Two armed Israeli female soldiers forced five Palestinian women to strip naked during a raid in the West Bank in July, threatening to release attack dogs on them if they refused.
According to a report by Israeli news outlet Haaretz yesterday, Israeli forces conducted an early morning raid on the home of the Palestinian Ajluni family in south Hebron back on July 10, waking 26 people in the household, including 15 children aged from four months to 17 years old.
While male soldiers searched the male family members without requiring them to take off their clothes, female soldiers took the women of the family into a room at separate times and forced them to strip naked.
According to the women, the soldiers threatened to set dogs on the women if they resisted, and sometimes released the dogs close to the women in an effort to scare them into complying.
The female family members who were forced to strip naked consisted of 53-year-old Ifaf, her 17-year-old daughter, Zeinab, and Ifaf’s three daughters-in-law – Amal, Diala and Rawan – who are in their twenties. Despite taking off their outer garments with little left to hide any potential weapons, the women were still forced to strip to their skin.
Aside from using the presence of dogs, the soldiers also reportedly used their rifles to threaten the women into compliance and to prevent male family members from intervening. During the ordeal, the occupation forces arrested the family’s eldest son, Harbi, who they took with them following the ordeal.
His wife, Diala, discovered afterwards that 2,000 shekels ($526) previously in a drawer had disappeared, immediately suspecting the soldiers of having taken it. The family also discovered that the Israeli forces took gold jewellery worth 40,000 shekels ($10,500) from the home, which the youngest brother, Mohammed, had bought prior to his wedding.
Manal Al Jaabari, a human rights activist with the left-wing Israeli organisation B’Tselem, said that she recently documented 20 psychological and physical assaults by Israeli forces against Palestinian women.
She added that there is a clear increase in Palestinian women being forced to strip naked at gunpoint and the use of attack dogs.
Al Jaabari pointed out that Palestinian women who are subjected to this experience refuse to give interviews or talk about it, but these family members spoke in detail about the horror of the experience.
Addressing the forced stripping of the women, the occupation forces said that “in accordance with instructions from detectives from the Hebron police, female (canine unit) combat soldiers searched the women in the house in a closed room, each one individually.”
In response to concerns that the soldiers had cameras fitted onto their helmets during the raid, as is usually the case during such operations, the Israeli military insisted that the “soldiers were not wearing cameras”, but that the dog “had a camera fitted on its back for operational purposes, and it was not turned on at that time”. They also claimed that the dogs were “not present in the room during the inspection”.
Yesterday, Israeli troops killed an Islamic Jihad gunman and wounded another Palestinian in the occupied West Bank, the armed faction and medics said, during what the military described as clashes touched off by an operation to uncover a bomb cache.
The West Bank, among areas where Palestinians seek statehood, has seen a surge in violence over the last 18 months amid long-deadlocked US-sponsored peacemaking efforts.
Israel’s military said troops entered Nur Shams camp, near the town of Tulkarm, to seize bombs manufactured by local militants, and fired back after coming under attack from gunmen.
Medical officials said a 21-year-old local man was killed and a second Palestinian was wounded. Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militant group, claimed the fatality as its member and said he had taken part in fighting.
In a separate incident, Israeli police said officers searching for a suspect involved in a criminal shooting incident in the Jordan Valley were shot at by the Palestinian suspect, returned fire and “neutralised” him.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said a man had been killed and residents of his village near the Palestinian city of Jericho said he was around 17-years-old, though there was no immediate official confirmation of his age.
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