This grab taken from a UGC video made available on the ESN platform on October 19, 2022 shows people reacting as they gather at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran to welcome Elnaz Rekabi, an Iranian climber who caused a sensation by competing at an event abroad without a hijab. (AFP/File)
PARIS: Members of the Iranian security forces raped and used other forms of sexual violence against women and men detained in the crackdown on nationwide protests that erupted from September 2022, Amnesty International said Wednesday.
Amnesty said in a report it had documented 45 such cases of rape, gang rape or sexual violence against protesters. With cases in more than half of Iran’s provinces, it expressed fear these documented violations appeared part of a “wider pattern.”
“Our research exposes how intelligence and security agents in Iran used rape and other sexual violence to torture, punish and inflict lasting physical and psychological damage on protesters, including children as young as 12,” Amnesty’s secretary general Agnes Callamard said.
The London-based organization said it had shared its findings with the Iranian authorities on November 24 “but has thus far received no response.”
The protests began in Iran in September 2022 after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, 22. Her family says she was killed by a blow to the head but this has always been disputed by the Iranian authorities.
After rattling Iran’s clerical leadership, the movement lost momentum by the end of that year in the face of a fierce crackdown that left hundreds dead, according to rights activists, and thousands arrested, according to the United Nations.
Amnesty said 16 of the 45 cases documented in the report were of rape, including six women, seven men, a 14-year-old girl, and two boys aged 16 and 17.
Six of them — four women and two men — were gang raped by up to 10 male agents, it said.
It said the sexual assaults were carried out by members of the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary Basij force, agents of the intelligence ministry, as well as police officers.
The rapes on women and men were carried out with “wooden and metal batons, glass bottles, hosepipes, and/or agents’ sexual organs and fingers,” it said.
As well as the 16 rape victims, Amnesty said it documented the cases of 29 victims of other forms of sexual violence such as the beating of breasts and genitals, enforced nudity, and inserting needles or applying ice to men’s testicles.
It said it collected the testimony through interviews with the victims and other witnesses, conducted remotely via secure communications platforms.
“The harrowing testimonies we collected point to a wider pattern in the use of sexual violence as a key weapon in the Iranian authorities’ armory of repression of the protests and suppression of dissent to cling to power at all costs,” said Callamard.
One woman, named only as Maryam, who was arrested and held for two months after removing her headscarf in a protest, told Amnesty she was raped by two agents during an interrogation.
“He (the interrogator) called two others to come in and told them ‘It’s time’. They started ripping my clothes. I was screaming and begging them to stop.
“They violently raped me in my vagina with their sexual organs and raped me anally with a drink bottle. Even animals don’t do these things,” she was quoted by the group as saying.
A man named as Farzad told Amnesty that plain clothes agents gang raped him and another male protester, Shahed, while they were inside a vehicle.
“They pulled down my trousers and raped me. I couldn’t scream out. I was really being ripped apart... I was throwing up a lot, and was bleeding from my rectum when I went to the toilet,” said Farzad who was released without charge a few days later.
Amnesty said most victims did not file complaints against the assault for fear of further consequences, and those who did tell prosecutors were ignored.
“With no prospects for justice domestically, the international community has a duty to stand with the survivors and pursue justice,” said Callamard.
Israeli military says it fired to stop suspects reaching Lebanon no-go zone
Updated 56 sec ago
Reuters
DUBAI: Israeli forces on Wednesday fired at several vehicles with suspects to prevent them from reaching a no-go zone in Lebanese territory and the suspects moved away, the Israeli military said in a statement, hours after a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah came into effect at 0200 GMT.
Hezbollah says launched drones ahead of ceasefire at ‘sensitive military targets’ in Tel Aviv
Updated 27 November 2024
AFP
BEIRUT, Lebanon: Lebanon’s Hezbollah said it launched drones at “sensitive military targets” in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, after deadly Israeli strikes in Beirut and as news of a ceasefire deal was announced.
“In response to the targeting of the capital Beirut and the massacres committed by the Israeli enemy against civilians,” Hezbollah launched “drones at a group of sensitive military targets in the city of Tel Aviv and its suburbs,” the group said in a statement.
What does the US-brokered truce ending Israel-Hezbollah fighting include?
The Lebanese army would deploy troops to south of the Litani to have around 5,000 soldiers there, including at 33 posts along the border with Israel, a Lebanese security source told Reuters
Updated 27 November 2024
Reuters
BEIRUT: Israel and Lebanese armed group Hezbollah are set to implement a ceasefire early on Wednesday as part of a US-proposed deal for a 60-day truce to end more than a year of hostilities.
