largely unheard. The report shows how, for men, sexual violence is carried out as a means of stripping away dignity and inducing a sense of total powerlessness, while for women it functions as a tool of social destruction, inflicting shame that fractures family bonds and forces withdrawal from communal life.

The report also indicts the Israeli justice system for its active role in sustaining impunity. The data presented make clear that the failure to prevent or prosecute these crimes is neither incidental nor a matter of institutional capacity. Rather, the evidence points to a deliberate construction of the appearance of accountability, one in which perpetrators face no meaningful consequences and crimes committed against Palestinians continue undisturbed.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor asserts that the documented sexual violence and torture fall within several categories of international crimes. The cited practices meet the legal definitions of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, grounded both in the Convention against Torture and the Rome Statute. Rape and other forms of sexual violence constitute a further and distinct category of crimes under international criminal law, specifically Articles 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute. Because these acts are perpetrated within a situation of armed conflict and military occupation, the war crimes provisions of the four Geneva Conventions are equally applicable. Their widespread, systematic nature, their targeting of a civilian population and their execution in furtherance of a state policy, crimes against humanity. Finally, the report argues that the documented patterns cannot be assessed in isolation: read alongside the broader attack on Palestinians in Gaza, they rise to the level of genocide.

The report closes with a series of urgent measures addressed to international institutions, states, and the broader global community.
On the International Crimal Court front, Euro-Med Monitor calls on the Office of the Prosecutor to explicitly frame genocide as the primary legal lens for its investigation into Gaza, to open a dedicated and expedited inquiry into the specific intent to destroy Palestinians, and to fast-track investigations into torture and sexual violence in detention.
States Parties to the Rome Statute are urged to fully cooperate with the Court, securing evidence, protecting witnesses, and executing arrest warrants, and to activate their own national jurisdictions to prosecute suspects present on their territory. States applying universal jurisdiction should launch structured criminal investigations into torture and sexual violence against Palestinian detainees, with adequate resources, and work toward both national and international arrest warrants targeting perpetrators and their chains of command.
At the United Nations level, the report urges that the Israeli army and its security agencies be listed in the annex to the Secretary-General's annual report on conflict-related sexual violence, a step that would fill a significant classification gap, as previous UN listings did not explicitly recognise sexual violence as a distinct criterion.
Finally, the international community is called upon to mobilise funding for comprehensive medical, psychological, and social support programmes for survivors, designed in line with international standards including the Istanbul Protocol, and to establish robust mechanisms to protect victims, witnesses, and their families.