Originally posted at Dispatches from Reality, by Scipio Eruditus. dfreality.substack.com
Not a place, but a verdict…
Nearly 100 of them died in custody. 4,000 remain forcibly disappeared. Thousands detained without charge, held in inhuman conditions, beaten, shackled, sexually abused, denied medical care, starved, raped.
Israel has effectively been given a license to torture Palestinians because most of your government, your ministers have allowed it.”
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Mar. 23rd, 2026)
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October 7th is now routinely invoked as the explanation for the unbridled violence and psychopathic disregard for human life displayed by Israel in its recent wars in both Gaza and the Middle East as a whole.
That is just an excuse however, an occasion to unleash what has been simmering beneath the surface for decades, now openly expressed across Israeli national conduct as a whole. No clearer example of that condition can be seen than inside Israel’s prison and detention system, particularly as it relates to the treatment of the Palestinian peoples. The Gazan Genocide, for all of its evils, has shined a light on the plight of this people like never before. With it, the victims of the Israeli regime describe a system in which severe physical abuse, humiliation, and sexual violence are routine occurrences.
One victim, Abu Hassan, describes just such an occurrence after weapons were reportedly planted on his property by the IDF (emphasis mine):
“They had an iron pipe and knives that they also used to beat us. They beat us everywhere, on our hands, on our chest and on our heads. Everywhere. They put out cigarettes on us, they tried to pull out my nails.”
The abuse continued. “They stepped on our heads and shoved our faces in dirt and feces,” Abu Hassan says. At one point, he says, one of the attackers pulled the flannel over his eyes.” He came close to my face and asked: Do you remember me? I told him no. He told me: ‘I am a cattle herder from Bidiya.’ Then he beat me all over my body, stepped on my head with both feet and jumped on my back, trying to break my spine.”
At one point, the two say, while the abuse was continuing, a man arrived to question them. Abu Hassan remembers being asked repeatedly where they intended to carry out the stabbing attack. Khaled says he was questioned mainly about personal matters, “What is your mother’s name, what is your sister’s name, who is your girlfriend? The questions were in Arabic,” he says.
“The violence continued the whole time,” says Abu Hassan. “They poured water on us, they urinated on us, and then someone holding a stick tried to put it in my butt. I resisted with all my might until he simply gave up.”
While the above incident led to an investigation and, ultimately, the dismissal of the unit’s commanding officer by the IDF, even perfunctory investigations into such attacks are an increasingly rare occurrence. Indeed, multiple UN reports have documented the “egregious human rights violations” taking place within Israeli detention. As witnesses also recalled, the soldiers were joined by nearby settlers, stating “it was hard to tell who was a settler and who was a soldier.” This too follows a pattern of escalating violence between the native Palestinians and Israeli settlers, behavior which the Italian magazine L’Espresso recently came under fire for exposing. (It bears noting that the vast majority of such Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.)
In my discussion with GHF whistleblower Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, we noted that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is structured in such a way that makes violence practically a guarantee. The former Green Beret described aid sites configured so that civilians are funneled into controlled corridors, with lethal force routinely being deployed against unarmed and peaceful civilians. Though Lt. Col. Aguilar was viciously smeared at the time, yet another GHF whistleblower has come out in recent days: former Royal Marine David McIntosh, like Aguilar, provided footage of the casual usage of “warning shots” to steer crowds. The Palestinian detainee and the Gazan refugee occupy different positions, but are functionally treated the same — as something less than human.
Of course any discussion of this subject must touch upon what has been dubbed Israel’s Abu Gahraib — the now infamous Sde Teiman facility. If the preceding accounts establish the structure and regularity of such abuse, this horrific case at Sde Teiman crystallizes it for us (emphasis mine):
Video has emerged of a gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner by guards at the Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev desert, southern Israel.
The video, which has been verified by Al Jazeera, shows the prisoner being selected from a larger group lying bound on the floor. The victim is then escorted to a wall, where guards, using their shields to hide their identity from the camera, proceed to rape him.
The attack is believed to have been so brutal that, after he was transferred to hospital, Israeli media reported that the victim was unable to walk.
Ten soldiers were ultimately arrested for the rape on July 29, in a case that has rocked Israeli society. The soldiers belong to a unit known as Force 100, which is tasked with guarding the Sde Teiman facility, according to Haaretz.
