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

Published 12 June 2026 · world

A colonial chain of sexual violence that Britain built, France refined and Israel inherited is being used against Palestinians. Warning: This story includes descriptions of

A colonial chain of sexual violence that Britain built, France refined and Israel inherited is being used against Palestinians. Warning: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault that some readers will find disturbing. 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 not new to the Palestinians’ “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.” What sexual torture actually is 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.