Insight to Incite: Open Source Intelligence Analysis
The headlines last weekend were so outrageous that most people did the sensible thing and ignored them. Dog sodomy in Israeli prisons? Really? The instinct to wave it off as propaganda is understandable, and the people doing the waving are loud, credentialed, and confident. But the evidence is overwhelming, and as strong as you could ever expect the evidence to be.
Officials belonging to the Israeli government employed dogs to sodomize Palestinian prisoners of war? Such an accusation stretches the bounds of human imagination, and such a fantastical, absurd claim can be disputed outright, without even reading the accounts reported in international media outlets last weekend. At least, that’s the sentiment of many Americans who saw those headlines and instantly ran to social media to denounce them as obvious “Hamas propaganda,” a tell-tale sign that global media has been captured by Islamic extremism. The American Jewish Committee called it a “modern-day blood libel by the ‘paper of record’.” Scott Jennings of CNN called it “shameful media behavior” and announced it to be “anonymous, unverified, unwitnessed allegations.” Erick Erickson called it “terrorist sympathizing” and said it was “more insane than the origin story of Scientology.” Someone at Town Hall called it “cartoonishly evil.”
But I spent twelve hours down the rabbit hole on this yesterday, and looked at each account. There’s not just one. There are many of these accounts, from many different people, with corroborating evidence and witnesses, some of whom have a great deal of support and evidentiary substantiation. The jeers from Israel-First influencers seem to be entirely gut reactions and knee-jerk hot-takes of those who, like Erick Erickson, reject the claims because to believe them is “terrorist sympathizing” (which is more of a dismissal because of who the victims are than a denial it happened), or because it’s so outrageously over-the-top it appears “insane.” The problem is, it’s not insane, and actions exactly like this have taken place in almost every war, which Americans learned from Abu Ghraib, which included similar mistreatments. Ironically, Erickson also dismissed those accounts when they happened, for largely the same reasons.
What I discovered down the rabbit hole is that not only are the dog-sodomy accounts as well established as any claims of prisoner misconduct could ever be in such a controlled environment, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg when learning about Israeli mistreatment of political prisoners. I’d use the term “terrorists,” but considering the bulk of those who have been arrested have not and will not ever stand trial, and because it’s proven that a great many have been incarcerated by the IDF for indefinite periods of time who have been completely innocent of Hamas affiliation or involvement in terror, “political prisoner” is the most accurate term to employ in this situation.
My reason for providing the information in this article is straightforward: to demonstrate that Israel is not a Western nation, it does not share our Western convictions or worldview, and whatever “shared religious heritage” Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism happen to share is obviously not enough to restrain them from dehumanizing their neighbors and using dogs to sodomize them. The notion of “Judeo-Christian values” has always been farcical, ahistoric, and forced, but the dog sodomy really does stretch the limits of the claims of sharing values.
SUPPOSITIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
In October 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a decision to cut off the civilian population of Gaza from food, water, electricity, and fuel, which is a war crime by conventional standards and modern sentiments, and forbidden by the international treaties signed by most Western nations (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949, Art. 23 and 55, Additional Protocol I, 1977, Art. 54, Additional Protocol II, 1977, Art. 14, Rome Statute, 1998). He justified this by five words: “We are fighting human animals.” He wasn’t talking about Hamas; he was talking about the Gazans – all of them.
At the launch of the ground war, Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke to IDF soldiers, invoking 1 Samuel 15, the passage in which God condemned King Saul for not killing every man, woman, child, and head of livestock belonging to the Amalekites. Since then, the Amalekites have been invoked dozens of times by top-level Israeli officials. Christians in the U.S. think this was a vague Scriptural reference, because we don’t understand the role the Amalekites play in Rabbinic Jewish religion. In Rabbinic Judaism, wiping out the Amalekites is one of the 613 commandments given to Jews (it’s commandment 188 in Maimonides’ Sefer Ha-Mitzvot). There is an entire Sabbath dedicated to killing them, Shabbat Zachor, observed annually before Purim, on which the Amalek passages are read aloud in synagogue. So when Netanyahu made the reference, every observant Jew in his audience understood exactly what was being invoked; it was their duty to wipe out Gaza. And they have.