Military prosecutors released three of the arrested soldiers on August 4, adding to the two previously released by investigators following a military court hearing in Kfar Yona on July 30, at which protesters gathered in support of the soldiers under arrest. …
Taking to X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday night, Bezalel Smotrich demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them”.
Others, including the hard right and ultranationalist politicians, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, within Israel, have argued that any action – even gang rape – is permissible if it is undertaken for the security of the state.
— ‘Everything is legitimate’: Israeli leaders defend soldiers accused of rape
Only further adding outrage to this case is the fact that the leaker of the video, former Military Advocate Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, would be arrested for doing so.
The male victim of this heinous and barbaric assault suffered “serious rectal injuries requiring surgery, a ruptured bowel, punctured lung, and fractured ribs. An Israeli medical staffer said that the victim arrived at the hospital in critical condition.” While obscured on the leaked footage, the medical evidence paints a much clearer picture for us: while the Israeli soldiers forming the barricade beat and kneed their victim so viciously his broken ribs punctured his lung, their comrades took turns violently sodomizing him. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has done significant work on this subject, noting the conditions at Sde Teiman are “just the tip of the iceberg,” with reports matching this severity having occurred in sixteen different Israeli facilities. What makes the above case unique is not its severity, but that it is one of the rare cases where such vile crimes were caught on camera.
As Israeli journalist Oren Ziv astutely observes, those defending the rapists and leading demonstrations on their behalf are part of the Israeli government, and as such, the distinction between the people and the state becomes almost indistinguishable (emphasis mine):
It’s important to notice that while the Israeli media tried to portray it as a struggle between the mob and the state or between the army and the police — that was not preventing this fight, although requested — I think it’s important to see that today, because Ben-Gvir and their allies are in the government and are leading those demonstrations, including breaking into Sde Teiman, they are the face of the state, and those people are not extremists, they are the mainstream Israelis nowaday.
In that sense, their sense of anger and surprise can be understood, because from the beginning of the war, since October, there was full or almost full impunity for soldiers. So, we still don’t know why this specific case was investigated and is being proceeded. But, as Diana said, we’re hearing many horrific evidence from prisoners that were released to Gaza, to the West Bank or into ‘48 Israel, and it’s not a unique case.
— Oren Ziv, Israel’s Torture & Rape of Palestinian Prisoners Defended by Knesset Members, Far-Right Mobs
Conditions and conduct of the most horrific kind is routinely unleashed against captive Palestinians, from gang rape to the usage of male dogs to sexually violate their victims. Indeed, as has been documented at length by human rights groups both within and without Israel, such events are sadly far too common: sexual violence, in particular sodomy, has consciously been weaponized by the Israeli state to break the will of the Palestinian peoples.
Lest one think the rhetoric of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are outliers, the rapists were met with cheers upon appearing in court in November of 2025. Outside the courtroom, meanwhile, large crowds gathered to support the accused. On March 12th, 2026, the Israeli military formally dropped all charges against the five soldiers who were charged. The military court did not dispute that the soldiers were caught on video assaulting the prisoner, merely that the video did not adequately satisfy the arbitrary evidentiary standard required to convict them.
In Israel, violent sodomites are cheered on whilst those who expose their crimes are punished.
This pattern of behavior is neither novel nor without precedent. The sin of Sodom was not merely reducible to vice, nor homosexuality alone, but the convergence of violence, sexual domination, and a culture in which such acts became commonplace.
It is this spirit that has now possessed Israel once again.
“And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to [Hades]: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.”
— The Gospel of Matthew 11:23-24 KJV
Throughout the Scriptures, Sodom serves as the archetypal emblem of a society fattened by abundance, emptied of mercy, and given over to sexual predation — only to be utterly destroyed by the fiery and eternal judgment of God (Jude 7). The prophets go further still, using the title as a covenantal accusation, a name applied to Jerusalem and Judea whenever she, having repudiated righteousness, begins once again to slip into apostasy. Upon its introduction in Genesis 13, Sodom’s opulence is noted and its abundance is equated with that of Eden, “the garden of the LORD.” Early on, Sodom and its prosperity is presented as a type of Eden, albeit, a false one — outwardly appealing, yet riddled with corruption. Moses, in describing the consequences of apostasy, declares that the land itself will become “like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah…” (Deut. 29:23), a devastation so complete that future generations will look upon it and ask, “Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land?” (v. 24).
