The U.S. State Department trusts Israel to investigate itself. We don’t.

After the October 7 attack, the news media was aflame with allegations of systematic sexual assault by Hamas, including an explosive front-page New York Times story that galvanized support for Israel’s war on Gaza despite an already horrific civilian death toll.

But now, video has emerged that appears to show Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian detainee, and the major corporate news media has barely mentioned it.

In fact, this video is just the latest evidence that Israel has been systematically torturing Palestinian detainees, little of which has gained sustained attention from most major U.S. news outlets.

The Intercept has been exposing these abuses for months, but it’s never been more challenging to report from on the ground about Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed at least 113 journalists so far.

That’s why The Intercept’s in-depth investigations — made possible by long-standing relationships with Palestinian and Israeli writers and human rights advocates — are so vital.

Your $5 donation to The Intercept today will ensure that our journalists can continue to expose Israeli atrocities.

In May, an Intercept investigation found that hundreds of Palestinian doctors have disappeared into Israeli detention, and included the testimony of one surgeon who was beaten and abused at a secretive Israeli military prison in the Negev Desert.

Israeli human rights advocates told The Intercept they’ve been hearing alarming reports about the Sde Teiman detention camp, which has become known as “Israel’s Guantánamo Bay,” since the first month of the war.

But even as the evidence of torture has mounted, the U.S. has been slow to act. The State Department has ducked specific questions with generalities about “looking into” allegations, and claims that the U.S. is asking the Israeli military to investigate itself.

Meanwhile, while some media outlets have done heroic reporting on Sde Teiman, few have given the story the kind of blockbuster treatment that they gave to alleged sexual violence by Hamas.

The New York Times’s own investigative feature on the facility began by describing how detainees were “handcuffed and blindfolded” — waiting almost 3,000 words to report on how a prisoner says he was anally raped with a metal rod.

The Intercept does not believe that Israeli atrocities — even if they are perpetrated with the tacit assistance of the U.S. military — are less newsworthy than Palestinian ones.

But as a nonprofit newsroom swimming against the tide, we depend on reader support to continue this vital reporting.

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