Israel’s systematic use of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners is by now well understood and exhaustively documented.
Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli, who represents Palestinian “security” prisoners in Israeli detention, told this reporter that his clients sometimes beg him not to visit.
One even told him directly: “Don’t come, because every time you do, I get raped.”
Marmarelli said he could recognize signs of sexual violence with riot batons – a phenomenon, he said, that has been growing since Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, assumed his position – even before his clients spoke. They are visible in the marks of abuse, and the way prisoners struggle to walk.
But batons are not the only weapon used in sexual assaults on prisoners. Specially trained dogs are increasingly deployed to abuse detainees, as revealed by organizations such as the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor as well as the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.
One striking account recounts how a young fellow prisoner was attacked and raped by dogs in front of his fellow inmates.
“The soldiers let loose trained police dogs on the young man, who was subjected to [rape],” Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr, a lawyer from Gaza who was detained early in Israel’s genocide told human rights organizations. “I was hoping to die so that this would not happen to me.”
But where do the dogs come from? And by what mechanisms do they enter the Israeli system?
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