‘Humiliated’: Palestinian victims of Israel sexual abuse testify at UN – World

Palestinians who say they suffered brutal beatings and sexual abuse in Israeli detention and at the hands of Israeli settlers testified about their ordeals at the United Nations this week.

“I was humiliated and tortured,” said Said Abdel Fattah, a 28-year-old nurse detained in November 2023 near Gaza City’s Al Shifa hospital where he worked.

Ahead of the hearings Daniel Meron, Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva dismissed them as a waste of time, saying Israel investigated and prosecuted any allegations of wrongdoing by its forces.

Fattah gave his testimony from Gaza via video-link to a public hearing, speaking through an interpreter.

He described being stripped naked in the cold, suffering beatings, threats of rape and other abuse over the next two months as he was shuttled between overcrowded detention facilities.

“I was like a punching bag,” he said of one particularly harrowing interrogation he endured in January 2024.

The interrogator, he said, “kept hitting me on my genitals… I was bleeding everywhere, I was bleeding from my penis, I was bleeding from my anus”.

“I felt like my soul (left) my body.”

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