Blog Post: Sexual Torture in Israel and Palestine — Credible Sources, and Our Responses to Them

May 14, 2026

by Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson

We’ve received two genres of response to our statement yesterday, and in conversation with   the wider discourse surrounding this week’s op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times ,and the publication of the comprehensive Israeli report of Hamas’ terror attack on October 7th. As this piece was drafted, Israel also announced its intention to sue the New York Times over the publication of Kristof’s column. I’ve been asked by colleagues I know and trust whether the widespread sexual torture outlined in Kristof’s article could possibly be true. I’ve also answered polite but painful questions about the use of rape as a weapon of terror on October 7th: did it really happen? Hasn’t this been debunked?

These exchanges make my stomach turn. And I know, as someone who travels in circles of commitment to the humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians, we must engage with them. 

Across these responses, the emotions have been similar: disgust, denial, disbelief, shame, fear, anger, sadness, denial again. 

There’s also a bifurcated discourse I’ve observed amongst the responses to both the Times piece and the Civil Commission’s findings. One level is about sources and their veracity, which I’m including below with the warning to please take great care in reviewing these materials. 

Another is far more psychological, and painful: that of a reckoning. Few people, I’ve found, are willing to sit in this second place of conversation, and we must take account of the way in which a back and forth about sources actually serves as an opportunity to avoid it altogether. This larger conversation will emerge again and again unless we confront it directly: the way in which our emotional investments in tribalism and a desire for the ease of a binary worldview makes a comprehensive recognition of these crimes and their effects incredibly difficult, or even unbearable. 

Sexual Assault and Rape on October 7th: 

A back and forth about the veracity of the sources documenting the events of October 7th, 2023 has raged since the day itself, even in the face of extensive real-time video recording that was transmitted across social media as the attacks occurred.

There is a real issue of documenting the scale of these attacks, one that has been acknowledged since at least January 2024: a lack of forensic evidence available from the bodies of victims who were found deceased at sites of Hamas attacks. Nevertheless, we draw on reports by ARCCI in in February 2024, and the Israeli-led report issued this week. Additionally,  testimony is available from a number of former hostages including Roni Gonen, Alon Ohel, Guy Gilboa-Dalal. There is also a review of available sources that was issued by Physicians for Human Rights- Israel, the December 2025 report issued by Amnesty International, and a February 2024 report from the United Nations’ special envoy on sexual violence. 

There is widespread sexual torture and rape occurring in Israeli military prisons and as part of West Bank pogroms. 

An independent legal investigation will be necessary to determine whether these assaults are being allowed to happen or are (as journalist Yehuda Schlesinger infamously stated, then and recanted in August 2024) reflective of an implicit or official policy. Legally, this matters a great deal, and must be subject to an independent investigation. For the survivors of this torture, the experience is the same: a violent abuse of power, with the intent to humiliate and harm. 

A common critique used to dismiss the larger story in Kristof’s piece is his citations from the organization Euro-Med, which are often critiqued as forensically unverifiable at best.

 At the same time, there are widespread reports of sexual torture and rape occuring in Israeli military prisons and as part of ongoing violence in the West Bank from credible sources, including organizations and individuals with whom Partners works, and who we’ve platformed in our webinars and symposiums. These include a November 2025 joint report to the United Nations from Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHRI), Adalah: the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Hamoked, the Committee Against Torture- Israel, and Parents Against Child Detention; the May 2024 report of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry, B’tselem’s January 2026 report of conditions in Israeli military prisons and the Guardian’s investigatory interviews following that report; PHRI’s February 2024 report on the conditions of those same prisons; and the same organization’s 2025 report and collection of full testimonies regarding the treatment of Gazan medical staff detained in Israeli custody.

I have no doubt that any attempt to collate these sources in one place, about abuse endured by either Palestinians or Israelis, will be subject to criticism and careful combing-through. Some of this will be done by journalists and field experts, and it must be done — it’s this attention to detail and commitment to truth that allows any of this conversation to take place with veracity. It’s also necessary for local and international courts of law to ensure that the perpetrators of sexual torture and rape as a weapon of war are brought to justice. 

But a far greater group of readers and respondents will (perhaps even unconsciously) return to a re-litigation of sources and form in order to discount the larger story they tell, and to preclude the emotional and moral reckoning they demand of us all. There’s real panic here, a desire to discount the stories survivors are sharing, because the depth of pain and degradation they tell can feel impossible to sit with. It’s a very human impulse to intellectualize or pick at the threads of these reports, but each of us seriously engaged in this work owes it to ourselves and to the survivors to be honest about when we are doing this in the pursuit of specificity, and when we are using it as a form of psychological deflection or distraction. 

Others might push back against form, timing, or presentation: the Kristof piece in the Times came out one day before the comprehensive Israeli investigation’s report. The conversation about abuses at Sde Teiman quickly shifted to a discussion of the Israeli Military Advocate General’s leakage of the footage. The role and practices of ZAKA in the days after October 7th become debated again and again. There is sometimes a feeling that the very discussion of both October 7th and military prison torture is somehow deeply improper, a form of equivocation or inversion of one’s community’s pain, that any attempt to discuss the two in conversation is immediately discounted. 

We are all so desperate to avoid direct discussion of torture, to sit with the reality that Palestinian and Israeli societies can contain both perpetrators and victims of atrocities. This is not a competition of pain, and cannot be a weaponization of harm in order to portray one community or the other in having a moral superiority. This is about the acknowledgement of systems of abuse. 

As I’ve written before about this topic, the perpetration of rape and sexual torture is a violent expression of power. It reflects a desire to humiliate and reinforce or establish a violent hierarchy, and perpetrators are often emboldened by a culture of dehumanization and objectification: I am a person, you are less. 

There is no excuse or justification for these acts, and we can also not claim ignorance about the environmental and social factors that enable the perpetration of sexual torture. If there is a call to reckon with the experiences of Israeli and Palestinian survivors in concert, it is not from a place of equivocation or a flattening of the circumstances of power and consequence in which they occurred. These patterns of torture, humiliation, and violence have occurred and are happening in concert with one another. I don’t think that someone like Yehuda Schlesinger represents by any means a normative viewpoint, but his vitriol makes explicit the cycle of revenge and humiliation that enflames and often justifies a cycle of sexual violence.

We must seriously confront the disparate international response to these reports and alleged crimes. Hamas was an internationally sanctioned organization and recognized as a terror group long before October 7th. Its leadership rightly faces international condemnation and continued legal proscription: just this week, the EU announced further sanctions on Hamas alongside those placed on specific individuals and settler organizations on the West Bank.   

The blood of our brothers and sisters — men, women, and children, Jewish and Christian and Muslim — is crying out from the ground. Are we brave enough to hear their cries in concert, and reject the weaponization of their pain?