UN: Israel has a “de facto state policy” of organized torture

The committee highlights allegations including dog attacks and sexual violence, raising concerns about impunity for war crimes.

According to a UN report covering the last two years, Israel has “a de facto state policy of organized and widespread torture”, which also expressed concern about the impunity of Israeli security forces for war crimes.

The UN committee on torture expressed “deep concern about allegations of repeated severe assaults, dog attacks, electrocution, waterboarding, use of prolonged stress positions and sexual violence.”

The report, published on Friday as part of the committee’s regular monitoring of countries that have signed the UN convention against torture, also stated that Palestinian detainees were humiliated by being “forced to act like animals or have urine on them”, were systematically denied medical care and were subjected to excessive use of restraints, “in some cases resulting in amputation”.

The UN committee, made up of 10 independent experts, expressed concern about the indiscriminate use of Israeli law on illegal fighters to justify the prolonged detention, without trial, of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. The most recent data released by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem indicates that, at the end of September, the Israel Prison Service held 3,474 Palestinians in “administrative detention”, that is, without trial.

The new UN report, which covers a two-year period since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, draws attention to the “high proportion of children who are currently detained without charge or in pre-trial detention,” noting that the age of criminal responsibility imposed by Israel is 12 years and that children under the age of 12 have also been detained.

The report states that children classified as security prisoners “have severe restrictions on family contact, may be held in solitary confinement and have no access to education, in violation of international standards.” The document calls on Israel to change its legislation so that solitary confinement is not used against children.

The UN committee, created to monitor the implementation of the 1984 UN convention against torture, goes further, arguing that the daily imposition of Israeli policies in occupied Palestine, taken as a whole, “may amount to torture”.

The report states that 75 Palestinians died in custody during the war in Gaza, a period in which detention conditions for Palestinians suffered a “marked deterioration”. The study found that the number of deaths is “abnormally high and appears to have exclusively affected the detained Palestinian population.” The report further notes that “to date, no state official has been held accountable for these deaths.”

The Israeli government has repeatedly denied using torture. The UN committee heard testimony from representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice and the country’s prison service, who argued that prison conditions were adequate and subject to supervision.

However, the committee highlighted that the inspector tasked with investigating complaints about interrogations had not brought “any criminal proceedings for acts of torture and ill-treatment” in the past two years, despite widespread allegations of such practices.

The report said Israel had only one conviction for torture or ill-treatment in that two-year period, an apparent reference to an Israeli soldier convicted in February this year of repeatedly attacking bound and blindfolded Gaza Strip detainees with his fists, a baton and his assault rifle. In this case, the committee concluded that the seven-month sentence “apparently does not reflect the seriousness of the offense.”

The report was published on the same day that three Israeli border police were released after questioning over the shooting of two Palestinians who had been detained in Jenin.

Moment when Israeli forces shoot dead surrendering Palestinians – video report

A video of the incident on Thursday night shows the two men, Youssef Asasa and Mahmoud Abdallah, crawling out of a building. Asasa and Abdallah appear with their hands up and lifting their shirts to demonstrate that they are unarmed.

The two men, both claimed by Palestinian Islamic Jihad as Al-Quds Brigades fighters, were detained for a few seconds by border police, including a bald police officer with a beard who appears in the video taking control and kicking the two detainees before making a gesture, apparently leading them back into the building. Seconds later, Asasa and Abdallah were shot by police officers from a distance of about 2 meters.

According to Israeli media, the three border agents questioned on Friday about the incident claimed to have felt an immediate and palpable threat to their lives. In his account of what happened, the two detainees refused to take off their clothes and put their hands in their pockets, and then one of them tried to escape back into the building.

Video of the scene, the authenticity of which has not been disputed by Israeli authorities, does not show any obvious resistance on the part of the two men, nor does it show them with their hands in their pockets. They appear reluctant to re-enter the building under the apparent orders of the border police officer.

The three border police agents were released after questioning, on condition that they did not discuss the case with other people.

Originally published by The Guardian on 11/29/2025

By Julian Borger in Jerusalem