Report Says 75 Documented Cases of Palestinian Women Raped in Israeli Custody Are Only 1% of What Is Actually Happening

A Palestinian women's rights organisation has warned that 75 documented cases of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women in Israeli custody amount to no more than one per cent of what is actually occurring on the ground.

The figure was compiled by the Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), a Ramallah-based feminist organisation that has spent more than two years gathering testimony from survivors across the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. Reaching even that number required months of sustained trust-building inside communities where fear of military retaliation, social stigma, and threats from soldiers keep most survivors permanently silent.

The warning arrives alongside a wave of parallel reports from the United Nations, Israeli human rights groups and an international consortium funded by 13 European governments, all pointing to the same conclusion: sexualised violence against Palestinian women has become a systematic instrument of war.

What WCLAC's 75 Documented Cases Reveal

Kifaya Khraim, WCLAC's advocacy unit manager, has documented reports from Palestinian women and girls who allege they were subjected to sexual assault, sexual torture and rape by Israeli soldiers. Speaking to the Irish Examiner in April 2026, Khraim said she believed documented cases represent a fraction of the true scale. 'This is maybe 1% of the cases,' she said. 'We had to do a lot of research in local communities just to earn the trust for people to tell us about these cases.'

The accounts Khraim and her team gathered share a disturbing consistency across geographic locations and different branches of the Israeli military. According to Prism Reports, women arrested without charge under administrative detention describe being forced to strip, beaten repeatedly on their genitals, photographed naked, and then threatened with or subjected to rape. Some told WCLAC they were afraid to fall asleep in Israeli jails because they believed they would be assaulted in the night.

Checkpoint violence accounts for an additional cluster of cases. WCLAC documented five incidents in which soldiers exposed themselves to women or subjected them to invasive sexual contact as a condition of movement. A 14-year-old girl who crossed a checkpoint daily to reach school told WCLAC that soldiers 'pretended to be searching her' before groping her. According to Khraim, that girl stopped going to school entirely. Home invasions produced some of the most harrowing testimony: soldiers with large dogs forcing women to undress and walk naked in front of children and handcuffed male relatives.

Survivors who have attempted to speak publicly face further coercion. Khraim told Middle East Eye that two named Israeli captains routinely phone women after their release. 'They keep calling these women on their phones regularly, asking them not to speak to the media and not to talk about their stories,' she said. One woman, identified by the pseudonym Khulood, spoke publicly about her detention but withheld the sexual assault she endured. A captain subsequently called her and warned: 'If you speak to the media again, we are taking you back.'

UN Commission Concludes Sexual Violence Is Israeli Military Policy

In March 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory published a report concluding that sexual violence against Palestinian detainees was 'committed either under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement by Israel's top civilian and military leadership.' Forced public stripping, rape threats and sexual assault, the Commission found, 'comprise part of the Israeli Security Forces' standard operating procedures toward Palestinians.'

The report, spanning incidents since 7 October 2023, documented cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence that 'amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.' It described detention conditions across multiple facilities, temporary holding sites and transit points, concluding that 'Israeli detention is characterised by widespread and systematic abuse and sexual and gender-based violence.'

In August 2024, Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem published its own findings, calling the Israeli prison system a 'network of torture camps.' The report alleged 'repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity, by soldiers or prison guards against Palestinian detainees as an additional punitive measure.' Witness accounts described genital beatings, the use of metal batons on genitals and filmed gang assaults.

In April 2026, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released a report titled 'Another Genocide Behind Walls,' documenting direct sexual assault, assault with objects and torture targeting genitals in Israeli prisons and detention centres since October 2023. Researcher Khaled Ahmad told Euro-Med Monitor that accessing testimonies had been 'nearly impossible.' 'We knew there were dozens of cases of rape and sexual assault, but in a conservative society, it is extremely difficult for someone to come forward and say they were raped,' he said.

A separate West Bank Protection Consortium report published on 20 April 2026, led by the Norwegian Refugee Council and funded by 13 European nations, found that more than 70 per cent of displaced Palestinian households cited threats of sexualised violence against women and children as the decisive reason for leaving their homes. The report's chief of party, Allegra Pacheco, told The New Arab: 'Sexualised violence is a tool in this larger realm of violence. It's not a pattern of a one-off type of case. It's continuous. This violence goes on and on until the community basically, until most of them end up leaving.'

Charges Dropped, UN Investigators Blocked, Accountability Absent

The system of impunity surrounding these allegations is itself thoroughly documented. In March 2026, Israel dropped all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman, a desert detention facility holding thousands of Palestinians since October 2023. The military's own indictment had described soldiers stabbing the detainee near his rectum, causing cracked ribs, a punctured lung and an internal tear. A doctor who treated the man said he initially assumed the injuries were inflicted by a rival armed group.

The US State Department had described the allegations as 'horrific' and demanded a 'swift and full' investigation, with spokesperson Matthew Miller stating: 'There ought to be zero tolerance of any sexual abuse, rape, of any detainees, period.' No accountability followed. The military lawyer who filed the original indictment, Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, subsequently resigned and was arrested on unrelated charges including fraud and obstruction of justice.

In January 2025, Israel refused a formal request from Pramila Patten, the UN's Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, to investigate claims of rape and abuse committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians in detention. Israel was warned the refusal could result in its inclusion on the UN's list of entities responsible for sexual violence in armed conflicts.

The structural barriers to accountability are not incidental. Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that 93.6 per cent of investigations into ideologically motivated offences by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005 ended without indictment, a record Yesh Din describes not as oversight but as deliberate policy. A sweeping UN Human Rights Office report found that of more than 1,500 Palestinians killed between 2017 and September 2025, Israeli authorities opened 112 investigations and secured just one conviction.

In April 2026, UN experts issued a fresh statement warning that sexualised violence is driving Palestinian displacement across the West Bank, describing a 'persistent climate of impunity' in which abuses by Israeli personnel are rarely investigated and almost never prosecuted.

If Kifaya Khraim's assessment is correct, the 75 cases in the public record are not the story: they are merely what survived the silence.