The text of the deal has not been published and Reuters has not seen a draft.
US President Joe Biden announced the deal, saying it was designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities. Israel’s security cabinet has approved it and it will be put to the whole cabinet for review. Lebanon Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed the deal, which Hezbollah approved last week.
The agreement, negotiated by US mediator Amos Hochstein, is five pages long and includes 13 sections, according to a senior Lebanese political source with direct knowledge of the matter.
Here is a summary of its key provisions.
HALT TO HOSTILITIES
The halt to hostilities is set to begin at 4 a.m local time (0200 GMT) on Wednesday, Biden announced, with both sides expected to cease fire by Wednesday morning.
The senior Lebanese source said Israel was expected to “stop carrying out any military operations against Lebanese territory, including against civilian and military targets, and Lebanese state institutions, through land, sea and air.”
All armed groups in Lebanon — meaning Hezbollah and its allies — would halt operations against Israel, the source said.
ISRAELI TROOPS WITHDRAW
Two Israeli officials said the Israeli military would withdraw from southern Lebanon within 60 days. Biden said the troops would gradually pull out and civilians on both sides would be able to return home.
Lebanon had earlier pushed for Israeli troops to withdraw as quickly as possible within the truce period, Lebanese officials told Reuters. They now expect Israeli troops to withdraw within the first month, the senior Lebanese political source said.
A Lebanese official told Reuters the deal included language that preserved both Lebanon’s and Israel’s rights to self-defense.
HEZBOLLAH PULLS NORTH, LEBANESE ARMY DEPLOYS
Hezbollah fighters will leave their positions in southern Lebanon to move north of the Litani River, which runs about 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of the border with Israel.
Their withdrawal will not be public, the senior Lebanese political source said. He said the group’s military facilities “will be dismantled” but it was not immediately clear whether the group would take them apart itself, or whether the fighters would take their weapons with them as they withdrew.
The Lebanese army would deploy troops to south of the Litani to have around 5,000 soldiers there, including at 33 posts along the border with Israel, a Lebanese security source told Reuters.
“The deployment is the first challenge — then how to deal with the locals that want to return home,” given the risks of unexploded ordnance, the source said.
More than 1.2 million people have been displaced by Israeli strikes on Lebanon, many of them from south Lebanon. Hezbollah sees the return of the displaced to their homes as a priority, Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah told Reuters.
Tens of thousands displaced from northern Israel are also expected to return home.
MONITORING MECHANISM
One of the sticking points in the final days leading to the ceasefire’s conclusion was how it would be monitored, Lebanon’s deputy speaker of parliament Elias Bou Saab told Reuters.
A pre-existing tripartite mechanism between the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL), the Lebanese army and the Israeli army would be expanded to include the US and France, with the US chairing the group, Bou Saab said.
Israel would be expected to flag possible breaches to the monitoring mechanism, and France and the US together would determine whether a violation had taken place, an Israeli official and a Western diplomat told Reuters.
A joint statement by Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron said France and the US would work together to ensure the deal is applied fully.
UNILATERAL ISRAELI STRIKES
Israeli officials have insisted that the Israeli army would continue to strike Hezbollah if it identified threats to its security, including transfers of weapons and military equipment to the group.
An Israeli official told Reuters that US envoy Amos Hochstein, who negotiated the agreement, had given assurances directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel could carry out such strikes on Lebanon.
Netanyahu said in a televised address after the security cabinet met that Israel would strike Hezbollah if it violated the deal.
The official said Israel would use drones to monitor movements on the ground in Lebanon.
Lebanese officials say that provision is not in the deal that it agreed, and that it would oppose any violations of its sovereignty.
Israeli strikes hit north Lebanon crossings with Syria for first time, minister says
Syria says 6 killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon border crossings
Updated 27 November 2024
Reuters
BEIRUT: Israeli strikes late on Tuesday targeted Lebanon’s three northern border crossings with Syria for the first time, Lebanon’s transport minister Ali Hamieh told Reuters.
The strikes came moments after US President Joe Biden announced that a ceasefire would come into effect at 4:00 a.m. local time (0200 GMT) on Wednesday to halt hostilities between Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and Israel.
Hamieh said it was not immediately clear whether the roads had been cut off as a result of the strikes. Israeli raids on Lebanon’s eastern crossings in recent weeks had already sealed off those routes into Syria.
