Ramallah, Occupied West Bank – Qusay Abu al-Qabash, 29, is suffering physically and psychologically from sexual assault allegedly perpetrated by a group of settlers who attacked the Bedouin community where he lives in the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank.
At midnight on 13 March, more than 70 residents attacked Khirbet Hamsa al-Fouka.
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Qusay told Al Jazeera that the settlers divided themselves into groups to attack Palestinian tents. Five of the settlers attacked his tent – where he was sleeping – and began beating him severely with their hands and sticks. They also assaulted two foreign women workers sleeping in the same tent.
“The settlers then forcibly removed my pants while tying my hands and legs, binding my body with my belt and removing my underwear,” Qusay said. She reported that the settlers beat her genitals, tied her limbs and genitals with plastic zip ties, and humiliated her before threatening to repeat the attack if she did not leave the area.
The attack on Kusay and all the residents of the area lasted for about 45 minutes. During that time, several residents, including children, reported being beaten and said they were threatened with death if they did not leave immediately. Residents also stole hundreds of livestock.
At the end of the attack, Quse said the settlers dragged him to the ground without underwear and beat him severely all over his body, including his eye, which later swelled up.
“The psychological impact of the sexual assault on me was far greater than the physical impact,” Cuse said. “After the attack, I felt extremely angry and irritable and chose to sit alone, upset.”
were forced from their homes
Sexual violence and deliberate harassment by Israeli soldiers and residents has become common in the occupied West Bank. According to observers, these acts are no longer isolated incidents, but systematic tools used by Israel to pressure Palestinians and force them to leave their homes.
On 20 April, the West Bank Protection Consortium – led by the Norwegian Refugee Council and funded by the European Union and several European states – published a report titled Sexual Violence and Forced Transfer in the West Bank, which documented cases of conflict-related sexual violence in the Palestinian territory over a period of approximately three years.
The report documented forced nudity, invasive body searches, threats of rape, and sexual harassment. The report concluded that more than 70 percent of displaced families interviewed said that threats against women and children, particularly sexual violence, were a deciding factor in their leaving their homes.
But the problem may be larger than reported due to the difficulty of documentation, fear, and social stigma associated with sexual violence.
find strip
Abeer al-Sabbagh, 60, was one of the women allowed by Israeli forces to enter the Jenin refugee camp for a limited time on April 13 after Israel closed the area for a year following a deadly week-long raid last year. But Abir did not know that he would be stripped and searched.
The soldiers forced the women into a house they had occupied at the entrance of the camp. Inside, female constables were waiting to conduct a thorough search.
Abir said, “We didn’t know they were going to search us. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone at all.” “The female soldiers started searching us with their hands, then they asked me to lift my dress. After that, they ordered me to take it off, then they ordered me to take off all my clothes. I hesitated, and they started yelling at me. I told them I did not want to enter the camp and wanted to leave immediately. One of the female soldiers yelled at me, saying, ‘You will be searched, whether you want to enter the camp or No.”
Abir started requesting the female constable not to strip him, but the constable started shouting at him.
She said, “At that moment, I cried a lot and wished I had not gone to the camp.”
“I felt really humiliated,” Abeer said. “Of all the things we have experienced as residents of the Jenin camp, this is probably the worst thing that has happened to me.”
mass event
Violence and sexual harassment have had a devastating impact, with women and girls particularly affected. To reduce the likelihood of encountering Israelis who might attack or harass them, Palestinian girls have sometimes dropped out of school, and women have stopped working, the West Bank Protection Consortium reports.
Issa Amro, coordinator of the Youth Against Settlements group in Hebron, told Al Jazeera that Israel uses sexual harassment as a tool to make life difficult for Palestinian civilians and to retaliate against their presence in friction areas.
According to AMRO, before October 2023 sexual violence was the result of individual acts of a few soldiers, but now, it has become a widespread phenomenon, used as a tool to harass civilians and residents, especially in Hebron’s Old City. Many Palestinian families have left their homes, and many women avoid crossing checkpoints to avoid being humiliated.
“Of course, Israel does not respect that we are an Orthodox society. Soldiers force women to undress in front of them at checkpoints, try to access sensitive areas, ask them sexual questions and make sexual remarks,” she said.
Harassment has become a daily occurrence in Hebron’s Old City, with women and young boys being harassed while passing through Israeli checkpoints built around the Ibrahimi Mosque.
In December 2024, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a detailed report that included numerous testimonies of abuses and humiliations at the hands of soldiers, including men, women and children in their daily lives or while passing through the southern part of Hebron.
Testimony described detentions, humiliating body searches, filming of victims during attacks, and inappropriate physical and verbal abuse.
Amro cited a widely reported case a year and a half ago, when a soldier pulled down his pants in front of a 17-year-old Palestinian girl at a checkpoint in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida neighborhood and asked her to come with him to a small room designated for soldiers.
Israel says cases of sexual violence by its soldiers are isolated incidents, and not part of a broader policy.
rape in prisons
Sexual assaults against Palestinians have also been reported in Israeli prisons.
The Human Rights Watch report, published in August 2024, was based on interviews with detainees, which documented torture and ill-treatment in detention centers and included testimony of sexual violence, including rape and sexual assault, according to detainees.
One of the most famous cases is the sexual abuse of a Palestinian detainee from Gaza in Sde Timan prison by Israeli soldiers. Five soldiers were charged after footage of the incident emerged, and an Israeli doctor reported the incident to the press, but the charges were dropped in March following a campaign led by the Israeli far right to exonerate the soldiers.
Sexual harassment is not limited to attacks on detainees in the Gaza Strip. Sami al-Sai, a journalist from Tulkarem in the northern West Bank, told Al Jazeera that she was raped with a metal object while in detention.
In his testimony, al-Sai reported that he was detained from February 2024 to June 2025 and was subjected to severe beatings by prison guards during almost the entire period of his detention in Megiddo and Rimmon prisons.
She said that there are many cases of rape and sexual violence against prisoners in Israeli prisons, but not all of them, for their own reasons, dare to speak out about what happened to them.
“During one physical torture session, the guards took me to another place and forced me to sit on the ground and bend over while they beat me severely. Then they quickly and forcefully took off my clothes and inserted a solid object into my rectum. I felt unbearable pain and started screaming loudly, but they beat me again.”
Sami began bleeding, but the guards ignored him and returned him to his cell, beating him severely. Other prisoners ran to his aid and tried to stop the bleeding.
“They wouldn’t let me go to the doctor or even to the clinic,” he said. “I bled for two weeks and treated myself. Even after all this time I still suffer from pain, and of course, the psychological damage is still there.”
