'I was raped by a huge dog': Survivors recount horror in Israeli detention - 'It was a big party, they say'

Mohammed Zaki al-Bakri, a Gaza civil servant who was captured by Israeli soldiers after the October 7 attack on Gaza, says he was raped by a huge dog while in Israeli custody. Recounting the horrors he faced at the hands of Israeli guards, al-Bakri says he remembers the exact date he was raped.

“I think the date was April 10, 2024. This was the worst day I experienced there. They took many of our young men and left about six or seven of us. They treated us like madmen,” he told Al Jazeera.

He recalled: “They put us in a little cage outside. In front of the cage we were in, there was a small case, like a passageway, they call it something like a waiting room. When we were handcuffed, they stripped us of our clothes. We were blindfolded and our hands and feet were tied.”

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“We were attacked by dogs…there were officers and soldiers with them. It was a big party, as they call it. The dog was very big. The dog has an iron muzzle that also cuts the body and shaves the body.”

“After they stripped us, some officers or soldiers had a rubber rod with them. A stick used as a sex toy. They used these and pipes on some of us and on other dogs. I was among them. After he stripped me, I was raped by a big dog,” Al-Bakri said.

“We were crying and screaming and saying, ‘Oh, Lord, Lord…we couldn’t do anything,'” Al-Bakri said as he shared detailed testimonies with Al Jazeera for a documentary called Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon.

The documentary was posted on YouTube on June 9. It claims to expose “Israel’s use of rape in prisons” and interviews former detainees who have alleged systematic torture and sexual violence, including rape, in Israeli custody. The Mint could not independently verify the claim.

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The media reports that this is a documentary investigation into what the International Criminal Court (ICC), the United Nations and its Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese, say is the widespread and systematic use of rape and sexual torture by the Israeli military against Palestinians.

As with Al-Bakri, the “casual worker” Job’s memory of his rape is equally clear. “The hardest moment I’ve seen in my entire life wasn’t beatings, humiliation or electric shocks,” he was heard telling Al Jazeera in the documentary.

Like Al-Bakri’s, Job’s account begins with the soldiers handcuffing him and stripping him of his clothes. He claimed that female soldiers raped him with artificial objects.

“They put iron handcuffs on my arm behind my back. They took the chain off my ankles and replaced it with handcuffs. They put me face down and stepped on my back and neck,” he claimed.

“While I was lying like that, female soldiers came with a strap (of artificial objects) and one of them started to literally rape me. There were two of them. The soldiers around them were clapping and filming,” Job said.

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Job’s rape and sexual torture continued while he was questioned about any knowledge of the Hamas-led attack, which he knew nothing about, Al Jazeera reported.

The women said the same thing, that they were forced to be searched naked in front of their family members, in humiliating and humiliating positions, “under threats of large dogs, under threat of guns, one of them was actually beaten in the face”.

Shereen, an educator and activist who was detained in the West Bank, told Al Jazeera: “They took me to a bedroom, ordered me to take off all my clothes… a search was conducted. They said: stand up and squat 14 times. Turn around and squat 14 times.”

“So I stood and squatted and asked, ‘Is this really necessary?'”

“If it is Nukhba…everything is legitimate”

Allegations of sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons are not new – they date back decades, the report added.

Human rights groups such as the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) and the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor have also documented testimonies from prisoners who described how Israeli soldiers used dogs to rape them.

According to an Al Jazeera investigation and various reports from the UN and leading human rights organizations, Israel appears to have increased the use of rape as a weapon of war after launching its “genocidal” war in Gaza following a Hamas-led attack in October 2023.

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A UN report published in March 2025 found evidence of “systematic” use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence by Israel since 7 October 2023.

No soldiers or guards have been convicted of sexually abusing Palestinians, the report claims. According to the document, all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military prison in July 2024 have been dropped.

Asked in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in July 2024 whether it was ever legitimate to rape prisoners, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, shouted: “Yes.

“If Nukhba is (Hamas fighter), everything is legitimate to do, everything.”