Syria’s state news agency reported four civilians and two soldiers were killed, and 12 people were wounded including children, women and workers in the Syrian Red Crescent.
The Red Crescent said earlier a volunteer was killed and another was injured in “the aggression that targeted Al-Dabousyeh and Al-Arida crossings ... as they were performing their humanitarian duty of rescuing the wounded early on Wednesday.”
The strike damaged several ambulances and work points, it added in a statement.
Syrian state TV reported the Israeli strike hit the Arida and Dabousieh border crossings with Lebanon.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment. It has previously stated that it targets what it says are Iran-linked sites in Syria as part of a broader campaign to curb the influence of Iran and its ally Hezbollah in the region.
Separately, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said on Tuesday that it struck an Iranian-aligned militia weapons storage facility in Syria in response to an Iranian-aligned attack against US forces in the country on Monday.
Israeli NGO warns of “quiet annexation” of West Bank under cover of war
ACRI accuses Netanyahu govt. of “excessive, unrestrained and illegal use of force” in occupied territory in a new report
Says govt. is “implementing profound changes to all aspects of control, most of which are flying under the radar”
Updated 27 November 2024
Jonathan Gornall
LONDON: On Oct. 12 last year, a group of armed settlers and Israeli soldiers drove into the West Bank village of Wadi Al-Seeq, 10 kilometers east of the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
There, they seized and handcuffed three Palestinian men, subjecting them to hours of abuse and violence, later compared by one of the victims to the treatment meted out by rogue US soldiers to prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003.
The abuses in Wadi Al-Seeq were led by members of the IDF’s Sfar Hamidbar (Desert Frontier) unit, notorious for recruiting into its ranks violent “hilltop youth” from the illegal farming settlements that are proliferating in the West Bank with the blessing of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, which includes, and is dependent on the support of, far-right parties.
“For hours,” as an Israeli newspaper reported on Oct. 21, 2023, the Palestinians “were severely beaten, stripped to their underwear, and photographed handcuffed.
“Their captors urinated on two of them and extinguished burning cigarettes on them. There was even an attempt to penetrate one of them with an object.”
Palestinians bound and stripped after being apprehended by IDF soldiers and settlers in the central West Bank village of Wadi Al-Seeq on October 12, 2023. (The Times of Israel)
Israeli human rights activists who arrived at the scene were also arrested, cuffed, beaten, threatened with death and, like the Palestinians, robbed.
At the time, many in Israel were shocked to read the reports of the joint operation between the IDF and settlers, exposed by the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
But as a new report from an Israeli human rights group makes clear, such events have become commonplace as, under cover of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, the Israeli government and its agencies have been pursuing the ultimate goal of “realizing the vision of full Israeli sovereignty in the occupied territory.”
In the report, “One year of war: the collapse of human and civil rights in Israel and the West Bank,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) accuses the government of “excessive, unrestrained, and illegal use of force.”
Furthermore, it says, Netanyahu’s government is “demolishing the judicial system and the civil service with the aim of accumulating unlimited power; increasing the use of force in the West Bank and granting tacit permission for unrestrained settler violence; using force to limit freedom of expression and protest; and systematically violating the rights of detainees and prisoners.”
Israeli settlers march towards the outpost of Eviatar, near the Palestinian village of Beita, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, on April 10, 2023. (AFP)
The list of charges levelled against the government is long, including institutionalized discrimination against Arab society, “unprecedented” infringement of the rights of suspects and prisoners, the “mass armament and creation of untrained forces” of settlers, the “destruction of democratic foundations,” attacks on freedom of expression and “normalization of citizen surveillance and disregard for privacy.”
Legislative steps are being taken with the aim of excluding certain parties from running for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Last month a controversial bill was passed to change the rules for banning individuals or parties from membership of the Knesset if they have “supported terror,” a definition which now includes visiting the family of someone accused of an act of terrorism.
Likud, Netanyahu’s party, has even accused Arab members of the Knesset of supporting terror simply on the ground of their support for Palestinian statehood.
“Depriving a population of the right to protest politically and the right to political representation” is “a very slippery slope,” said Noa Sattath, the CEO of ACRI.
“When there’s no political representation of a minority, then there's a radicalization of that minority.”
IN NUMBERS
733 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023.
40 Israelis killed during the same period.
3,340 Palestinians in administrative detention as of last June.
11,800 Palestinians arrested since current conflict erupted.
What the ACRI report exposes on a grand scale, says Sattath, is “the excessive use of power. Of course, we see it in Gaza, and in Lebanon now, but we also see it in the West Bank.
