‘Torture isn’t new to Palestinians’: How Israel learned from colonialism

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A companion essay to Al Jazeera’s Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon, directed and executive produced by Awad Joumaa. He was in the next room. The walls were thin. The door between the rooms was open. He could hear everything. In 1969, Abdel Latif Ghaith, who would later become director of the Palestinian prisoner-rights organisation Addameer, was being held in a Jerusalem detention block when, in a contiguous cell, other Israeli interrogators were trying to break another young Palestinian. Her name was Rasmea Odeh. “I saw Rasmea in the interrogation room,” Ghaith recounts. “And she was naked.” His voice was slow and exact, as he relived a memory he has carried for more than half a century. Rasmea’s father was brought to the room, Ghaith said. Seeing his daughter in that condition, the father toppled her: “If you have something or don’t have something, say anything so they can get out of this situation.” The father cried. Rasmea said: “I don’t have anything, I didn’t do anything.” The father left, but Rasmea’s ordeal did not end. “And I saw her during the interrogations once again, where she was severely tortured,” Ghaith recalled. 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 in that Jerusalem cell: rape with a stick. Electric shocks to her mouth and genitals. Threats that her father would be forced to rape her. Her testimony entered the UN record years before the Convention Against Torture was adopted. But Rasmea was not, as Ghaith puts it, “the first”. “In Palestine, we have seen many situations like this,” he says. And Rasmea would not be the last. “Torture is, really, the trademark of this last two years of oppression of the Palestinian people,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, tells Al Jazeera in the film Bodies of Evidence. But, she insists, it is not new. “Torture is not new to the Palestinians. Israel has practised torture against the Palestinians since the very beginning of its existence.” Then she names the lineage that polite international debate prefers not to refer to. “During the British Mandate in Palestine, it is documented that the British administration used practices of torture, or law enforcement, that had already been used against the Irish insurgency as part of counterinsurgency measures. These practices were [applied in] Palestine. It is also documented that the British emergency regulations were incorporated [into the Israeli legal system].” They were not adapted. Not translated. Not modernised. They were, in Albanese’s words, “immediately received and ingrained in the Israeli system”. Simply put, sexual violence inside Israeli detention today is not an accident. It is the inheritance of an imperial method that Britain rehearsed in Ireland, exported to Palestine, and repeated in Kenya; that France industrialised in Algeria; and that apartheid South Africa systematised against Black South Africans. And that Israel, the European settler-colonial project Britain itself ushered into being, then took as its own. The cells change. The uniforms change. The process does not. “Torture is quite common in colonial systems or racially ordered regimes,” Albanese adds, “because the infliction of humiliation and erasure is seen as a practice to control.” Under international law – including the UN Convention Against Torture, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the rulings of the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International Committee of the Red Cross’s customary humanitarian law – sexual violence in custody includes rape, the insertion of objects, sexual mutilation, forced nudity, strip-searches conducted as humiliation, threats to rape detainees or their relatives, sexualised beatings, attacks on genitals, the use of dogs and the filming and circulation of intimate images. When any of these verbal or physical acts of abuse are carried out in the presence of family members, that too is considered sexual violence. All of it can be prosecuted as torture, as a war crime, as a crime against humanity. Cuno Tarfusser, the former Italian judge at the ICC, states the point starkly in Bodies of Evidence: “Sexual violence becomes more than crime … sexual crimes become a method to fight the war.” Kifaya Khraim, international advocacy coordinator at the Ramallah-based Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), says Israeli forces know exactly what they are doing, as she describes how many women tell groups like hers of devices inserted inside them “without being able to identify that as rape or sexual violence”. “Israeli forces know of [the social stigma], and they use it and they exploit it.” To understand what Britain did in Palestine, you have to understand what it had just finished doing in Ireland. Between 1920 and 1922, as the Irish War of Independence reached its peak, Britain deployed a paramilitary force in Ireland that became a byword for colonial terror: the Black and Tans and their officer counterparts, the Auxiliaries. When the Irish war ended, the empire did not retire its Black and Tans. It redeployed them. Approximately 650 former Black and Tans were sent to Mandate Palestine in April 1922 to form the new British Palestine Gendarmerie. By 1923, according to Richard A Cahill’s study Going Berserk: “Black and Tans” in Palestine, former Black and Tans made up between 75 and 95 percent of that force. They brought their methods with them. One of the men associated with the slang term “duffing up”, Douglas V Duff, was later found guilty in 1931 of getting a subordinate officer to inflict ill-treatment and bodily distress on a prisoner. This is the chain Albanese points to. It is not a metaphor. It is personnel. It is payroll. It is the same men, on a different shore, doing the same things to a different colonised people, protected by the same emergency law. By the 1930s, Britain was no longer experimenting in Palestine. It was governing it as a settler-colonial project of its own design. