Shackled, bleeding, raped: Palestinians describe abuse in Israel’s prisons

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing.

He does not begin with the name of the prison. He begins with the dog. In testimony gathered for Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon, an Al Jazeera original documentary I directed and executive produced, Mohammed Zaki al-Bakri describes being stripped, restrained and left powerless while Israeli soldiers laughed and filmed.

Al-Bakri, a survivor of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and a former detainee from Khan Younis, says he was held for 20 months and moved through five Israeli prisons.

“They stripped us of our clothes,” he says in the interview. “We are handcuffed … our hands were behind our backs and our legs were bound and we were blindfolded.”

Then came the allegation of violence, almost impossible to describe in words. “I was raped after being stripped of my clothes,” he says, “by a large dog.” In a separate part of the interview, he adds: “The seven of us were sexually assaulted by the dog.”

Across months of reporting, Al Jazeera’s documentary team gathered accounts from former Palestinian detainees who described dogs used not only as instruments of fear, but as part of a ritual of sexualised humiliation: prisoners stripped, blindfolded, handcuffed, forced to lie on their stomachs, beaten, threatened, filmed and attacked. These testimonies form the basis of AL Jazeera’s investigative documentary, Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon.

One former detainee from Gaza – we identify him with the pseudonym Job – who moved through eight Israeli detention facilities, describes how dogs were unleashed on prisoners in the same ritualised way when he was held at Israel’s Sde Teiman prison. A third Palestinian survivor from Gaza also describes a dog assault.

The pattern extends beyond the prison wall. Kifaya Khraim, international advocacy coordinator at the Ramallah-based Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), tells Al Jazeera about what one family – the Ajlounis – in Hebron faced in July 2023. Israeli forces, she says, forced their way into their home “under the threat of large dogs,” ordered the women to undress and walk naked around the house in front of female soldiers.