Isabel Kershner
Jerusalem: A team of researchers in Israel has published what it described as the most comprehensive report yet on sexual violence by Palestinian militants during and after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The report, after two years of investigation by a non-governmental team, concludes that sexual violence against women and men was “systematic, widespread and integral” to the attack by Hamas and its allies as well as to the violations against hostages who were taken back to the Gaza Strip.
In one of the more shocking chapters, the report described cases where victims were abused in front of relatives, or where the perpetrators broadcast images or footage of atrocities to family members of a victim in real time via social media. The researchers coined a term for such cases, calling them “kinocidal violence”.
In at least one case, according to the report, family members were coerced into acts of sexual violence against one another.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the founder of the group that wrote the report, said, “It allows us to take a step back and see the horror in its entirety.”
In the immediate, chaotic aftermath of the October 7 attack, numerous, fragmented accounts emerged of rape and sexual violence perpetrated by assailants from Gaza. The United Nations and human rights groups have documented a number of such cases.
Elkayam-Levy, a legal scholar and human rights advocate, created the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, Children and Families to raise global awareness of the gender-based violence. The group says it works to amplify victims’ voices and confront denial.
A team of about two dozen Israeli researchers and experts in trauma, archiving and documentation worked along with several international contributors on the report. They collaborated with others who geolocated photographs and videos from various scenes of the attack, pinpointing the locations of victims and cross-referencing them with other evidence.
The team consulted international experts. Among those who endorsed the report are Professor Irwin Cotler, international chairman of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada; Professor David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone; and Anila Ali, president of the American Muslim and Multi-Faith Womens’ Empowerment Council.
The report did not provide any precise numbers of cases it documented, saying that it was too difficult to quantify with certainty.
The deaths of many of the victims and the condition of some of the bodies made it impossible to fully determine what happened, the commission said, adding that survivors and witnesses of sexual violence, especially in conflict, often take time or never come forward. The commission said testimonies were still emerging.
These were not isolated acts but were “organised and patterned”, according to the 300-page report.
“By identifying recurring modes of operation across sites and phases, the report demonstrates that these crimes followed identifiable patterns,” the commission said in a statement.
Hamas has not commented publicly on the report and an official of the group did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The group has previously denied that its militants were involved in sexual abuse and has subsequently not responded to detailed questions about specific cases.
The sheer scale of the attack, which ignited a devastating, two-year war in Gaza, overwhelmed Israeli law enforcement authorities and hampered the gathering of the kind of forensic evidence that would stand up in a court of law, Israeli officials have said.
The attackers from Gaza killed about 1200 people in southern Israel within hours, according to Israeli authorities. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
About 250 people were abducted and taken to Gaza. Several former hostages have spoken publicly since their release about being sexually assaulted both during their capture and their time in captivity.
Israeli attacks on Gaza during the war killed 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 “inflicted with exceptional cruelty”.
A UN report released more than two years ago found “reasonable grounds” to believe that sexual violence occurred during the Hamas-led incursion into Israel, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations. The United Nations said at the time that in most of these cases, “victims first subjected to rape were then killed”, and recorded at least two cases related to the sexual abuse of women’s corpses.
The UN report also said that some hostages being held in Gaza had been subjected to rape and sexual torture.
The Civil Commission said its report was based on its war crimes archive, which includes survivor and witness accounts, videos, communications such as text messages, and testimonies.
The commission said it had analysed and catalogued more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, including footage recorded by perpetrators, as well as satellite imagery. The team also conducted site visits and cross-referenced firsthand accounts, documentation and open-source materials.
The commission’s archive is closed to the public because of the graphic nature of much of the material, it said, and to protect the privacy of victims and their families.
The report documents what it describes as “recurring 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 the presence of family members.
Two returning hostages, both minors who are related to each other, said that they were forced to perform “sexual acts on one another” while in captivity, according to the report.
“They were reportedly compelled by their captors to take off their clothes, and their captors then touched their private parts and whipped their genitalia,” it said.
The commission said it was maintaining their anonymity to protect their privacy and cited a meeting held with an unnamed senior medical expert as the source of the information.
In another harrowing account, the commission documented testimony from a male survivor who said he was subjected to a violent gang rape and torture by multiple perpetrators at the site of the Nova music festival.
He underwent and passed a polygraph examination, according to the report.
“At one point, I was alone with my head on the ground,” the report quotes the survivor, identified only as D, as saying. “At first, I resisted, until I was hit in the head so hard that I felt I lost myself, and the more I resisted, the harder they beat me. They injured my genitalia,” he added, saying that he was then beaten with a belt.
“They laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll,” he said. “There were no boundaries. I was completely naked. They did whatever they wanted to me.”
He added that he heard, in the background, women being raped and screaming for help.
Israeli officials, survivors and supporters have long protested that the sexual violence during the October 7 attack was met by much of the world, at least initially, with silence and scepticism.
Some statements by Israeli officials and first responders about atrocities that turned out to be inaccurate or false led critics of Israel to assert that allegations of sexual violence were fabricated or overblown and designed to deflect attention from Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Rights groups have documented Palestinian complaints of organised and systematic sexual abuse in Israeli detention, including allegations of rape, forced stripping and blows to the groin area. Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have also recounted incidents of sexual abuse at the hands of settlers and soldiers.
Elkayam-Levy said the Civil Commission’s report can now be used by prosecutors. The report examines mechanisms that could be established for international co-operation, given that victims of the October 7 attack included multiple nationalities. It also recommends that Israel establish a specialised chamber or panel of judges dedicated to prosecuting sexual and gender-based crimes.
Elkayam-Levy said that the commission could join both domestic and international efforts at prosecution as expert witnesses.
“Sexual crimes are the easiest crimes to deny,” said Merav Israeli-Amarant, a lawyer and the chief executive of the Civil Commission. She added that was especially true of the October 7 attack “because most of the victims were murdered and are unable to testify”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
