Dec. 29 (UPI) — A human rights monitor has documented incidents of alleged sexual harassment by Israeli fighters while storming the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, as groups in Israel and the West Bank document continued sexual violence against Palestinians.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on Saturday documented the testimonies of women who were allegedly abused by Israeli soldiers, who ordered them to remove their pants before putting their hands on their bodies during Friday’s raid.
“A soldier forced a nurse to take off her trousers, then placed his hand on her. When she tried to resist, he struck her hard across the face, causing her nose to bleed,” one witness told the human rights monitor.
Another woman recounted how a soldier ordered another woman to take off her pants or that the Israeli fighters would “force it off” of them. A third woman had her clothes torn to expose her chest by an Israeli fighter after she refused to remove her headscarf.
“The soldiers ordered us to remove our hijabs, but we refused. They then turned to the girls under 20 years old and demanded they remove their hijabs, but they also refused,” a hospital staff member said.
“The soldiers decided to punish us by taking two women at a time and forcing them to lift their clothes and lower their trousers under threats and coercion.”
When a young child with a psychological disorder was stripped to his underwear, he ran toward an Israeli tank and was shot dead by Israeli fighters, witnesses alleged.
Palestinians have been documenting such incidents of sexual violence throughout, and before, the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis escalated last October.
In August, video emerged of a Palestinian man allegedly being gang raped by Israeli prison guards at the Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev desert, which sits between the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli media reported at the time that the Palestinian victim was unable to walk after the brutal assault.
And the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said in a report released this month that Palestinians have suffered varying degrees of sexual violence from threats of rape to forced undressing and physical blows to their genitals.
“I also had bruises all over my body, especially on my testicles. My head wound was stitched and the doctors wanted to keep me at the hospital for 24 hours for observation,” Wisam Dugoush, a 35-year-old father, said in testimony to the Israeli human rights group.
“But I chose to go home after my daughter Rital called me, crying, because she’d seen pictures of me bleeding on the neighborhood WhatsApp group.”
He added that, a week after his alleged assault, his “testicles still hurt badly.”
Another Palestinian recounted how they were forced to strip “completely naked” and perform 150 pushups for the Israeli guards.
“If I see you in this place again, I’ll rape you and kill you. I’ll do the same to anyone else I see here,” an Israeli fighter allegedly told Muhammad a-Natsheh, a young Palestinian man.
And throughout the war, videos and pictures purporting to show Israeli soldiers going through Palestinian women’s underwear in Gaza have gone viral.
The Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ Affairs, a governmental body of the Palestinian Authority, has also previously documented the alleged rape and sexual assault of Palestinian captives by their Israeli jailers.
Meanwhile, human rights experts with the United Nations have expressed alarm about the treatment of women and girls in Gaza who were subject to extrajudicial executions by the Israeli military.