“We also see it being used against Israeli protesters. We’re also seeing it in the treatment of prisoners. In all walks of life, basically, the Israeli government has moved to using excessive power against the different players, rather than making more complicated decisions.”
The headline scandal of the past year is what ACRI describes as “the quiet coup” in the West Bank.
“With public attention focused elsewhere,” says the report, “the government is implementing profound changes to all aspects of control in the West Bank, most of which are flying under the radar.
“In the last two years, the government has made giant strides in advancing policies aimed at accelerating the annexation process of the West Bank, while establishing Jewish supremacy and marginalizing the Palestinian population, all in pursuit of realizing the vision of full Israeli sovereignty in the occupied territory.”
A member of the Israeli security forces walks past a bulldozer demolishing a house belonging to Palestinians in the southern area of the occupied West Bank on November 6, 2024. (AFP)
The annexation of the West Bank has long been on the agenda, said Sattath, “but the war has given cover and enabled this to happen.
“Basically, they’re creating a new reality on the ground, behind the scenes, without a lot of public scrutiny, without a lot of international discourse on this new reality that they’re manufacturing.”
The Israeli government has, in certain instances, issued statements that aim to distance itself from the violent actions of settlers in the West Bank. Netanyahu has occasionally called for calm and condemned settler attacks on Palestinians, especially after high-profile incidents.
However, ACRI fears that under the incoming US administration of Donald Trump, whose election has been welcomed so enthusiastically by far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, things are only going to get worse.
A member of the Israeli security forces scuffles with a protestor as Palestinian and Israeli peace activists demonstrate at the entrance of Huwara in the occupied West Bank, on March 3, 2023. (AFP)
“I think that the next years are going to be very difficult,” said Sattath.
“The US government is one of the only checks and balances on the behavior of the Israeli government behavior and, even if we would have liked them to be more forceful in the way that they do it, we're very worried that the disappearance of that will have grave implications for the lives of Palestinians, both in Gaza, where the US is currently so involved in the humanitarian aid efforts there, and in the West Bank.”
Disturbingly, she says, Israel is manoeuvring behind the scenes to end the status of the West Bank as an occupied territory under military occupation, which is how it has been defined by international law since the occupation of the West Bank by Israel in 1967.
A picture shows burnt cars, which were set ablaze by Israeli settlers, in the area of in Al-Lubban Al-Sharqiya in the occupied West Bank on June 21, 2023. (AFP)
“It seems a little strange that an organization like ACRI would be advocating for military occupation,” she said.
“But under international conventions military occupation gives the protected citizens of that area many different rights and gives the occupiers obligations.
“Residents in occupied territories cannot be moved. You cannot build on their territory and the occupying force has all sorts of obligations toward them, in terms of humanitarian aid.
“Now, what the settler movement, through its ministers in the government, is trying to do is erase the military occupation, replacing it with government agencies and officials to facilitate the settlement enterprise.”
A Palestinian man walks at the village of Khallet Al-Daba, in the occupied West Bank on October 26, 2023, after it was attacked by Israeli settlers. (AFP)
The process began in February 2023 when, despite disquiet among some members of Netanyahu’s government, authority over many civilian issues in the West Bank was stripped from Defense Ministry agency COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) and transferred to Bezalel Smotrich, the religious Zionism leader and finance minister.
According to a Times of Israel report, the agreement “appears to give the ultranationalist leader sweeping powers over the territory, and allows him to advance his goal of thwarting Palestinian aspirations for a state in the West Bank by enabling the Israeli population there to substantially expand.”
Anti-settlement organizations denounced the agreement, with one, Breaking the Silence, saying it amounted to “legal, de jure annexation,” of the West Bank.
The importance of ACRI’s report, says Sattath, lies in the sheer breadth of abuses by the Israeli government it exposes.
Israeli security forces fire tear gas at Palestinians demonstrating in the village of Beita, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, on April 10, 2023. (AFP)
ACRI, founded in 1972 and the oldest civil and human rights organization in Israel, has been publishing reports on the state of human rights in Israel and the West Bank for decades. But, she says, “we have never published a report showing such a severe and comprehensive deterioration as we have seen over the past year.”
ACRI says it hopes its report “will deepen the public’s understanding of the damage being done to human rights and democratic institutions, and that it will stir the public to action and resistance.”
It added: “Monitoring human rights violation processes is also critical for there to be any hope of correction under a different government and reality.”
