Accounts of Palestinian schoolgirls afraid to cross military checkpoints because soldiers had exposed themselves stayed with Dr. Rubin Minhas long after he reviewed the evidence.
For the doctor, a co-author of a new opinion piece in The BMJ, the descriptions were "haunting" – not only because of the reported abuse, but because children were having to navigate military checkpoints simply to reach their classrooms.
"I think it just brought home to me how absolutely bizarre it is that having to go to school and pass through military checkpoints is the norm before we even get to the sexual violence," he told The New Arab.
Published on Tuesday, the piece brings together evidence of conflict-related sexual violence against Palestinian women, men and children, calling for independent investigations and accountability regardless of the identity of victims or perpetrators.
It draws on survivor testimony, UN investigations, and medical, humanitarian and human rights sources to examine recurring patterns across detention, checkpoints, raids and displacement sites.
The purpose, Minhas said, was to draw together evidence "dispersed across accounts of detention, gendered abuse, humiliation, and displacement, and harm to children, to actually paint a picture of what was going on".
Conflict-related sexual violence, or CRSV, refers to sexual violence directly or indirectly linked to conflict. The UN definition includes rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy and other forms of comparable gravity; the BMJ authors also examine sexual torture, sexualised humiliation and reproductive harm.
'Occupation is violence'
For children, the evidence describes consequences extending beyond the immediate abuse into their education, relationships and sense of safety.
The piece cites a 2025 Save the Children report in which more than half of 165 children, aged 12 to 17 at the time of detention, reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence in Israeli detention, including rape threats, forced stripping and genital assault.
The same report documented anxiety, panic attacks, nightmares and social withdrawal among former child detainees. Twenty percent reported intentional self-harm, while 45% did not return to school after release. Those figures concern the children surveyed and the broader effects of detention, rather than outcomes attributed solely to sexual violence.
"We’re now moving away from the immediate act and are thinking about the long-term effects, the effects on their education, psychology, their development – it becomes intergenerational," Minhas said.
Beyond detention, the sources describe forced undressing, sometimes in public or in front of children, unwanted sexual touching during searches, rape threats and sexualised humiliation.
Accounts of settler abuse include genital exposure, attempts to touch women’s bodies and stalking women on their way to latrines. Fear of violence, survivors recall, would deter women from work and girls from education.
Among 39 displaced households interviewed in Area C of the occupied West Bank, more than 70% identified threats to women and children, particularly sexualised violence, as a decisive reason for leaving, the authors write.
In detention, the piece brings together reports of forced nudity, sexual humiliation, rape threats, genital violence and allegations of rape and assault with objects.
It also cites interviews reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists in February with 59 Palestinian journalists released from Israeli detention. Seventeen, or 29%, described sexual violence, including two who described rape.
Minhas told The New Arab that these accounts exposed an aspect of Palestinian life that remained poorly understood. "People have very little understanding and awareness of what actually is going on and what the daily life of Palestinians entails, the kind of indignities that people have to suffer," he said.
"There is a fundamental aspect of living under military occupation that involves violence. And you know, at its very core, occupation is violence. You know, that’s the fundamental transaction that takes place, and it will manifest itself in various ways."
Sexual violence as a systematic yet underreported issue
The authors argue that the convergence of accounts warrants examination as a pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents. They cite a 2025 UN Commission of Inquiry finding that specific forms of sexual and gender-based violence "de facto form part of" Israeli security forces' "standard operating procedures" towards Palestinians.
Yet Minhas said medical publication on the subject remained limited.
"The interesting thing here, from a medical perspective, was the remarkable lack of documentation and publication of conflict-related sexual violence in this setting," he said, contrasting it with what he described as a much larger body of publications concerning other conflicts like Ukraine.
He suggested political pressures could discourage research.
"I think there’s a degree of personal and professional exposure for academics and for researchers seeking to try and study and understand this subject," he said.
The opinion piece synthesises existing evidence rather than presenting a new investigation or estimating the overall prevalence of abuse. Its authors stress that CRSV is under-reported and demand accountability across all settings.
For Palestinians, they identify restricted access as a central obstacle: the UN commission has lacked full access to the occupied Palestinian territories since October 2023, while the International Committee of the Red Cross has been unable to visit Palestinians in Israeli custody.
The authors demand full, unrestricted access for independent investigators and medical and humanitarian organisations.
"The first instance is we need to get independent investigators into those settings," Minhas said. "And it’s only once you’ve got independent investigators in those settings that there’s actually a prospect that people may find that the impunity that they’ve enjoyed disappears."