And it’s not every day a major government leader admits to gameplanning a war crime, but it was on May 6, 2025, because that’s when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich admitted, “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.” Forced displacement is a war crime by every standard of the modern world, including the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949, Art. 49), the Rome Statute (1998, Arts. 7-8), and Additional Protocol I (1977, Art. 85), and the Genocide Convention (1948).
Americans cannot comprehend the level of contempt Israelis have for the Palestinians and Arabs in general, pounded into them from childhood and as part of their religion. That’s why we cannot fathom how our First World, seemingly civilized war partners could possibly engage in systemic dog sodomy. But the Talmud, which Jews consider to be of equal authority with the Torah and claim Moses delivered it himself on Mt. Sinai via word-of-mouth, contains passages that would blow the mind of evangelicals who talk of a shared religious heritage.
Yebamoth 98a states that gentiles are not considered to have fathers, meaning that family relationships among non-Jews carry no legal weight in Rabbinic jurisprudence, and every gentile is to be considered a bastard. Kerithoth 6b draws a distinction between the souls of Jews and the souls of non-Jews, and the Tanya, written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, teaches explicitly that a Jew possesses two souls: a Godly soul that partakes in the actual substance of God Himself, and an animalistic soul, but that Gentiles only have the soul of an animal. So when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that the Gazans were “human animals,” he was just citing Jewish doctrine.
Sanhedrin 57a provides lesser penalties for crimes of Jews against non-Jews than crimes committed by non-Jews against Jews, in which killing a Jew requires death and killing a Gentile requires a slap on the wrist. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whose grave has been prayed at by Donald Trump, Mark Levin, and Ben Shapiro, taught that the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person is not a matter of degree but of fundamental category, stating that a Jew is “a different kind of creature entirely.” Isaac Luria, founder of the most influential school of Jewish mysticism, taught that gentile souls are evil by nature because they originate entirely from the “satanic sphere,” but Jewish souls come directly from God.
For Americans who’ve been taught that Rabbinic Judaism is basically Christianity minus Jesus, it’s hard to comprehend the way Israelis view Palestinians when the Imago Dei isn’t a shared belief. For them, the idea of sodomy via dog, let alone sodomy via dog done systematically in different Israeli prisons and prison camps over a period of years and perpetrated by different guards or officials, is beyond the pale of imagination. But when you understand the deep religious convictions of Israeli soldiers, prison guards, and government officials, it gives you a different outlook when you consider that Palestinian humanity is not only taken for granted, but disbelieved.
THE DOGS OF SEDE TEIMAN
A few days ago, Nicholas Kristof published a column in the New York Times opinion section titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” Kristof is not a fringe blogger or a pro-Palestinian activist. He is a twice Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist at the most establishment newspaper in the English-speaking world, and he spent considerable time reporting the piece before publishing it. Based on the testimonies of fourteen Palestinians, the column argued that sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners by Israeli security forces is widespread, systematic, underreported, and carried out with effective impunity.
Among the specific allegations in the piece, Kristof described a Gaza journalist who was held down, stripped naked, blindfolded, and handcuffed while a dog was summoned and, with encouragement from a handler speaking Hebrew, mounted and anally raped him. He bled and urinated blood afterward. The column also described a man raped three times in a single day, a young woman stripped at the beginning of each shift by guards introducing her to new personnel, a woman shown photographs of herself being raped and told they would be released if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence, and three children who reported sexual abuse during detention
The New York Times defended the column in the face of pro-Israel outrage. Kristof defended himself on social media, specifically responding to critics who argued the dog rape allegations were biologically impossible by noting that “many Palestinians have described it,” and pointing to documented historical precedents including testimony that Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie trained dogs to rape women, that Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence services used a trained German shepherd named Volodia for the same purpose under the direction of a torturer known as “The Dog Lady,” and that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright documented evidence of the same practice under Egypt’s Mubarak regime. The claim that training a dog to rape a human being is biologically impossible is, in other words, historically illiterate, and the people making it with the greatest confidence are the same people calling the documentation of Israeli prisoner abuse a blood libel.
The Kristof column did not introduce these allegations. It brought them to a mainstream American audience for the first time, but the underlying testimonies have been circulating in human rights documentation for two years, collected independently by multiple organizations across multiple facilities, and the specific accounts are considerably more numerous and more detailed than the column’s summary suggests. What follows is the documented record as it stands.
