Al Jazeera has published a new documentary film on Israeli torture of Palestinians entitled “Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon.” That weapon, as described in a 4,000-word essay by Awad Joumaa, the film’s director and executive producer, is the systemic use of sexual abuse, sexual assault, and torture against Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including the use of dogs.
“I was raped after being stripped of my clothes,” says Mohammed Zaki al-Bakri, a Palestinian from Gaza interviewed for the film, “by a large dog.” In a separate part of the interview, he adds: “The seven of us were sexually assaulted by the dog.”
Then: “We are all powerless to do anything. They”–-the Israeli prison guards—"are laughing. And of course they are filming us.” Al Jazeera is not publishing every graphic detail of the testimony, Joumaa writes. But the pattern is clear: dogs appear repeatedly in accounts of nakedness, restraint, sexual violence and degradation.
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, says in an interview for the film that Palestinians have long been subjected to “the use of animals, the use of dogs to attack, to abuse, and even to inflict sexual abuse.”
“These are facts that were known,” she says. Albanese describes a broader pattern reported by prisoners: “Shackling until bleeding, beating, dragging, starvation, exposure to cold, denial of medical care, attacks by dogs, solitary confinement, sexual abuse, forced stripping, and threats to rape and kill family members.”
The film is posted on youtube.
