It’s not blood libel when it’s true (and also not new)

JVL Introduction

“On the day after the United Nations had voted to establish the State of Israel in November, 1947, Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president and, to many, its founding father, wrote: ‘I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it shall do with the Arabs.’ The dilemma his prophecy encapsulates leads directly to the situation revealed by our investigation.”

from the Sunday Times Insight team, 1977

We have seen how Israel has treated “the Arabs” from the Nakba onwards. Dispossession, ethnic cleansing, brutal military occupation, widespread incarceration, settler violence and much more. Torture has been a constant too and all forms of oppression have worsened dramatically since the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad attack on October 7th 2023.

Israel now wants to sue the New York Times for publishing an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristoff entitled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians“. The article included references to rape by dogs meted out to Palestinians incarcerated by the State – in about one third of cases without even a charge or any hint of due process. Israel argues that this is a blood libel but there is ample evidence to support the conclusions that rape and sexual assault are systematically used in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians. To its credit the  NYT has defended the piece and the writer.

Israel used denialism, as it always does, as its main form of “defence” but we see the reality of the genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the images of prisoners who have been released who have clearly suffered horrendously in jail, some returning gaunt and looking as though they have been terrified while incarcerated.

Below we refer to the report from Euro Med Human Rights Monitor that focused on sexual torture between October 2023 and October 2025 and to a report from 1977, an Insight article in the London Sunday Times. It is worrying that it is almost impossible to imagine a legacy media outlet today producing work of this depth and that is unequivocal in its conviction that Israel uses torture on Palestinian detainees. The article also calls out all the places where the Israeli Embassy response claims as fact things that are not true. The Sunday Times was not by any means a left wing outlet but it was a newspaper with commitment to revealing the truth. Ten years after its publication, and the investigations by other groups, most notably Amnesty International, “an Israeli judicial panel finally confirmed that Israeli security officials did indeed routinely torture Palestinian prisoners.”

In April we published an article about a report from EuroMed Human Rights Monitor which is tough reading; here are some key excerpts from this thorough, well referenced report.

“The testimonies in this report are interconnected with other evidence and widely known data, including leaked CCTV footage of gang rapes, such as the shocking incident involving reserve soldiers at Sde Teiman. These facts are supported by rare testimonies from Israeli whistleblowers, including doctors and soldiers, who have admitted to serious medical violations. Preliminary medical reports reveal severe injuries to the rectum and genitals, and stories of bodies returned to Gaza showing signs of torture. Additionally, reports from the United Nations and prominent human rights groups confirm that Palestinians face systematic and widespread sexual violence in Israeli prisons and detention centres.

This cross-referenced, multi-source evidence confirms that the crimes of torture and sexual violence committed by Israeli security forces against Palestinians are not isolated incidents or mere behavioural deviations by soldiers. Instead, they are systematic and widely practised as part of an organised state policy, which receives full protection from the highest political, military, and judicial authorities.” 

and

“Sources also reported disturbing instances where trained military dogs were used to perform anal sexual assaults on detainees openly in front of soldiers. Detainees were also subjected to electric shocks and were hit directly in the crotch with hands or military boots. These abuses led to documented cases of permanent physical injuries, including loss of reproductive or excretory functions, removal of testicles, and, in some cases, death under torture.” (my emph LL)

Denial and, of course, allegation of blood libel seems a standard response since they cannot claim “self defence” against bound and blindfolded prisoners.  But in addition to the Euro Med and other reports, including two from Bt’Selem since October 2023, a researcher has uncovered a report from the University of California Press and Institute for Palestine Studies that contains the original information for a 1977 Insight article by the London Sunday Times, the response from the Israeli Embassy in London and the Times’s response to the Embassy’s response that was replete with denials.

The report describes torture experienced by 44 of the 49 men who were spoken with. There seemed to have been different “specialities” at different prisons.

“Like the allegations involving the prisons of Ramallah and Hebron or the secret interrogation centre, those relating to the Russian Compound consistently specify a range of abuses which is both limited and by and large peculiar to that place. At the Russian Compound [In Jerusalem LL], these centre on sexual assault.

Nine of those we interviewed spoke of having had their genitals beaten, squeezed or twisted. Consistently, they said this was done mostly from behind, while they stood, naked and with legs apart, facing a wall. “

Another occasion was accidentally observed by a lawyer:

“…Hedva Sarid walked into Barack Four. She is the secretary of the Israeli-born lawyer Lea Tsemel, whom she had arranged to meet there. “I looked for a secretary in the reception office, but nobody was there. Then I heard a shout I think ‘halam’ [Arabic for ‘immediately’]. The door of an office a little further down the corridor was half-open and I looked inside.
“There were some men five, six or seven around someone who I recognized as a client of ours. They were all talking to him at the same time. In the middle of shouting at him, one of them, a man with grey hair, swung his leg and kicked our client in the genitals. The client cried out and folded over. He held his genitals and he was crying. “

This 1977 report refers to dogs being present but does not  allege assault of any nature by the dogs at this time.  There was another, horrific example of sexual violence at the Russian Compound with terrible testimony from Josef Odeh, which is

“by no means unique. It squares with the pattern thrown up by other testimony; and some corroboration is available.”

“Odeh’s allegations go back to 1969 when his daughter Rasmiah, then aged 21, was given two life sentences for terrorist offences which included the planting of two bombs which killed 14 people. 

