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In July 2024, a surveillance video leaked out of a military facility in the Negev desert – then, it persistently eluded Israel’s attempts to suppress it. The footage appeared to show a group of masked Israeli military reservists gang-raping a Palestinian detainee under the cover of riot shields at Sde Teiman, a makeshift detention camp that has elicited growing horror from human rights organizations and onlookers since the start of the genocide. The victim was hospitalized with a ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage. Military police arrested nine soldiers in connection to the attack on July 29.
Sde Teiman is an army base in an arid expanse about half an hour’s drive from the Gaza perimeter. After October 7, 2023, it was quickly converted into a detention facility for Palestinians from Gaza abducted by Israeli forces. What it promptly became – documented through survivor testimony, medical reports, and the findings of multiple human rights investigations – is a torture facility rife with sexual abuse. Not only are detainees held for days in stress positions, blindfolded and shackled, denied food, water, hygiene, and medical attention, but they are also raped.
What followed the arrests of the reservists caught in the video was a spectacle without precedent even in the recent record of Israeli impunity. A mob of far-right nationalists, including sitting members of the Knesset and government ministers, stormed first the Sde Teiman base itself to free the soldiers, then the Beit Lid army base 37 miles away, where they had been transferred for questioning. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, condemned the arrests and called the men “our best heroes.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich released a video defending them. On the floor of the Knesset, Likud lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked by his Arab colleague Ahmad Tibi whether it was legitimate to insert a stick into a prisoner’s rectum. “Yes!” Milwidsky shouted back. “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas operative], everything is legitimate. Everything!”
The mob did not succeed in releasing the accused rapists instantly, but several were let out by military courts within days. By February 2025, the five reservists who remained in custody were charged with “severe abuse” rather than rape. The video prompted condemnations from the United Nations and the State Department, which both called for a “full-scale” investigation of Israeli detention centers; the 1997 Leahy Laws prohibit U.S. aid to any foreign military forces guilty of “gross violations of human rights,” but despite an investigation, as well as innumerable other abuses by Israeli forces in Palestine, they have not been enforced.
