Israel likely tortured Palestinian to record rape confession, say rights groups

from Press TV

Human rights groups have questioned the credibility of an Israeli military video of an alleged Islamic Jihad member admitting to raping an Israeli woman during the Hamas-led operation on October 7.

On Thursday, the Israeli forces shared a video online featuring a man named Manar Mahmoud Muhammad Qasem, who is said to be associated with the Islamic Jihad’s naval division, confessing to the rape during an interrogation conducted by the Israeli Intelligence Division.

However, the credibility of the confession has been called into question by human rights groups and commentators, who suspect that it may have been obtained through the use of torture. They have highlighted the rise in arbitrary arrests and the inhumane treatment of Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces since October 7.

“In light of Israel’s decades-long track record of mistreating and torturing Palestinian detainees and resulting well-founded concerns that the interrogations could have involved the use of torture or other forms of ill-treatment, Human Rights Watch does not rely on, nor consider credible, accounts recorded in videos of interrogations of detained Palestinians they say participated in the October 7 assault,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.

Additionally, Amnesty International’s researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories, Budour Hassan, said “any public ‘confession’ made by the defendants should be excluded from the evidence considered by court.”...

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