- A Gaza journalist detained at Sde Teiman in 2024 was stripped, blindfolded, and held down while a handler encouraged a dog to anally rape him. He bled and urinated blood afterward and reported a severe psychological breakdown following the assault.
- A detainee identified only as Ahmed, held at Ofer Prison, was forced to the ground while a dog named Messi mounted and sexually assaulted him. He was beaten for resisting.
- A man named Wajdi, 43, was raped repeatedly by soldiers and then untied and raped by a dog, causing severe pain and bleeding.
- A detainee identified as A.A. was stripped with a group at Sde Teiman while dogs climbed on the prisoners, urinated on them, and one anally raped him for approximately three minutes while soldiers beat and pepper-sprayed the group simultaneously.
- A man identified as Amir, 35, was stripped and raped by a dog described by witnesses as trained for the purpose, for several minutes, while being beaten.
- A.S., also 35, was forced to the ground at Sde Teiman and anally penetrated by a dog. A lawyer named Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr witnessed a young detainee raped by dogs released by soldiers and provided direct eyewitness testimony.
- An unnamed detainee documented by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reported that soldiers brought dogs that urinated on prisoners and one anally raped him, after which he suffered a psychological breakdown of sufficient severity that it was specifically noted in the documentation.
- Multiple other detainees across Sde Teiman, Ofer, and Megiddo gave group accounts of dogs climbing on or raping stripped prisoners while guards watched, filmed, or laughed, frequently in conjunction with other documented forms of sexual torture occurring in the same sessions.
The corroboration extends beyond the victims themselves. Mohammed Arab, the Al-Araby TV correspondent detained at Ofer after transfer from Sde Teiman, reported witnessing the abuse and described it in detail. A lawyer was present for one incident and gave direct testimony. Israeli analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim spoke directly with two IDF guards. One said the dog rape had occurred and that it was “too awful to talk about.” The other had heard about it from colleagues and told Ben-Ephraim he believed it was true. These are not Palestinian sources. These are Israeli sources confirming the same events described in Palestinian testimony.
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Every one of these accounts is testimonial. Admittedly, there is no video footage of the dog rape specifically, no forensic examination of the victims, and no Israeli legal proceeding that has confirmed this particular category of abuse. Would you expect there could be in such a highly controlled and secure environment as prison? We couldn’t even count on video of Epstein’s murder when he was the most high-profile federal inmate in the American penitentiary system, so it’s a little silly to demand it from an Israeli gulag. There is far more evidence, however, than you would think even possible, and is better substantiated than you could ever reasonably hope. It’s a miracle any of these accounts got out, and it’s incredible they got out with an impressive level of substantiation.
These accounts were collected independently by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Euro-Med Monitor, B’Tselem, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and Al-Araby TV, across multiple facilities and multiple time periods, and they are consistent in specific operational detail in the way that fabricated accounts distributed across that many independent sources typically are not. The standard being applied to dismiss them is one that would have dismissed the testimony of every Holocaust survivor who did not have security camera footage of their own abuse, and the people applying that standard are doing so selectively, having never once applied it to the October 7 testimony they treat as settled fact.
The question is not whether these accounts constitute a criminal conviction. They do not. The question is whether they constitute a serious, documented, multi-source body of evidence that deserves honest engagement rather than reflexive classification as blood libel. They do, and the people calling it blood libel know they do, which is why their responses consist entirely of the classification and nothing else.
THE RECORD THAT PREDATES THE DOGS
The dog rape allegations did not emerge from a vacuum, and the evangelical dismissal class has been so focused on the most sensational element of the Kristof column that it has successfully distracted its audience from a documented record of Israeli prisoner abuse that requires no testimony from anonymous Palestinian sources, no NGO reports, and no Al Jazeera investigations to establish. It requires only Israel’s own legal filings, Israel’s own military indictments, and the physical evidence that came back to Gaza on the bodies of dead prisoners.
In July 2024, five IDF reservists at Sde Teiman beat a Palestinian detainee, dragged him across the floor, stepped on his body, broke his ribs, punctured his lung, and caused an internal rectal tear by stabbing him in the buttocks with a sharp object. The military’s own indictment, filed by the military’s own prosecutors, cited medical records and security camera footage as evidence. Those five soldiers were indicted in February 2025. In March 2026, the new Military Advocate General dropped all charges on procedural grounds, after his predecessor was arrested for leaking the security footage that confirmed the abuse occurred. Netanyahu called the soldiers heroic fighters. Smotrich celebrated. The abuse is in Israel’s own paperwork.