No sooner had the land been conquered than this prophecy would find its first fulfillment. The rape and murder of the Levite concubine at Gibeah (Judg. 19) is intentionally constructed as a deliberate recapitulation of Genesis 19: “the men of the city… beset the house round about,” at first demanding to violate the male strangers in their midst (v. 22) — the same kind of mob violence and sexual aggression that marked Sodom. After hearing of her death at the hands of these men, the other eleven tribes convene a council and demand that Benjamin surrender the culprits so that evil might be put out of the land. The elders of the tribe of Benjamin refuse however, choosing tribal solidarity over obedience to the Law. Their refusal to judge this heinous act is treated as functionally equivalent to their participation in it, and the consequence is war — the tribe of Benjamin is brought to the brink of extinction (Judg. 20:46–48).
Before Jerusalem is ever named Sodom by the prophets, Israel has already enacted Sodom in its own midst, and, more importantly, suffered judgment for refusing to purge it.
That is the backdrop to one of the most arresting identifications in the whole of the New Testament. In Revelation 11, as St. John describes the martyrdom of the two witnesses (a symbol for the Law and the Prophets), he locates the place of their slaying: “And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.” (Rev. 11:8) That final clause fixes our referent beyond any serious dispute: the great city of Revelation is the earthly Jerusalem. She is Sodom, because she has become morally sodomitical; she is Egypt, because she has become covenantally Egyptian — an oppressor, a persecutor, and therefore a fit subject of the plagues and curses once visited upon Pharaoh.
The Apostle John builds upon an ubiquitous prophetic refrain: Isaiah had addressed Judah’s leaders as Sodom’s long ago (Isa. 1:10-17). Jeremiah extends the same indictment to her priestly class (emphasis mine):
14 I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness; they are all of them unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.
15 Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets; Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall…
— The Book of Jeremiah 23:14-15 KJV
Wormwood, an herb famous for both its fragrance and its bitterness, here represents both affliction (Lam. 3:19) and the pain of judgement (Jer. 23:15 BES). Indeed, as Jeremiah declares in his Lamentations, Jerusalem’s sins have abounded beyond even Sodom’s: “And the iniquity of the daughter of my people has been increased beyond the iniquities of Sodoma…” (Lam. 4:6 BES) Nor is their corruption hidden: “They declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not” (Isa. 3:9). What was once shameful becomes normalized.
Ezekiel is no less devastating in his critique, for he not only calls Jerusalem Sodom’s sister, but declares that her sins are even more outrageous (emphasis mine):
48 As I live, saith the Lord God, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters.
49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
— The Book of Ezekiel 16:48-49 KJV
As we can see, Sodom — in the prophetic lexicon — is an enduring symbol: abundance without mercy, power without restraint, haughtiness, sexual depravity, and looming judgment.
When Christ sends forth the disciples, He warns that the cities which reject their witness will suffer a far worse fate than Sodom: “It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.” (Matt. 10:15). Thus, by the time St. John pens Revelation during the Neronic persecution of the Church, this theological grammar is already commonplace: indeed, Josephus also compares the impiety of his generation to that of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jerusalem. and by extension Israel, is also identified as the spiritual Egypt: the plagues of old are unmistakably poured out upon the earthly Israel in John’s Apocalypse, albeit, in largely spiritual forms. “Three unclean spirits like frogs” go forth (Rev. 16:13), recalling the Egyptian plague of frogs, and so too the hailstones: “There fell upon men a great hail… every stone about the weight of a talent” (Rev. 16:21) Here again the account of Josephus startlingly matches the events of the Apocalypse: the Roman siege engines hurled stones into the city — stones “of the weight of a talent” and white in color (Wars of the Jews, 5.6.3). This is why the warnings of Deuteronomy are framed as a reapplication of Egypt’s plagues to Israel: “The Lord shall bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt” (Deut. 28:60); “he will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt, which thou wast afraid of” (v. 27); and finally, in its most severe formulation, “the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships” (v. 68) — events which would find their fulfillment in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
Josephus describes Jerusalem during the Roman siege as a city no longer governed by law, restraint, or even basic human decency; one utterly given over to violence, bloodshed, and sexual corruption of the most degrading kind (emphasis mine):
