Israeli Prison Guards Are Using Dogs to Rape Palestinians, Former Detainees Say

A leading human rights group has published the testimony of a Palestinian man who says guards used a dog to rape him in a notorious Israeli detention camp. 

The testimony, collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), is the most recent of at least four reports of dogs being used in the sexual torture of detainees at the Sde Teiman facility and elsewhere. 

“They know once they rape someone with a dog or with a stick that these people won’t be able to carry out their jobs or live their lives normally,” Basel Alsourani, international advocacy officer at PCHR, told Novara Media. “It’s part of their genocidal intention to destroy [Palestinians].” 

A UN commission of inquiry found in March that Israel’s use of sexual violence was systemic, serving to “dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part”.

Sde Teiman gained global notoriety earlier this month after footage was leaked of soldiers allegedly gang raping a captive there. 

The man who described being raped with a dog spoke to PCHR in October after 19 months in detention there. In his first weeks at the camp, he was taken with a group of other detainees to “a place far from the cameras”, he told a field researcher. 

“We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me,” he said. “Then one of the dogs raped me – the dog… inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces.

“I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation,” he said. “I lost control because I could never have imagined experiencing such a thing.”

Another detainee, aged 18, told PCHR that soldiers raped him and other captives using bottles, and that during the ordeal, “there was also a dog behind us, as if the dog was raping us.

“They violated our dignity and destroyed our spirits and our hope for life,” he said. “I had wanted to continue my education; now I am lost after what happened to me.”

Last year, Palestinian lawyer Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr told the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor that he witnessed a dog being used to rape someone in Sde Teiman. 

Soldiers brought him and two others to a cement courtyard, he said in an October 2024 Al Jazeera documentary, then they took one of the other men, beat him, stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet. 

“A captain came and sprayed something on his backside,” he said. “There was a dog there. They unleashed the dog on him. The dog raped the young man. It raped him, literally speaking.”  

In July 2024, Mohammed Arab, Gaza correspondent for the Qatar-based Al Araby TV, told a lawyer who visited him in detention that he had witnessed soldiers sexually abuse captives with dogs at Sde Teiman.

“One of the soldiers tried to get one of the dogs to rape one of the prisoners,” he said. “They teach their dogs to have sex with prisoners. Can you imagine?”

In May, PCHR released a report based on interviews with 100 people who were detained by Israel between 2023 and 2024, alongside testimony from the centre’s lawyer, who visited 53 Palestinians held in Israeli detention in late 2024.

The report concluded that Israel’s torture of captives from Gaza was so widespread and severe that it constituted an act of genocide. 

Alsourani said the widespread use of torture and degrading treatment was intended to destroy the fabric of Palestinian society at every level: “Many of the people whose cases we documented were doctors, journalists, medical workers, teachers.” 

The use of dogs to torture, maim or even kill Palestinian detainees is apparently widespread. PCHR’s May report includes testimony from a 48-year-old man who was detained at al-Shifa hospital before being taken to a military outpost and then five different detention centres over the course of 56 days. 

At one, he said guards set police dogs on him and other detainees, “allowing them to tear into our flesh”. He witnessed a dog mauling another man’s genitals, he said. “He bled to death in my arms.”

It is unclear where Israel gets the dogs it uses in its detention facilities, but dogs in the military’s specialised canine unit, Oketz, are almost entirely sourced from Europe, according to John Spencer, a researcher who has embedded with the IDF. 

Between October 2023 and February 2025, police dog companies in the Netherlands were granted veterinary certificates allowing them to export of at least 110 dogs to Israel, according to the Center for Research on Multinationals. The vast majority of those licenses were granted to a company called Four Winds K9, it added.  

Alsourani said PCHR representatives will travel to the Netherlands in September and meet with officials from the international criminal court (ICC), with whom they will share the evidence gathered for their reports. 

PCHR is one of three Palestinian rights groups recently hit with sanctions by the US after it helped the ICC with cases against Israeli officials. Alsourani said the sanctions have been devastating for his organisation, and more generally for efforts to hold Israel to account for its genocide.