In 2023, two Golani Brigade soldiers were convicted by an Israeli military court of abusing a Palestinian man and exceeding authority to the point of endangering life or health. One served a forty-day prison term. Both were convicted of obstruction of justice. These are not Palestinian claims. These are Israeli convictions entered by Israeli judges in Israeli courts, and they establish as a matter of legal fact that IDF soldiers abused a Palestinian prisoner and then lied about it.
The bodies tell their own story. When Israel returned Palestinian prisoners as part of the 2025 ceasefire deal, more than a hundred of them came back dead, sent to Gaza with numbers instead of names. The marks on those bodies, combined with blindfolds and handcuffs still physically attached to some of them when they arrived, confirmed torture before death and, in multiple cases, apparent execution. The director general of the Gaza Health Ministry documented that 135 mutilated bodies returned under ceasefire terms came with paperwork in each body bag confirming they originated from Sde Teiman specifically. As of November 2025, at least 98 Palestinians had died in Israeli custody since October 2023, according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel, which is an Israeli organization, not a Palestinian one.
Seventeen-year-old Walid Ahmad was returned to his family with virtually no muscle or fat remaining on his body. His family said he had been an athlete before his arrest in September 2024. A post-mortem examination showed severe and prolonged malnutrition as the cause of death after six months in custody without charge. Arafat Hamdan, 25, a Type 1 diabetic from the West Bank, died within two days of military custody because guards withheld the insulin injections required to keep him alive. Witnesses confirmed both the beatings he received and the denial of his medication. Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a Palestinian surgeon, died at Ofer Prison in March 2024 under circumstances that investigators believe involved sexual torture, though that specific cause has not been confirmed. Abd al-Rahman Mar’i, 33, was returned to his West Bank family with his body documented as covered in bruises, contusions, and fractures.
In November 2025, the UN Committee Against Torture, which is not a Palestinian organization and is not funded by Hamas, described Israel’s detention practices as a “de facto state policy of organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment.” That’s what we know about Israel’s POW treatment before the dog accusations.
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“DEFENDING TERRORISTS”
If what these claims represent is the truth, then what I’m doing isn’t “defending terrorists.” It’s exposing them.
The fastest way to avoid engaging documented evidence of prisoner abuse is to reframe the person presenting it as a defender of terrorism, and the evangelical Israel-enthusiast class has deployed this move with impressive consistency every time the subject of Palestinian prisoners comes up. You cite the testimony, and they cite October 7. You present the IDF’s own indictment, and they ask why you are defending Hamas. It is a rhetorical move so intellectually dishonest that it deserves to be rebuked. So, consider this a rebuke.
The first problem is the assumption baked into the framing, which is that the people in Israeli custody are, in fact, terrorists. That assumption is not supported by the available evidence, and in a significant number of documented cases, it is directly contradicted by it. The IDF’s own records show that Sde Teiman peaked at over 700 detainees simultaneously. The Taguba Report from Abu Ghraib, which American evangelicals were perfectly happy to cite as an example of isolated bad actors when it implicated their own government, found that approximately 60 percent of prisoners held at that facility had been picked up in random community sweeps and were later found to have no intelligence value whatsoever and were released.
The parallel at Sde Teiman is direct and also documented. Multiple detainees whose cases have been specifically examined, including Tamer Qarmut, a disabled man detained during a hospital raid, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, arrested while caring for patients, and Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a surgeon who died in custody, were not terrorists by any reasonable definition of the word. They were civilians, medical workers, and journalists. Sami al-Saei was a journalist. Mohammed Arab was a journalist. The BBC’s April 2026 investigation specifically noted that the men it interviewed were not charged with serious offenses and that there was no evidence linking them to direct involvement in the October 7 attacks. They were accused of “having ties to Hamas” and interrogated about tunnels and hostages, which is a description that, in the context of Gaza’s governance structure, could apply to a significant percentage of the civilian population that has lived under Hamas administration for nearly two decades without being combatants.