Now this Simon, who was without the wall, was a greater terror to the people than the Romans themselves, as were the zealots who were within it more heavy upon them than both of the other; and during this time did the mischievous contrivances and courage [of John] corrupt the body of the Galileans; for these Galileans had advanced this John, and made him very potent, who made them suitable requital from the authority he had obtained by their means; for he permitted them to do all things that any of them desired to do, while their inclination to plunder was insatiable, as was their zeal in searching the houses of the rich; and for the murdering of the men, and abusing of the women, it was sport to them. They also devoured what spoils they had taken, together with their blood, and indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, without any disturbance, till they were satiated therewith; while they decked their hair, and put on women’s garments, and were besmeared over with ointments; and that they might appear very comely, they had paints under their eyes, and imitated not only the ornaments, but also the lusts of women, and were guilty of such intolerable uncleanness, that they invented unlawful pleasures of that sort. And thus did they roll themselves up and down the city, as in a brothel-house, and defiled it entirely with their impure actions; nay, while their faces looked like the faces of women, they killed with their right hands; and when their gait was effeminate, they presently attacked men, and became warriors, and drew their swords from under their finely dyed cloaks, and ran every body through whom they alighted upon. However, Simon waited for such as ran away from John, and was the more bloody of the two; and he who had escaped the tyrant within the wall was destroyed by the other that lay before the gates, so that all attempts of flying and deserting to the Romans were cut off, as to those that had a mind so to do.
— Flavius Josephus, Wars of the Jews (Book IV, Ch. 9.10)
Truly, the Spirit of Sodom had descended upon Jerusalem once again as homosexual tyrants dressed in drag proceeded to murder, rape, and terrorize the besieged city. The scenes described are indeed shocking, not only for their content, but because once again it parallels John’s covenant indictment of Judea in spirit, if not in language.
Jerusalem, having assumed the moral condition of Sodom, enacts its corruption; having assumed the covenantal posture of Egypt, suffers its plagues.
In Jenin, there are no innocent children.”
— Yitzhak Kroizer, Israeli Knesset Member (Mar. 26th, 2026)
Sadly, this kind of monstrous disregard for human life or suffering is not restricted to the Israeli military alone. While Benjamin Netanyahu serves as a convenient target for international ire, in reality, he is representative of the mainstream Israeli consensus on Gaza and the so-called Palestinian Question. Netanyahu, if anything, is a moderate in relation to Israel’s internal politics. Some ~82% of Israelis support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, ~64% affirm the idea that there are no innocents in Gaza, and a plurality of Israelis (~47%) support the killing of every single man, woman, and child within the Gaza Strip as a matter of policy. Numerous reports, including my conversation with Lt. Col. Aguilar, detail the viewing sites from which Israeli civilians observed the bombardment of Gaza as it unfolded. This moral affliction has infected not just the leadership of Israel, but truly her society as a whole.
Mere weeks ago, in the midst of Lent — naturally — Benjamin Netanyahu blasphemed Christ, stating:
Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good.
I must once again pose these questions to my brothers and sisters in Christ who yet cling to Scofield’s doctrines:
Do you truly think God will bless a people whose leader blasphemes His Son? That He would bless a people such as this?
- Homosexuality Is Part of Jewish Tradition
- Welcome to Tel Aviv, the gayest city on earth
- Is Tel Aviv the gay capital of the world?
- Tel Aviv, ‘Gay Capital Of The Middle East,’ Welcomes Return Of Pride Celebration June 8th-12th
On what basis is such unqualified support justified?
Scripture exactly nowhere teaches that a people are to be blessed irrespective of their conduct. On the contrary, the consistent witness of the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospel is that such blessings, having once been bequeathed unto ethnic Israel, only intensifies their judgement. Can a religion that denies The Son ever be treated as though it honors The Father (John 5:23)? Can a people be blessed in defiance of the very conditions under which Scripture itself pronounces their blessing and cursing?
Ultimately, Sodom is a spiritual condition, one that reappears whenever abundance gives way to arrogance and violence — particularly sexual violence — becomes normalized.
The Spirit of Sodom, once again, has found its host.
And, as before, its crimes will not go unpunished.
“28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”
— Epistle to the Romans 1:27-32 KJV
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Further Research
Israel as homotopia: Language, space, and vicious belonging by Milani & Levon
Israel’s LGBT Movement and Interest Groups by Gilly Hartal
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