“Odeh says that it was around 1 a. m. on February 28, 1969, when Israeli soldiers burst into his home, then in Ramallah, and arrested him and his three daughters – one 23, one 17 and Rasmiah. They were taken to the Russian Compound. His testimony bears out what the later prison sentences argue: that the Israelis were, from the start, really interested in Rasmiah. According to Odeh’s account, during his 20 days at the compound, the interrogators arranged a series of confrontations between members of the family, seemingly, as a pressurizing device. Once, he had said, he was kept in one room while Rasmiah was beaten nearby:

“When they took me back… Rasmiah couldn’t stand on her own feet. She was lying on the floor and there were blood stains on her clothes. Her face was blue and she had a black eye. Then she was picked up by two soldiers, and at that moment I started crying and screaming and they blindfolded me and I think she was then taken away. “

As his recital continued, Odeh became visibly distressed. He began to breathe rapidly and the muscles in the side of his neck were twitching. We asked him when he next saw Rasmiah, and he began to cry. At last he said to our interpreter: “I wish I had died rather than see this thing… It’s a question of honour… It’s all right, interpret, why not? What is there to tell? They held her down and shoved up a stick.”

When he could go on, he said that he had been taken into an interrogation room to find Rasmiah naked and handcuffed. One of the interrogators, he said, “asked me to sleep with her, and I said: ‘Don’t even think of that. I would never do such a thing.’

They were beating me and beating her and we were both screaming. Rasmiah was still saying: ‘I know nothing.’ And they spread her legs and shoved the stick into her. She was bleeding from her mouth and from her face and from her end. Then I became unconscious.

The Israeli Embassy in London responded to the article, which had taken five months of research and was written very carefully, noting for example when the Palestinians interviewed were then or previously guilty of terrorist activities and when they thought the impact was not so bad as claimed.

Inevitably the Embassy piece was replete with denial and in its response, the Times conceded one point but called out numerous points made by the Embassy as being “untrue”.  Among those lies were the assertion that the Red Cross was routinely informed of every prisoner and that they were able to visit.

In fact, while it has allowed the Red Cross to visit prisons it has “consistently forbidden the Red Cross to see prisoners undergoing interrogation” and notes that the Embassy response ignores the fact that “over the last nine years [1968-77 LL]  when Red Cross representatives have got to prisoners in jails, they have heard story after story of ill-treatment and torture. And the Red Cross has filed hundreds of notices to the Israeli Government pointing this out….The Red Cross is not immediately notified of arrests. Often it is the families or lawyers of prisoners who contact the Red Cross and usually they do not themselves know where the prisoners are now. The Red Cross then tries to trace and get to the detainees as swiftly as possible especially if there are any grounds for suspecting ill-treatment. But the delegates face three obstacles. They have access only to prisons, not to police stations or military camps. Nor do they have unrestricted access even to prisons. Attached to prisons in the occupied territories are sets of cells which the Red Cross cannot see. Some are outside the prison proper, attached to the local military governor’s office. But inside Nablus jail, for example, the special cells known there as “X-cells” are to be found on the south side near the solitary confinement cell. These remain under the control of the security services, and the Red Cross has no access.

Nor, for the first eight years of occupation, could the Red Cross visit any prisoners in the holding and interrogation centre known as the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. And it has no access to the secret interrogation centre where Harb was held. Moreover, 48 hours before a prison visit, the Red Cross submits to the prison authorities a list of prisoners it particularly wants to see. It sometimes then happens that when the delegates arrive, they are told that the prisoner in question has just been moved to another jail. The delegates covering that jail promptly add the man to their list. If they in turn are told that the prisoner has again been moved a process described to us as “play-
ing paper games” their concern inevitably increases.

Of course, the Red Cross had no access to Palestinians in Israeli jails since October 7th 2023 and only minimal access has been agreed more recently.

19 years later the report was remembered by the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs  that noted:

The “Times report, the controversy it generated had the result of touching off investigations by other groups, both foreign and Israeli. It took another 10 years before an Israeli judicial panel finally confirmed that Israeli security officials did indeed routinely torture Palestinian prisoners. (my emph LL)

However, instead of demanding the medieval practice be stopped, it agreed that “moderate physical pressure” could be employed against prisoners. Those are the general guidelines that Israel follows today, meaning it is the only self-professed democracy in the world that sanctions the use of torture. The practice puts Israel in violation of the 1984 International Convention Against Torture, which Israel signed in 1991. Israel was strongly criticized in 1994 by the U.N. Committee Against Torture for failing to enact in its domestic law terms of the convention, thus “its provisions cannot be invoked in Israeli courts.”²

To this day Israel condones torture despite international criticism. However, there is little doubt that the practice has been at least somewhat moderated under the glare of the international community. The credit for documenting and pressuring Israel to admit its practice of torture goes largely to Amnesty International.”

The more recent reports show clearly that, certainly since October 2023 – and probably since the second Intifada if not the first – that any moderation that followed the Times Report and Amnesty International’s campaigning, no longer applies. Here are two further sources for the ongoing sexual torture: Zeteo’s ‘They’ve Been Raping Palestinians Since 1948’: and DDN’s video  Israel Raping Palestinians with Dogs & Terror Stabbing Media Refused To Cover

(an aside from the 1977 report – “In Gaza, the sequence has been different. With 300,000 refugees crammed into camps alongside 100,000 native Gazans, the area is one of the most overcrowded in the world…” – imagine what the report author would say about Gaza now with over 2 million crammed into about 42% of the Strip)