AhlulBayt News Agency: The Israeli police have arrested three footballers from the occupied city of Netanya on suspicion of raping a 29-year-old female American tourist during her stay in Tel Aviv earlier this month.
The arrests were first reported by the Israeli regime’s Channel 12 and its Ynet news website before being reflected across various other Israeli outlets on Tuesday,
The suspects were identified as two active players from the regime’s main league as well as League A, the third tier of the Israeli football league system, besides a former player.
They were detained following an intensive investigation by detectives from the Sarat police station that covers many regions, including Tel Aviv, in cooperation with other police units.
Authorities said the woman filed a complaint on November 1, saying she had been assaulted at a hostel in central Tel Aviv after meeting one of the suspects during a night out.
Investigators collected evidence from the scene and questioned witnesses before apprehending the trio on Monday evening.
Preliminary findings suggested the victim might have been drugged before the assault.
Police sources said the first suspect had met the tourist and later summoned his two friends to the hostel room, where the incident took place.
All three men, aged between 21 and 25, were taken in for interrogation and are set to appear before the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court for a hearing to extend their remand.
One of the suspects’ attorneys, Moshe Meroz, told Israeli media that his client “denies the allegations and insists that everything was done with consent. There was no rape.”
The police, however, have requested to keep the suspects in custody as the investigation continues.
This is far from the first time the regime’s settlers and officials are being faced with sexual assault suspicions or charges.
The report came on the same day, when the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) accused the regime of engaging in a “systematic campaign of sexual torture” targeting Palestinians detained from the blockaded Gaza Strip.
The Gaza-based group said its field investigators had uncovered widespread sexual violence against both men and women held in Israeli custody over the past two years.
The organization said researchers and lawyers had interviewed several recently freed detainees, who recounted harrowing experiences of rape, forced nudity, filmed assaults, and sexual violence using objects and dogs, in addition to psychological degradation and other forms of abuse.
One of the survivors, a 42-year-old mother detained while attempting to cross an Israeli checkpoint in northern Gaza in November 2024, told investigators she had been subjected to repeated rape and brutal physical violence throughout her detention.
A day earlier, former Israeli military lawyer Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who had leaked footage exposing the rape of a Palestinian captive by Israeli forces at the regime’s notorious Sde Teiman detention facility was reported to have attempted suicide.
In October, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a victim of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, was found to have disclosed in her posthumous memoir that she had endured brutal beatings and rape at the hands of a prominent political figure in a series of encounters, referring to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.
In March, various Hebrew-language outlets said a former Israeli captive, who had been released from the Gaza Strip during an exchange process, reported being raped by a well-known Israeli fitness trainer in Tel Aviv.
The assault allegedly occurred just days before her wedding, after the trainer drugged her drink.
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