A New York Times investigation that was published last week describes in graphic detail verified accounts of Hamas’s systemic brutalization of Israeli women on October 7.
Read the story here. One police witness, a 24-year-old named Sapir, was at the music festival where Hamas slaughtered 360 Israelis. Sapir hid under a tree after being shot in the back and witnessed “about 100 men” passing between each other “assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women”:
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
Raz Cohen hid about a mile away from the festival on October 7 when Hamas began “combing the area and shooting anyone they found,” the Times reports:
Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.
He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.
“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”
“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”
Multiple witnesses testified to seeing women whose vaginas appeared to have been cut open or mutilated. An Israeli who was looking for her missing friend filmed a video at the site of the music festival on October 8. The footage shows a woman lying face down near a car, her dress torn, “legs spread, vagina exposed.” The woman was mother-of-two Gal Abdush, whose family almost immediately identified her body from the video. Hamas killed both Abdush and her husband, who had been together since they were teenagers, at the rave. The couple’s children, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7, are now in their grandparents’ custody, the Times reports, and Refael said a couple of weeks ago:
“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”
“Honey,” she said, “you can ask anything.”
“Grandma, how did mom die?”
Hamas member Basem Naim reportedly denied last week’s article and said there is “no conclusive evidence” that terrorists committed mass rape during what he called the “glorious” October 7 attack. Evidence is scarce, Israeli military says, because Jewish burial practices require bodies to be buried as soon as possible after death and because the military didn’t prioritize the collection of rape kits due to the overwhelming number of bodies collected on October 7. Israel has zero autopsies so far to prove Hamas’s sexual violence, which is why, until (and if) Israel exhumes bodies, the growing number of witness testimonies are so consequential.
The United Nations body tasked with investigating Hamas’s war crimes (the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel) has asked Israel to prove that Hamas committed rape and sexual violence. The commission claims it will investigate and prosecute accounts of gender-based violence. The commission has also called Israel’s counter-attack against Hamas “reciprocal wrongdoing,” implying that Israel’s pursuit of justice can in some way be equated to Hamas’s bloodthirsty onslaught.