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had committed Britain to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The Mandate, awarded in 1922, made Britain the colonial midwife of the Zionist project. In 1936, Palestinians answered with a six-month general strike. It became the Great Arab Revolt, three years of armed uprising against British rule and the Zionist project it was building. A campaign of state terror followed: Britain deployed more than 20,000 troops to Palestine, imposed curfews and collective fines, dynamited homes, demolished much of old Jaffa, and used Palestinian civilians as human shields. Matthew Hughes traces the shift “from law and order to pacification” in his landmark study of Britain’s suppression of the Arab Revolt. The Mandate’s police manuals did not need to order rape. They built the rooms in which it could be denied: arrest without warrant, forced entry, search by force, joint police-military raids and indemnity for officers acting “in good faith”. It was also from the Mandate that Israel inherited the practice of administrative detention, under which Palestinians are held indefinitely in prison without charges, veteran Israeli lawyer Leah Tsemel pointed out. The same logic would outlive the Mandate itself. Britain did not just write the manual for the Nakba of 1948 and the ongoing Nakba ever since. It cleared the field. In the 1950s, the same imperial state that had governed Palestine ran a network of detention camps in Kenya known as the Pipeline, designed to break the Mau Mau uprising against British rule. Survivors described castration, rape with bottles and broken glass, the insertion of objects into the rectum and vagina, forced nudity during interrogation and sexual humiliation as methods of breaking political will. In 2013, after years of legal struggle by Mau Mau survivors represented by British law firm Leigh Day, the UK government settled the case. If Britain built the architecture, France wrote the doctrine. During the Algerian war, the French army raped Algerian women in detention and in their homes. Algerian men were stripped, electrocuted and threatened with the rape of their relatives. The case of Djamila Boupacha, tortured and raped with a bottle by French paratroopers, became an international scandal because French-Tunisian lawyer and activist Gisele Halimi and French philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir took it up, and refused to let it disappear. In Blida, some 45km from capital Algiers, the French psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon treated Algerian victims of French torture in the same hospital where he treated French personnel who carried it out. Torture, Fanon understood, was not an excess of war. It was the essence of the colonial relationship. As Albanese puts it, “Frantz Fanon was curing the victims of torture and the perpetrators.” Israel did not inherit only the British architecture of sexual violence and torture. It also bound itself, almost immediately after its birth in 1948, to the French one. In October 1956, Britain, France and Israel signed the Protocol of Sevres, a secret conspiracy to invade Egypt and topple Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was France that helped Israel build the nuclear plant in Dimona. French scientists and engineers played a central role in designing the reactor and reprocessing infrastructure that gave Israel the bomb. But the bomb was not all Israel learned from France. It learned to treat an anti-colonial population itself as the enemy, and that the body of the colonised, its sleep, its sexuality, its family, its shame are all legitimate terrains of war. The Israeli government’s 1987 Landau Commission would call this “moderate physical pressure”. The 1999 Israeli High Court would bar some methods while leaving the door open for the use of such practices when “necessity” demands it. And who decides what’s “necessary”? The same Israeli security state that the High Court order was supposed to restrain. “Sexual violence is something that’s been happening historically against all Palestinians by Israel since the very founding of Israel,” Khraim of the WLAC says. “It is well known that in 1948, during the ethnic [cleansing], sexual violence was used as a means to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.” Israeli historian Benny Morris, drawing on declassified archives, acknowledged at least a dozen documented rapes by Israeli forces in 1948, a number he called “just the tip of the iceberg”. By the 1970s and 1980s, even Israeli insiders now concede that force was used in interrogations. Human Rights Watch documented the methods in 1994. Across that arc, the names change, Rasmea Odeh in 1969; Mohammed Zaki Al-Bakri in 2024, but the methods do not. A naked body. A bound body. A father brought into the room. A dog brought into the room. A camera. A laugh. A file with a number on it. The historical archive matters because it sounds like the present. In Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon, one former detainee from Jenin describes a female guard making a sexual threat about his sister during a body search. “I will never forget that moment,” he says. “My tears fell. I was 18 years old.” Mohammed Zaki Al-Bakri describes the body under assault in simpler terms: “You are no longer