Report: Israeli officer convicted of rape of Palestinian, sexual bribes

An Israeli occupation forces officer has been convicted of raping a Palestinian woman and receiving sexual bribes from others, according to court documents published Wednesday, Israeli Ynet news site reported.

The Civil Administration officer committed the acts, which also include sexual harassment as well as fraud and breach of trust, in the years 2014-2013.

Gen. Doron Piles, the IOF’s court of appeals chief, on Tuesday approved Ynet’s request to allow the details of the affair, which has been hidden from the public for years, to be publicized.

The Ynet news reported that the Israeli officer, whose name and picture are still under a gag order, was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

He was also discharged from the military. This is one of the heaviest punishments imposed on an IOF officer in IOF’s history, the site said.

He appealed the sentence, and last March the three-judge panel headed by Gen. Piles agreed to scrap the count of the officer’s removal from the military, instead demoting him to the rank of a private.

Among the main charges in the indictment is a rape of a Palestinian woman who asked the officer for a permit to enter and work in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

According to the indictment, he contacted the Palestinian woman many times with suggestions for sexual encounters and threatened to take her permits away if she told anyone about his actions.

The military court, based in part on audio recordings that the woman made, determined that in the first instance of rape, the officer had forced her to have sex with him and then made her clean up the floor afterwards, before giving her the work permit.

A few days later, he called her and told her that he had rescinded the permit and again forced her to have sex with him in order to get it back.

In both cases, the Palestinian woman refused his demands for sex, and in both cases, he threatened to take away her work permit if she told anyone about the rape.

He was also found guilty of the sexual harassment of a Palestinian man, whom he urged to meet for sex, the site also reported.

Ynet news said that the indicted officer denied the allegations, but the court ruled that his versions of events were unreliable.

The IOF in response said the affair is “one of the serious cases brought before the military tribunals, and the sentence imposed [on the officer] befits the actions of the accused”.

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