Sexual violence against Palestinians in Israeli custody is often framed as a post-October 7 issue. But historical records, academic research, and legal testimony suggest a much longer history. . Al Jazeera's @basel.gazi traces the documented record from 1948 to the present. #news

Israel claims that what happens to Palestinians it detains is the product of wartime chaos or individual soldiers and exceptional circumstances. But documentation indicates a pattern as far as the 1948 Nakhvah were nearly 1 million Palestinians were ethnically cleansed to make way for the state of Israel. April 9, 1948. The Palestinian village of Derya Asin is attacked by Ergon, Lehi and Hagan as Zionist militias. A British UN delegation report documents what happened in circumstances of great savagery. Women and children stripped, lined up and shot, with survivors reporting even more incredible beastialities. 1949. Israeli soldiers abducted gang rape and executed Palestinian Bedouin teenage girl. The incident is documented by the soldiers but remains classified for decades. 1967. Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza, building a mass attention system that over time held more than 800,000 Palestinians. That's 40 percent of the Palestinian male population over time. Allegations of torture and sexual abuse begin immediately. The UN and Amnesty International are documenting them by the early 1970s. June 1977. Britain's Sunday Times publishes an investigation into Israel's systematic and organized torture of Palestinian prisoners, concluding that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of broke-cups exceeding orders. The report documents beatings electric shocks, compression of genitalia and rape with objects. It is submitted to the UN Security Council which did nothing that year. Documents declassified in 2025 show that the UK government already knew about Israel's systematic torture through its own diplomatic channels and did nothing. Late 1980s. Israeli historian Benny Morris starts looking at declassified Israeli army archives. He documents about 12 reported cases of rape by Hagan fighters in 1948. His words, "To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape." In Akka, Yaffa, Honin, Tantura and Abushuja. 1987. Israel's Land of Commission finds that Israeli intelligence had been routinely torturing Palestinian detainees and lying about it in court, under oath. And the commission's response was not stop this. The commission's classified appendix later confirmed through Israeli Supreme Court proceedings said it was okay to keep using what it called "moderate physical pressure." The UN committee against torture said this is completely unacceptable. 1995. A follow-up report confirms agents were exceeding even those secret guidelines. And for the first time, Israel admits Palestinian detainees were systematically tortured during the first anti-Fadah, between 1988 and 1992. From 2005 to 2012, Israeli clinical psychologist Daniel Weichit publishes the first peer-reviewed study of sexual torture of Palestinian detainees, 517 files. His findings were that it was systematic and most cases involved secret service officers from an Israeli researcher at an Israeli university. The report barely made the news. August 2024. Leaked footage from his detainment allegedly shows soldiers sexually assaulting a blind-folded detainee behind a wall of shields held to block the cameras. Ten soldiers are arrest, but swithing protesters including three members of parliament stormed the base where they're held to demand their release. A liquid MP was asked if solemnizing a prisoner with objects is legitimate. To be honest, there's a lot of people who want to speak to them, right? To be honest, there's a lot of people who want to speak to them. OK. Netanyahu calls the leak, not the assault. The most serious public relations attack Israel has experienced since its founding. Charges against five of the soldiers are dropped. March 2025. The UN Commission of Inquiry. Thousands detained without charge held in inhuman conditions, beaten, shackled, sexually abused, denied medical care, starved. Reaped. The conclusion was that sexual violence is part of Israeli security forces standard operation procedures. The frequency, prevalence, and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated across the occupied Palestinian territory leads the commission to conclude that sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people. The UN Committee against Torture calls it a de facto state policy of organizing widespread torture, not individuals, not incidents, policy. From 1948 to 2025, that's 77 years of documented evidence. Al Jazeera's documentary "Bodies of Evidence" asks, "a web point does a pattern of documented institutional behavior across governments, across agencies, across seven decades with zero convictions constitute policy. The evidence is there, what remains is accountability."