File photo : A screenshot from the video that appears to show the sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman prison in Israel, as it aired on Israel's Channel 12.
The Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory was created by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council and is led by former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay. Its findings can be used as evidence for the International Criminal Court or other bodies that seek to prosecute war crimes and other rights violations in the context of the war.
Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission, accusing it and the council of anti-Israel bias. Israel has quit the council shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a U.S. pullout last month.
Rights groups have reported widespread abuse at a military detention facility, Sde Teiman.
The first witness, a male nurse from Gaza who spoke by video from the territory, said he was caged, hung up “like a punching bag," beaten in the genitals until they bled and subjected with other detainees to attacks by dogs.
Saeed Mohammad Abdel-Fattah Abu Al-Jidyan, 26, said he was detained on Nov. 18, 2023, in the earliest days of the war, while working in Shifa Hospital. Through a translator, he described being ordered to strip naked and being held for three days with no clothes.
Israeli forces launched two major raids on Shifa, Gaza's main hospital, during the war.
During questioning by the Israeli army interrogators, including about tunnels Al-Jidyan said he knew nothing about, he said, “the torture affected the genitals.”
Another witness from Gaza, Abu Jidyan, said he was held at Sde Teiman and another facility. By the time of his release, he said he had lost nearly 30 kilograms (about 65 pounds). The duration of his custody was not immediately clear.
“This is not just my story. I’m just one person among many detained by the occupying Israeli power,” he said, according to a translator.
The Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has killed over 48,500 Palestinians in Gaza.Over half of the dead were women and children.
Systematic Israeli abuses
The commission's hearings continue Wednesday. It is expected to issue a report Thursday on Israel's “systematic” use of sexual and other gender-based violence against Palestinians since the start of Gaza war.
The U.N. human rights office has previously issued a report in 2024, indicating that Palestinian detainees taken by Israeli occupation forces since Oct. 7 have faced waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, and other torture and mistreatment.
The report on detention says Israel’s prison service held more than 9,400 “security detainees” as of the end of June, and some have been held in secret without access to lawyers or respect for their legal rights.
A summary of the report decries a “staggering” number of detainees — including men, women, children, journalists, and human rights defenders — and said such practices raise concerns about arbitrary detention.
Back then, the has US State Department has called reports of sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli soldiers “horrific” and said Israel must investigate “swiftly” and “fully,” after a video leaked from Israel’s Sde Teiman, a secret imprisonment camp in the Negev desert and documenting Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian man.
* This story was edited by Ahram Online.
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