The Palestinians who say they suffered brutal sexuals and sexual abuse in Israeli arrest and the Israeli settlers testified about their evidence in the United Nations this week.
“I was humiliated and tortured,” said Abdel Fattah, a 28 -year -old nurse arrested in November 2023, near the Shif Hospital of the city of Gaza, where he worked.
Before the audiences, Daniel Meron, Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, dismissed them as a waste of time, saying that Israel investigated and prosecuted any accusation of irregularities for their forces.
Fattaah gave Gaza’s testimony through a video link to a public audience, speaking through an interpreter.
He described to be naked in the cold, suffering from beatings, threats of rape and other abuses in the next two months, since he was transferred among overcrowded detention facilities.
“It was like a boxing sack,” he said about a particularly heartbreaking interrogation he suffered in January 2024.
The interrogator, he said, “I kept hitting my genitals … I was bleeding everywhere, I was bleeding from my penis, I was bleeding from my anus.
“I felt like my soul [left] My body “.
‘Shocking’
Fattaah spoke on Tuesday during the last one of a series of public hearings organized by the UN Independent Research Commission (IOC) about the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.
This week’s hearings, criticized hard by Israel, focus specifically on accusations of “sexual and reproductive violence” committed by Israeli security forces and settlers.
“It’s important,” said Coi Chris Subii member, who organized the meeting AFP.
The victims of such abuse have “right to be heard,” he said.
The experts and defenders who testified on Tuesday spoke of a “systematic” trend of sexual violence against the Palestinians in detention, but also at the control points and other environments from Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 within Israel caused the conflict in Gaza.
Meron, for Israel, criticized attempts to equate accusations against individual Israelis with the “shocking … sexual violence of Hamas towards Israeli hostages, towards the victims on October 7”.
Any comparison of this type was “representable,” he told journalists on Monday.
He insisted that the audiences were “wasting time”, since Israel as “a country with law and order” would investigate and process any irregularity.
But Palestinian lawyer Sahar Francis denounced an obvious lack of responsibility, claiming that abuse had become “a generalized policy.”
All those arrested from Gaza were examined by stripes, he said, with the soldiers in some cases “pushing the sticks” to the anus of the prisoner.
Sexual abuse occurred “in a very massive way”, especially in the first months of the fight, he said.
“I think it can be said that most of those arrested in these months were subjected to such practice.”
‘Just shoot me’
The accusations of abuse are not limited to the detention centers.
Mohamed Mata, a West Bank resident, said he suffered hours of torture at the hands of security agents and settlers, even when the Israeli police refused to intervene.
A few days after the October 7 attack, he and other Palestinian activists went to help protect a Beduine community that faces attacks from settlers.
When they left the complex, they were persecuted and trapped by a group of settlers, who, according to him, joined members of the Shabak security agency in Israel.
He and two other men had bandados, were stripped of the underwear and tied their hands before being taken to a close stable.
The leader stopped “in my head and ordered me to eat … The feces of the sheep,” he said.
With dozens of settlers around, the man urinated in all three and hit them so much during the almost 12 hours of abuse to kill said he cried: “Just shoot my head.”
The man, he said, jumped on his back and repeatedly, “he tried to introduce a stick in my anus.”
Flashing the tears, killing showed Subti a photograph taken by the settlers who show the three men with the bandaged eyes on the ground in their underwear.
Other photos taken after the test showed it with mass bruises throughout their body.
Speaking to journalists after his testimony, he said that he had spent months “in a state of psychological shock.
“I didn’t think there were people on earth with such a level of ugliness, sadism and cruelty. “
