Israeli police are documenting rape incidents by Hamas terrorists during the 7 October terror attack on Israel by employing forensic evidence, video, witness testimony, and questioning suspects, reported CNN. Witnesses to the terror attack said that women and girls caught up in the rampage were slaughtered, subjected to physical and sexual abuse and brutally tortured.
According to Police Superintendent Dudi Katz, investigators have gathered over 60,000 video clips and over 1,000 statements pertaining to the assault including accounts from witnesses who claimed to have witnessed women raped. It is unclear whether any rape victims survived, he continued, and investigators lack firsthand testimony. Shabtai Yaakov, the Police Commissioner, stated that although prosecutions may result from the inquiry, the primary objective for them at the time is documentation.
Hebrew University expert on human rights law Cochav Elkayam-Levy, fearing that the world is going to ignore the violence against Israeli women and girls while the war destroys Gaza and thousands of Palestinian lives, has formed a civil commission with colleagues to record evidence of the heinous acts. “We’ll never know everything that has happened to them. We know that most women who were raped and who were sexually assaulted were also murdered.”
She cited a statement from the United Nations that made no mention of sexual abuse, released exactly one week after the terrorist attacks. Referring to the international body she noted, “It’s much worse than just silence or an insult to us as Israeli women and to our children and to our people. When they are failing to acknowledge us, to acknowledge what happened here, they are failing humanity.”
Notably, Israel has been demanding the resignation of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres over his remarks trying to contextualise the Hamas terror attack, after he said that the attack ‘did not happen in a vacuum’. He has also spoken against the Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza. Israel has also stopped issuing visas to UN officials over the issue.
Unprecedented crimes of Hamas
The accounts narrated depict dreadful and nearly inhuman deeds. The elite 669 Special Tactics Rescue Unit’s paramedics reported to have encountered many different types of casualties in the past, but the violence on 7 October was incomprehensible. He walked from house to house in Kibbutz Be’eri, searching for survivors of the carnage, and discovered two young teenage girls dead in a bedroom. He informed, “One is lying on the bed. One on the floor.”
The combat paramedic who wished to remain anonymous mentioned that the girl on the ground was lying on her stomach. He disclosed that the teenager was undoubtedly sexually assaulted, but was unsure whether she passed away before the violation. ‘Her pants are pulled down toward her knees and there’s a bullet wound on the back side of her neck near her head. There’s a puddle of blood around her head and there’s remains of semen on the lower part of her back.”
He added that the girl on the bed had a bullet wound to her chest and several bruises all over her body. “These are two girls that were just killed, executed, perhaps raped in their own bedroom.” Similar horrors at the Nova music festival where terrorists killed hundreds of young people were recounted by others. The festival’s organiser Rami Shmuel commented that he spotted naked female victims while making his getaway and had no queries about what transpired.
He highlighted, “Their legs were spread out and some of them were butchered” and elaborated that the females appeared to be the focus of sexual violence. “Why didn’t they take clothes off men? “Only women, only young girls, beautiful girls, why,” he asked.
Tedious future inquiry
Although Elkayam-Levy stressed that some families of dual nationals might opt to bring cases in international courts as well as seek justice in nations other than Israel, the country’s police acknowledge that their probe may take months. At a press briefing, however, officials offered a sobering glimpse into the material they have been compiling. Among the statements was one from a woman who from her hiding position on 7 October observed the attack on the Nova festival.
The anonymous witness unveiled, “They bent someone over and I understood he was raping her and then he was passing her on to someone else. She was alive, she stood on her feet and she was bleeding from her back. I saw that he was pulling her hair. She had long brown hair. I saw him chop off her breast and then he was throwing it toward the road, tossed it to someone else and they started playing with it. I remember seeing another person raping her and while he was still inside her he shot her in the head.”
Israel-Hamas War
Hamas militants launched coordinated attacks across the border, killing about 1,200 Israelis and injuring more in villages and farmland close to Gaza on 7 October which triggered the ongoing conflict. Furthermore, they kidnapped over 240 hostages. Officials in Gaza which is under the Hamas regime claimed that over 11,000 Palestinians have died, however, the figures couldn’t be independently verified.
