Israeli guards ‘crushed’ Palestinian prisoner’s testicle with rubber bullet
Israeli prison guards have seriously wounded Palestinian prisoners by firing rubber-coated bullets at close range inside jails, including one man hit in his testicle, according to human rights organisations.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel said on Thursday they had collected 21 testimonies documenting what they described as a “dangerous practice” of firing at prisoners at close range, causing severe injuries and potentially irreversible harm.
Most of the cases occurred over the past year, they said.
One involved a 45-year-old prisoner taken to Soroka Medical Centre in June following what medical reports described as “a riot and rubber bullet shooting incident”.
His right testicle was “completely crushed” and had to be removed surgically.
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According to Haaretz, an attorney who visited the prisoner recorded his testimony that guards had kicked him directly in the testicles during a search a week before the shooting.
The prisoner said the incident began when members of the Metzada unit, the Israeli Prison Service’s operational intervention unit, fired “rubber bullets that looked like marbles” into his cell.
He was hit twice: once in the testicles and once behind the knee.
Another prisoner required surgery for a fractured tibia after being struck by a rubber bullet at Ktziot Prison in July.
'My back was to the door, and suddenly I heard a gunshot and felt pain in my left leg'
- Former Palestinian prisoner
A third prisoner told Haaretz after his release that he had been shot while being told to enter a cell with about 40 other detainees.
They were all kneeling, facing the wall, with their hands on their heads, he said.
“My back was to the door, and suddenly I heard a gunshot and felt pain in my left leg. At the same time, I heard prisoners screaming in pain,” he told the newspaper.
He said the shot was fired from a distance of no more than about two metres.
“Right after that, they handcuffed us from behind and dragged us in a humiliating way, one by one, to the courtyard of the prison wing.
"There they threw us onto our stomachs, even though there were injured people bleeding.”
'War on Palestinian prisoners'
Physicians for Human Rights Israel warned that firing rubber-coated bullets in confined, crowded spaces increased the danger of serious injury because of fragments and ricochets.
“Firing at prisoners at close range inside confined cells is not only a severe act of violence but also reflects a dangerous structural shift in how prison officers perceive their role,” the group said.
It said the Israeli Prison Service had for some time been recruiting officers under the designation “incarceration combatants”, arguing that the terminology further militarised the prison system and encouraged officers to view prisoners as enemies on a battlefield.
The organisation added that this shift risked treating prisoners’ lives as expendable and lowering the threshold for the use of force, against the backdrop of what it described as the state’s "declared war on Palestinian prisoners".
Separately, figures published on Friday showed that Israeli prison authorities had placed 351 children in solitary confinement at least once in 2025, including five boys aged 13 to 14.
The data was obtained through a freedom of information request by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and Parents Against Child Detention.
According to Haaretz, children were typically held in solitary confinement for seven consecutive days, with some kept alone for as long as two weeks.
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