The Gush Etzion Regional Council in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has publicly admitted that ritualistic sexual abuse of children occurred within its communities, a confession that marks the first time a governing body in Israel’s religious-Zionist settler sector has broken ranks with years of denial.
The extraordinary statement came on 27 May 2026 in direct response to a broadcast by Israeli public broadcaster Kan 11, whose investigative programme ‘Zman Emet’ aired accounts from five women, most of whom did not know each other, who described virtually identical patterns of multi-perpetrator ritualistic sexual abuse in the same geographic areas.
The admission did not materialise in isolation. It is the culmination of more than a year of survivor testimony, Knesset hearings, rabbinical warnings, and police investigations that have shaken Israeli society to its core, forcing a reckoning within the country’s religious communities over decades of alleged institutional silence.
Yael Shitrit, another survivor, described abuse that began when she was three years old:
‘You have no idea what ritual abuse is,’ Shitrit told committee members. ‘The human brain cannot comprehend it. You can’t imagine what it means to program a three-year-old girl through rape and sadism so they can do whatever they want without anyone knowing.’ Shitrit described being trafficked across Israel from ceremony to ceremony. ‘Naked men stood in a circle. My therapist, her husband, and her son harmed me, and there were dozens of other girls and boys who harmed me.’ She said police had known of the cases for a year but lacked the tools to act: ‘The people who will fall are very, very senior figures. These people run communities and government agencies.’
American Buddhist Net 