Addameer, the Palestinian prisoner rights organization, documented as of late 2025 that of the 9,250 Palestinians then held in Israeli custody, 3,368 were held without trial or charge, and 350 were children. You cannot simultaneously hold 3,368 people without charge and claim that everyone in your custody is a terrorist whose abuse is therefore justified. Those two positions are logically incompatible, and the people making them know it, which is why they never address the detention-without-charge numbers directly and instead keep redirecting to October 7.
The second problem is more fundamental, and it applies even if every single person in Israeli custody were a confirmed Hamas operative who participated personally in the October 7 attacks. The Christian just war tradition, the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and the basic moral framework that evangelical Christians claim to inhabit do not contain an exception for terrorists. The prohibition on torture is not conditional on the virtue of the person being tortured. The protection of prisoners from sexual violence is not suspended when the prisoner is guilty. The moral framework that Western civilization built after the Second World War was built specifically in response to a regime that also believed its prisoners were subhuman enemies who deserved whatever was done to them, and the lesson that civilization drew from that experience was not that the regime was wrong about which enemies to target. The lesson was that the category of people who can be tortured with impunity is empty, and that a civilization which creates exceptions to that principle based on the identity or alleged crimes of the prisoner has not actually believed the principle at all.
Condemning the torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is not a defense of Hamas. It is not a denial of October 7. It is not “aNtISeMiTisM.” It is the application of a moral standard that every person claiming the name of Christian is obligated to apply consistently or abandon the claim. The evangelical church in America has spent decades telling its people that Israel is a moral ally whose conduct deserves unconditional support. The documented record assembled in this article is what unconditional support has been purchasing. It’s time we stop buying it.
WHAT CHRISTIANS SHOULD DO WITH THE TRUTH
The question of how evangelical Christians should respond to this information is simpler than the Israel-First media wants it to be, and that’s because it cuts against two decades of carefully cultivated political propaganda.
Let’s start with something we should all be able to agree upon by the evidence: Something happened in those prisons. The bodies came back with the handcuffs still on. The IDF’s own prosecutors filed the indictments. The UN Committee Against Torture used the words “de facto state policy.” An Israeli military court convicted soldiers. An Israeli analyst confirmed what the IDF guards told him. The New York Times published a twice Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist’s account based on fourteen direct testimonies. Whatever precise shape the full truth takes when it is finally, completely known, the category of “nothing happened here and this is all Hamas propaganda” has been foreclosed by Israel’s own paperwork. Evangelicals who have staked their credibility on that category need to move off it, and they need to do so publicly, because they staked that credibility publicly.
Then comes the harder concession, which is that the dog sodomy allegations specifically deserve to be heard out instead of getting a reflexive dismissal. They may not all be true, but the testimonial record is substantial and corroborated in ways that should prevent any honest person from simply waving it away. Responsible engagement with the evidence does not require certainty. It requires the same standard that evangelical Christians apply to every other atrocity claim – like the “Holocaust” they accept without forensic confirmation, applied consistently rather than selectively. If you believed the October 7 testimony without demanding security camera footage of every assault, you do not get to demand security camera footage of Sde Teiman. The standard applies in both directions, or it applies in neither.
The missionary consequence of getting this wrong is horrendous. There are approximately 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. The evangelical church’s stated mission is to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people, which includes those 1.9 billion people, hundreds of millions of whom are watching what the American evangelical church does with documented evidence that its political allies sodomized Muslim prisoners with dogs while soldiers laughed and filmed. The testimony of the church on the love of Christ, the dignity of every human being made in the image of God, and the integrity of the gospel is being evaluated in real time by the people the church claims to want to reach, and the evaluation is not going well. Every evangelical leader who called this a “blood libel” and just started screaming about how implausible this is just made our task in the Muslim world measurably harder. That is not a political observation, but a theological one. If you care about ending Islamic terror by both killing terrorists and evangelizing their children (both are required), then you shouldn’t just waive this away.
The Christian witness is not advanced by unconditional political loyalty to a foreign government, nor is it advanced by applying one evidentiary standard to the suffering of people we have decided are our allies and a different standard to the suffering of people we have decided are our enemies, both of whom happen to be enemies of God. The Christian witness is advanced by the same thing it has always been advanced by, which is a willingness to tell the truth about what is happening in the world, no matter where that truth takes us.
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