On June 9, Al Jazeera released an hour-long documentary film, called “Bodies of Evidence”, which presents damning evidence that the Israeli police and military have institutionalized the use of sexual violence as psychological torture of Palestinian men, women, and children, all non-combatants in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. The documentary was released just a month after a May 11, 2026, New York Times opinion column by Nicholas Kristof, “a prize-winning regular contributor” to the Times, on the same topic, which led to “recent escalation of defamatory attacks on Euro-Med and its leadership,” according to Prof. Richard Falk, who is chairman of the Euro-Med Monitor’s Board of Trustees.
The film displays extensive clandestine footage, purportedly recorded and “leaked” by an Israeli soldier from inside Sde Teiman prison, one of 15 sites from which recorded testimonies of detainees charge their Israeli captors with an array of highly depraved sexual assaults and unimaginable forms of psychological torture. Much of the testimonial evidence for both this film and the Times article was gathered by Euro-Med staff.
Coverage inside Israel regarding the way the highly volatile material reached outside sources prompted the resignation of Israeli Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who stated she accepts full responsibility for the leak of the video, and who now faces charges of “obstruction of justice and breach of trust.”
Candidly brutal images throughout the video are interspersed with segments of heart-wrenching personal recollections from former detainees, detailed accounts of two attorneys, who describe the psychological “catch 22” encountered by their client-victims, as well as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, representatives of the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling, and well-known human rights experts, elaborating how the charges against Israeli police and military forces qualify as war crimes or crimes against humanity.
The British Model
While not given due prominence in the film, “the British Mandate in Palestine” (1923) is identified. Over the course of two decades, the British set a precedent for practicing psychological torture. It is “documented that the British used the practice of torture, which they had initially used against Irish insurgency as part of counterinsurgency measures. These practices were also taught to Zionist militias in Palestine,” recounts Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
This video exposé quotes Netanyahu’s and Ben Gvir’s openly racist, blood-lusting social media posts and dehumanizing public diatribes against Palestinians, for the undeniable intent of their prison policies. This “official” policy is directed at intimidating Israeli leaders who seek peaceful negotiations to end the Palestinian genocide. For example, Al Jazeera includes footage of national Israeli media broadcasts that promote four IDF soldiers who were tried for sexual assault as heroes, but who were ultimately “judged” innocent and released in 2024. Clips are incorporated from other Israeli TV broadcasts honoring IDF sexual predators without their masks or balaclava face-coverings and glorifying their hideous deeds.
Fortunately, the viewer is spared from witnessing an explicitly sexual act. However, an array of frank scenes does show uniformed female and male Israeli soldiers cheering and jeering while policing long lines of partially clad Palestinian men in open-air settings. Also filmed is the brow-beating of cowering, crying youngsters by masked, uniformed gangs of men with shields and batons, or handling large snarling, viciously barking dogs ready for the attack. These conditions of incarceration betray the hideously sadistic mindset of the jailor, and an institutionalized environment fraught with intentional brutality and repressive, intimidating behaviors against those held in captivity.
Al-Jazeera’s video release followed in less than a week, a Lyndon LaRouche and International Peace Coalition associate’s highly revealing interview with Maha Hussaini,, a representative of the international human rights organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on their work.
Attesting to Euro-Med’s highly regarded quality of research and documentation of Israel’s systematic use of sexual abuse as a tool of war, the Israeli government officially reacted by imposing a ban on the organization, blacklisting its founder, Ramy Abdu, and forty leaders of the organization, this past May. Moreover, each individual leader has personally become an active target for reprisals from Israel’s Zionist elements. As Prof. Richard Falk, Euro-Med’s Board chairman, puts it in an open letter, “This attack on Euro-Med should be understood as part of a wider campaign of punitive response to truth-tellers (in contrast to impunity for wrongdoers) who are risking not only their reputations but their lives by devoting their efforts to the dissemination of inconvenient truths.”
Why has the series of “tell-all” articles in the London Guardian and Kristof’s Times story elicited such heavy-handed actions from the Netanyahu regime? These Western press outlets prominently covered the disgusting accusations in detail; subsequently, a variety of spinoff commentaries are appearing.
While the use of sexual abuse and psychological torture are not new, they have become more pervasive and systematically employed in the past two years, particularly following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel. What is rattling the Jabotinskyites today? Might it be, as Falk insists, that “Voices of global conscience need to accept and act upon the ancient wisdom that when truth prevails, justice is served, human dignity and moral decency upheld. Likewise, when truth is suppressed, and evidence of atrocities is filtered or ignored, evil flourishes?”
