Published: 8 September 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Two masked and armed women soldiers threatened Palestinian women with an attack dog during a raid in the West Bank in July.
Two masked Israeli women soldiers with rifles and an attack dog forced five female members of a Palestinian family to strip naked, each one separately, in the West Bank city of Hebron in July. The soldiers threatened to release the dog if the women did not comply.
During the raid on the family’s home, male soldiers searched the male family members but did not require them to take off their clothes. The army had intelligence that there were weapons in the home, and the Israel Defense Forces’ Spokesperson’s Unit told Haaretz that an M16 rifle and ammunition were found there, requiring a search of the house’s other residents.
A total of 26 people, including 15 children aged from four months to 17 years old, live in three adjoining apartments in the Ajluni family’s home in south Hebron. The family says that on July 10 at 1:30am, around 50 soldiers massed around the house accompanied by at least two dogs.
The case, reported by both B’Tselem and Haaretz this week, has sparked outrage in the Palestinian community.
The Human Rights Committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council said in a statement that the event demonstrated “the extent of the ugliness and fascism of the occupation before the world,” and demanded the formation of an international investigation committee.
Hamas vowed revenge, saying in a statement that the event represented a “dangerous escalation that the Palestinian people and their resistance will not ignore,” and that the “violations committed by the fascist occupation […] will fall in the face of our steadfastness […] until the last soldier and settler are uprooted from our occupied land.”
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) spokesperson, Tarik Salami, called on Palestinians in Hebron and other West Bank cities to “escalate their confrontations with the occupation” and “avenge the free women against whom this grave violation occurred,” according to the Middle East Monitor.
