Israeli Lawmaker Says Raping Palestinian Prisoners Is ‘Legitimate’

A member of the Israeli Knesset has defended the idea of raping Palestinian prisoners after Israeli soldiers suspected of sexually torturing a detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility were arrested.

The arrest took place on Monday, sparking protests from far-right activists, including several members of the Knesset and at least one minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

In a meeting of lawmakers on the day of the arrest, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, was asked if it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum?”

Milwidsky replied, “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

According to Haaretz, the Palestinian prisoner who was raped suffered from a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, and broken ribs and was taken to the hospital for an operation.

The Times of Israel reported that two out of the ten soldiers arrested for the rape were released on Wednesday and that they were not the main suspects. The report also said that Honenu, a legal aid organization representing four of the soldiers, claimed the soldiers were acting in self-defense when they forcibly sodomized the Palestinian prisoner.

The condition of the prisoner confirms some of the worst allegations made by Palestinians who were previously held in Sde Teiman. Younis al-Hamlawi, a senior nurse who was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza after he left Al-Shifa Hospital over allegations that he was tied to Hamas, told The New York Times that Israeli soldiers penetrated his rectum with a metal stick, causing him to bleed and leaving him in “unbearable pain.”

The Times report said a leaked report from the UN “cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators ‘made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,’ and also said that another detainee ‘died after they put the electric stick up’ his anus.”