Israel Inherits Colonial Legacy of Torture: 'Torture Is Not New to Palestinians'

Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault that may be disturbing to some readers.

In 1969, Abdel Latif Ghaith, later director of the Palestinian prisoners' rights organization Addameer, was detained at a detention center in Jerusalem. From a nearby room, he heard everything. Israeli interrogators were trying to break a young Palestinian woman named Rasmea Odeh.

Ghaith recalled: "I saw Rasmea in the interrogation room. She was naked." Rasmea's father was brought into the room. Seeing his daughter in that state, he wept and said: "If you have something or nothing, say anything to get them out of this situation." Rasmea replied, "I have nothing, I did nothing."

Ten years later, in 1979, after a prisoner exchange, Rasmea Odeh stood before a United Nations committee in Geneva and described what had been done to her body: raped with a stick, electrocuted in the mouth and genitals, threatened that her father would be forced to rape her. Her testimony was entered into UN records years before the Convention Against Torture was adopted.

But Rasmea was not "the first," according to Ghaith. And she would not be the last.

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said: "Torture is a hallmark of the past two years of oppression of Palestinians. But torture is not new to Palestinians. Israel has practiced torture against Palestinians since its inception."

She traced the link: "During the British Mandate in Palestine, there is documentation that the British authorities used torture methods, law enforcement methods that had already been used against the Irish rebellion. These methods were applied in Palestine. There is documentation that the British emergency regulations were immediately absorbed into Israeli law."

Under international law, including the UN Convention Against Torture and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, sexual violence in detention includes rape, insertion of objects into the body, sexual mutilation, forced nudity, strip searches, threats to rape a prisoner or their relatives, beatings of a sexual nature, genital attacks, use of dogs, filming, and dissemination of sensitive images. All can be prosecuted as torture, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.

Kifaya Khraim, international advocacy coordinator at the Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC) in Ramallah, said Israeli forces know exactly what they are doing. Many women tell groups like WCLAC that objects are inserted into their bodies "in a way that they cannot define it as rape or sexual violence." Khraim said: "The Israeli forces know about the social stigma, and they use it, exploit it."

To understand what Britain did in Palestine, one must understand what it had just done in Ireland. Between 1920 and 1922, Britain deployed the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries paramilitary forces in Ireland. When the Irish war ended, the empire did not disband them but redeployed them. Some 650 former Black and Tans members were sent to Palestine in April 1922 to form the new Palestine Gendarmerie. By 1923, according to research by Richard A. Cahill, 75–95 percent of that force were former Black and Tans. They brought their methods with them.

By the 1930s, Britain ruled Palestine as a settler-colonial project. The 1936 Palestinian revolt lasted six months, followed by a three-year armed uprising. Britain deployed more than 20,000 troops, imposed curfews, collective punishment, house demolitions, and used Palestinian civilians as human shields. Mandate police manuals did not need to order rape; they built the room in which it could be denied: arrests without warrant, searches by force, immunity for officers acting "in good faith."

Israel also inherited from the Mandate the regime of administrative detention, under which Palestinians are imprisoned indefinitely without charge.

In the 1950s, the same imperial state that had ruled Palestine ran a network of detention camps in Kenya, known as the Pipeline, to suppress the Mau Mau uprising. Survivors described castration, rape with bottles and broken glass, forced nudity, and sexual humiliation.

If Britain built the architecture, France wrote the doctrine. During the Algerian war, French army raped Algerian women in detention and in their homes. Algerian men were stripped, electrocuted, and threatened with the rape of relatives. The case of Djamila Boupacha, tortured and raped with a bottle by French paratroopers, became an international scandal. Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon treated Algerian victims and also the French personnel who carried out the torture. Fanon understood that torture was not an excess of war but the essence of colonial relations.

Israel not only inherited Britain's architecture. It also aligned with France immediately after its founding in 1948. In 1956, Britain, France, and Israel signed the Protocol of Sevres, conspiring to invade Egypt. France helped Israel build the Dimona nuclear reactor. But Israel also learned from France how to treat an entire anti-colonial population as an enemy, and that the body of the colonized—their sleep, their sexuality, their family, their shame—were all legitimate terrain of war.

Israel's 1987 Landau Commission called this "moderate physical pressure." In 1999, Israel's Supreme Court banned some methods but left open the possibility of use when "necessary." And who decides what is "necessary"? The same Israeli security apparatus the court sought to restrain.

If one address encapsulates the colonial chain extending to the present, it is Sde Teiman. A military base in the Negev desert, converted after October 7 into a detention center for Palestinians from Gaza. It has become a symbol of Israel's detention system after formal restraints collapsed. Testimony from detainees, Israeli whistleblowers, B'Tselem, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and leaked footage describe weeks of shackling and blindfolding, denial of medical care, beatings, starvation, being forced to wear diapers, and sexual abuse. In March 2026, the Israeli military's top legal body dropped charges in a central sexual abuse case.

During a Knesset discussion in July 2024, Palestinian lawmaker Ahmad Tibi asked whether it could possibly be legal "to insert a stick into a person's anus." Hanoch Milwidsky, a Knesset member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, replied: "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas] fighter, everything is legal. Everything."

In 2025, the UN Secretary-General's annual report on conflict-related sexual violence listed Israel and the State of Palestine as situations of concern, citing patterns of sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinian detainees.

Francesca Albanese called it a "torture environment": where the infliction of pain is deliberate and continuous. Sexual violence is the most intimate instrument in that context. It works because it produces silence. That is what Ghaith witnessed in 1969. That is what survivors describe today, as guards film abuse and threaten to send it to their families. Silence is the weapon. Breaking silence is resistance.

Raji Sourani, founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, said: "We do not want Gaza to become the graveyard of international law. We want Gaza to have justice and dignity."

Chantal Meloni, an Italian criminal lawyer, called this "the first cracks in the wall of long-standing impunity." That impunity, like the sexual violence it protects, has traveled from Ireland to Palestine, from Palestine to Kenya, from Algiers to Pretoria, and from there to Hebron. When their flags are lowered, empires hand over the architecture of abuse to the next regime willing to use it. Then they assert that it never happened.

The Palestinian survivors speaking today are not asking the world to believe in an unprecedented horror. They are asking the world to recognize an old one, and this time, to act. Uniforms change. Legal vocabularies change. Emergencies are renamed. But the body remembers.

Watch the film "Bodies of Evidence: Israel's Darkest Weapon" on Al Jazeera English's YouTube channel.