New report lays bare the full horror of Hamas-led attack
Isabel Kershner
Jerusalem: A team of researchers in Israel has released what it calls the most comprehensive report yet on sexual violence committed by Palestinian militants during and after the Hamas-led Israeli offensive on October 7, 2023.
After two years of investigation by a non-government team, the report concludes that sexual violence against women and men is “systematic, widespread and integral” to the offensive by Hamas and its allies, as well as the violations against hostages taken back to the Gaza Strip.
One of the more shocking sections of the report described cases in which victims were abused in front of relatives or perpetrators broadcast images or images of the abuse in real time to the victim’s family members via social media. Researchers have coined a term for such cases, which they call “cinocidal violence.”
In at least one case, family members were forced to commit acts of sexual violence against each other, according to the report.
“It allows us to step back and see the horror in its entirety,” said Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder of the group that wrote the report.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, multiple fragmented accounts of rape and sexual violence by Gaza attackers emerged. The United Nations and human rights groups have documented many such cases.
Elkayam-Levy, legal expert and human rights advocate, October 7 Civilian Commission on Hamas Crimes Against Women, Children and Families Raising global awareness of gender-based violence. The group says it is working to amplify victims’ voices and confront denial.
A team of nearly two dozen Israeli researchers and experts on trauma, archiving and documentation worked on the report, along with numerous international contributors. They collaborated with others who geolocated photographs and videos of various scenes of the attack, located the victims, and cross-referenced them with other evidence.
The team consulted international experts. Those endorsing the report include Professor Irwin Cotler, international director of the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights and former Canadian justice minister and attorney general; Professor David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone; and Anila Ali, president of the American Council for the Empowerment of Muslim and Multifaith Women.
The exact number of documented cases was not specified in the report and it was stated that it was very difficult to make an exact quantitative assessment.
The deaths of many victims and the condition of some of the bodies made it impossible to determine exactly what happened, the commission said, adding that survivors and witnesses to sexual violence often take time or never come forward, especially in conflict. The commission said the statements were still emerging.
According to the 300-page report, these were not isolated actions, but “organized and stereotyped” actions.
“The report shows that these crimes follow identifiable patterns, identifying recurring modes of operation across sites and phases,” the commission said in a statement.
Hamas did not comment publicly on the report, and an official from the group did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The group had previously denied that its militants were involved in sexual abuse and subsequently did not respond to detailed questions about specific cases.
The sheer scale of the attack, which sparked a devastating two-year war in Gaza, stunned Israeli law enforcement and prevented the collection of the kind of forensic evidence that could emerge in court, Israeli officials said.
Attackers from Gaza killed nearly 1,200 people in southern Israel in a few hours, according to Israeli officials. It was the deadliest day in Israeli history.
Approximately 250 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza. Many former hostages have publicly stated since their release that they were sexually assaulted both during their capture and their time in captivity.
Israeli attacks on Gaza during the war caused the deaths of more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Elkayam-Levy added that the sexual violence carried out on October 7 was a calculated strategy “implemented with extraordinary cruelty.”
A UN report published more than two years ago found “reasonable grounds” to believe that sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred in at least three locations during the Hamas-led Israeli offensive. The United Nations stated at the time that in most of these cases “the victims were first raped and then murdered” and recorded at least two cases of sexual abuse of women’s corpses.
The UN report also stated that some hostages held in Gaza were subjected to rape and sexual torture.
The Civilian Commission said its report was based on a war crimes archive that includes accounts, videos, communications such as text messages and statements from survivors and witnesses.
The commission said it analyzed and cataloged more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, including satellite images as well as footage recorded by the perpetrators. The team also conducted field visits and cross-referenced first-hand accounts, documentation and open source materials.
It was stated that the Commission archive is closed to the public due to the sensational nature of most of the material and to protect the privacy of victims and their families.
The report documents what it describes as “recurrent forms” of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, forced nudity, postmortem sexual abuse, and sexual assaults carried out in front of family members.
The two underage hostages, both related to each other, said they were forced to “perform sexual acts on each other” while in captivity, according to the report.
“It was reported that the kidnappers forced them to take off their clothes and then touched their private parts and whipped their genitals,” the report said.
The commission said they maintained anonymity to protect their privacy and cited a meeting with an unnamed senior medical expert as the source of the information.
In another harrowing testimony, the commission documented the testimony of a male survivor who said he was subjected to violent gang rape and torture by multiple perpetrators on the grounds of the Nova music festival.
He took a polygraph examination and passed, according to the report.
“At one point I was alone with my head down,” the survivor, identified only as D, was quoted as saying in the report. “At first I resisted, until I was hit so hard on the head that I felt I would lose myself. The more I resisted, the harder they beat me. They injured my genitals,” he added, and then he was beaten with a belt.
“They laughed, they were really pleased, like I was their sex doll,” she said. “There were no limits. I was completely naked. They did whatever they wanted to me.”
He added that in the background he heard women being raped and screaming for help.
Israeli officials, survivors and supporters have long protested that the sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attack was met with silence and suspicion by much of the world, at least initially.
Some accounts of atrocities by Israeli officials and first responders that turned out to be false or inaccurate have led Israel’s critics to claim that allegations of sexual violence are fabricated or exaggerated and designed to divert attention from Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Human rights groups have documented Palestinian complaints of organized and systematic sexual abuse in Israeli detention, including allegations of rape, forced undressing, and blows to the groin area. Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank also described sexual abuse by settlers and soldiers.
Elkayam-Levy said the Civilian Commission report can now be used by prosecutors. The report examines the mechanisms that can be established for international cooperation, given that the victims of the October 7 attack were from more than one nation. It also recommends that Israel establish a specialized chamber or panel of judges to prosecute sexual and gender-based crimes.
Elkayam-Levy said the commission can participate in both national and international efforts to prosecute as experts.
“Sex crimes are the easiest crimes to deny,” said Merav Israel-Amarant, a lawyer and chief executive of the Civil Commission. He added that this was especially true of the October 7 attack because “most of the victims were killed and were unable to testify.”
This article was first published on: New York Times.
