
THE harrowing details of the widespread torture and sexual violence inflicted on Palestinian prisoners — men, women and children — by Israeli forces, as chronicled by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, are a damning indictment of the so-called civilised world that looks the other way when war crimes are committed by the Zionist state. Kristof’s account, published last week, is based on interviews with a number of Palestinians who have experienced sexual violence at the hands of “soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards”.