Shackled, bleeding, raped: Palestinians describe abuse in Israel’s prisons
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.”
His was far from the only such allegation.
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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.
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