a human being. You are just a body under their control.” That is the mechanism Kifaya Khraim describes: the weaponisation of family, stigma and shame. If anyone needs a single address where the colonial chain reaches its present link, it is Sde Teiman. A military base in the Negev desert, repurposed after October 7 into a detention site for Palestinians from Gaza, Sde Teiman has become – through the testimony of released detainees, Israeli whistleblowers, B’Tselem, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and leaked footage – the symbol of what Israel’s detention system became after its formal restraints collapsed. As the film’s own opening news line states: “All charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military prison in July 2024 have been dropped.” Detainees have described being held shackled and blindfolded for weeks, denied medical care, beaten, starved, kept in nappies and sexually abused. In March 2026, the Israeli military’s top legal officer dropped the charges in the central sexual abuse case. Amnesty International called the decision “disgraceful”. One extraordinary public exchange, after the scandal broke, distilled the doctrine beneath it all. In a July 2024 Knesset discussion, Palestinian politician Ahmad Tibi asked whether it could ever be legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum.” Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of the Knesset from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, answered: “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas fighter], everything is legitimate to do. Everything.” It was a chilling moment: not a denial of abuse, but a defence of it under the language of necessity. In that sentence, the logic of exception was made explicit – that once a detainee is marked as an enemy, the law can be suspended, the body can be violated, and cruelty can be recast as security. In 2025, the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence listed Israel and the State of Palestine in its situations of concern, citing patterns of sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinian detainees. Albanese calls it “a torturous environment”: a place where the infliction of pain is deliberate and constant. That repression also extends to those trying to document it. Tahseen Elayyan of Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organisation, says his organisation was targeted because of its work. In October 2021, Israel’s Ministry of Defense, under then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz, designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian civil society groups as “terrorist organisations”, a move UN experts condemned as an assault on Palestinian human rights defenders. The veteran Israeli lawyer Leah Tsemel describes the atmosphere after October 7 as one of “pure harassment”. “The humiliation of Palestinians and the attitude to them as non-human beings does not disturb.” Sexual violence is the most intimate instrument inside that landscape. It works because it produces silence. That is what Ghaith witnessed in 1969 when Rasmea Odeh’s father was brought to her cell. That is what survivors describe today when soldiers film the abuse and threaten to send it to families. The silence is the weapon. Breaking the silence is the resistance. In 1969, an Israeli interrogator made Rasmea Odeh’s father weep in a corridor in Jerusalem. In 1979, Rasmea stood before a UN committee in Geneva and told the world what had been done to her body. The world heard her. It did very little. In 2026, the survivors sharing testimonies in Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon are doing the same thing, at the same cost, inside a system designed to make their speech impossible. Raji Sourani, founder and director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, says simply: “We don’t want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law, and we want the Gazans to have justice and dignity.” Chantal Meloni, an Italian criminal lawyer, professor of international criminal law at the University of Milan, and senior legal adviser on international crimes and accountability at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, calls this moment “the first concrete cracks in the wall of a longstanding impunity”. That impunity, like the sexual violence it shields, has also travelled from Ireland to Palestine, from Palestine to Kenya, from Algiers to Pretoria, and from there to Hebron. When their own flag comes down, empires hand over their architecture of abuse to the next regime willing to use it. Then they insist it never happened. The Palestinian survivors speaking today are not asking the world to believe an unprecedented horror. They are asking the world to recognise an old one and, this time, to act. The uniforms change. The legal vocabulary changes. The emergency is renamed. But the body keeps the record. Watch Bodies of Evidence on Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel.  Advertisement AboutAboutShow moreAbout UsCode of EthicsTerms and ConditionsEU/EEA Regulatory NoticePrivacy PolicyCookie PolicyCookie PreferencesAccessibility StatementSitemapWork for usConnectConnectShow moreContact UsUser Accounts HelpAdvertise with usStay ConnectedNewslettersChannel FinderTV SchedulePodcastsSubmit a TipPaid Partner ContentOur ChannelsOur ChannelsShow moreAl Jazeera ArabicAl Jazeera EnglishAl Jazeera Investigative UnitAl Jazeera MubasherAl Jazeera DocumentaryAl Jazeera BalkansAJ+Our NetworkOur NetworkShow moreAl Jazeera Centre for StudiesAl Jazeera Media InstituteLearn ArabicAl Jazeera Centre for Public Liberties & Human RightsAl Jazeera ForumAl Jazeera Hotel PartnersFollow Al Jazeera English: