With the news in recent weeks that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza was infested with terrorism, another United Nations failure was swept under the rug. Despite over 1,500 testimonies by survivors, security forces, and first responders of the sexual violence, including rape and genital mutilation, committed by Hamas on October 7, the U.N. waited almost four months to send an envoy to Israel to address it. At a time when powerful adversaries of Western values and institutions seek to normalize sexual violence and an indifference to human dignity, the U.N.’s failure counts as an enormous strategic blunder.
When Pramila Patten, the U.N. envoy for sexual violence in conflict, finally did arrive in Israel, she mainly delivered platitudes about identifying “avenues for support” and encouraging victims to “break [their] silence” in search of justice. It took the U.N. agency tasked with upholding women’s rights 55 days to condemn Hamas’s violence. That long silence is hardly in keeping with the U.N.’s strongly worded condemnation on July 7, 2023, of the rise in conflict-related sexual violence and call for the Security Council to “better prevent such crimes.”
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