The ICC must investigate Israel’s genocidal use of sexual violence

Before the events of October 2023, human rights organizations had for decades documented allegations of sexual violence and abuse against Palestinian detainees held in Israeli custody. Since October 2023, these organizations have reported a marked increase in the frequency and severity of such violations, documenting brutal assaults perpetrated by Israeli prison guards and soldiers.

Al Jazeera’s recently released documentary, Bodies of Evidence, offers shocking personal testimonies from Palestinian survivors and more details about the inner workings of the system that has enabled the commission of sexual torture against Palestinian women, men, and children.

With the accumulation of this evidence, a disturbing picture is emerging of a broader pattern of sexual violence in the Israeli detention system aimed at humiliation, domination, dehumanization, and destruction. It increasingly appears that Israel has weaponized sexual violence as part of its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.

Israel has used a vast detention system to control the occupied Palestinian population since 1967. According to estimates, more than 750,000 Palestinians have been held in Israeli prisons since then. Currently, there are at least 9,500 Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, including more than 360 children. Around 3,500 Palestinians are being held in “administrative detention” – I.e., without charge or trial. In addition, there are more than 1,300 Palestinians from Gaza held in military detention centers.

Survivor testimonies show that abuse is not confined to detention centers but occurs at every stage of detention: from arrest during home raids, hospital raids, checkpoint stops, and military operations, to transfer, interrogation, imprisonment, and appearance before military courts.

As a result, responsibility is shared between various actors within the Israeli security apparatus: the army, the police, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), which falls under the Ministry of National Security, and the intelligence service Shin Bet, which operates under the authority of the prime minister.

The Israeli media outlet Haaretz has recently named various Israeli officials as “collaborators” in Palestinian prisoner abuse, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, IPS chief commissioner Kobi Yaakobi, IPS legal adviser Eiran Nahon, and IPS chief medical officer, Dr Liav Goldstein.

Palestinian detainees have reported being subjected to various abuses: stripping, blindfolding, handcuffing, beating, starvation, sleep deprivation, targeting of genitalia, sexual assault, rape with objects or dogs, humiliation before soldiers and other detainees, denial of medical care, and obstruction of legal scrutiny.

After October 7, 2023, the Israeli army started detaining Palestinians from Gaza en masse and sending them to military-run detention camps. Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base converted into a detention centre, became notorious for widespread abuse, with one leaked video of soldiers assaulting a Palestinian detainee sparking international condemnation but resulting in no accountability.

The significance of documenting these repeated abuses also lies in the pattern they reveal. Reports, survivor testimonies, and information gathered by human rights organizations undermine the claim that such incidents are isolated acts committed by a few “bad apples”. Rather, they point to a broader pattern of systematic violence perpetrated by state authorities.

Legally, the distinction is crucial: an isolated act of sexual violence is treated very differently from assaults that are repeated and widespread. A single act of sexual violence committed within the context of a belligerent occupation may amount to a war crime. However, when such acts are systematic, they can constitute crimes against humanity. When sexual torture is inflicted on members of a protected group, with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part, it may also constitute genocide.

In genocidal contexts, sexual violence is meant to attack the individual through the group, and the group through the individual. It weaponizes stigma. It turns the body into the battlefield of group destruction.

Testimonies of Palestinian survivors clearly show dehumanization – the ideological groundwork of genocide – at play. Genocidal action begins by changing how a targeted group is seen. The victim is first stripped of individuality, then dignity, then humanity. From the very start of the genocide in Gaza, Palestinians were identified as “human animals” by senior Israeli officials. As a result, violence has become not just permissible, but celebrated.

The accounts of soldiers laughing, filming, applauding, mocking, and boasting about sexual and other violence are legally significant. They suggest not only that abuse occurred, but that abuse was normalized.

The Genocide Convention does not define genocide only as killing. It also includes causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a protected group, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

Sexual violence can fall within these categories. It does not need to result in sterilization to be relevant to the Convention’s prohibition on measures intended to prevent births. Sexual torture can cause lasting physical harm to reproductive organs, increasing risks of infertility, pregnancy complications, and chronic reproductive health problems.

It can also lead to severe psychological trauma and difficulties with intimacy, relationships, and future parenting. Violence targeting the genitalia, rape with objects, electrocution, forced nudity, threats of sexual exposure, and the psychological destruction of sexual and family life can therefore all be practices carried out with the intent to annihilate the group’s capacity to reproduce biologically and socially.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda recognized this in the landmark Akayesu judgment. In that case, the Tribunal held that rape and sexual violence could constitute genocide when committed with genocidal intent. In other words, it admitted that sexual violence can be a method of group destruction. In Rwanda, it was indeed used with the intent to destroy the Tutsi people.

In Bosnia, sexual violence was used as a weapon of ethnic persecution, intended to contribute to the destruction or removal of targeted groups from specific areas. In Myanmar, gendered crimes against the Rohingya are integral to the genocidal campaign.

As widely reported, the Israeli justice system is unwilling and likely even unable to prosecute any serious crimes, including sexual violence, committed by Israeli nationals against Palestinians. Independent UN Commissions of Inquiry have repeatedly documented that the Israeli military justice system contains structural, procedural, and institutional shortcomings that undermine effective accountability for alleged violations of international law.

Where a justice system is structured in a way that effectively shields alleged perpetrators rather than delivering accountability to victims, it fails to deter serious violations and thereby enables the continuation of unlawful conduct, including the most severe forms of abuse.

Where there is a consistent pattern of serious allegations, there must be an urgent investigation at the proper legal level. The International Criminal Court (ICC) needs to investigate sexual violence against Palestinians not only as a war crime. In light of the widespread and systematic nature of such violence, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor must look at these acts as potentially constituting crimes against humanity. In light of the context of Gaza’s devastation, mass detention, forced displacement, starvation, dehumanization, and systematic torture, it must also investigate sexual violence as a potential genocidal act.

The systematic nature of alleged sexual violence against Palestinians requires that investigations not be confined to the direct or material perpetrators of these crimes. Where such acts are alleged in prisons or military detention facilities, investigative scope must extend across the full chain of responsibility, including individual guards or soldiers alleged to have committed the abuse, immediate supervisors responsible for their conduct, and facility-level commanders overseeing detention operations.

In the case of military detention, this may include unit commanders, military police authorities, and the Israeli Military Advocate General responsible for overseeing investigations and prosecutions within the military justice system.

Where detention is administered by civilian prison structures, such as the IPS, responsibility may also extend to prison wardens, regional commanders, and senior administrative officials responsible for detention policy and conditions.

At the policy and oversight level, scrutiny may further include defense establishment authorities and, where relevant, ministerial-level officials responsible for prison administration, detention policy, and approval of systemic practices affecting detainees.

If the ICC fails to prosecute these criminal acts, the consequence is not only impunity but the erosion of the deterrent function of international criminal law itself. In contexts where serious violations are widely and repeatedly documented, persistent non-prosecution risks normalizing patterns of abuse and embedding them within institutional practice.

The absence of meaningful accountability thus creates conditions in which impunity becomes self-reinforcing: a permissive environment in which violations can recur with reduced fear of investigation or sanction. In this sense, impunity is not merely the aftermath of abuse, but the fertile ground in which it can persist and expand, including the most severe forms of ill-treatment such as sexual torture.

Triestino Mariniello is Professor of Law at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.

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