Israel slammed U.N. officials for declining to convene a Security Council meeting on the findings.
A U.N. report released this afternoon found it “reasonable” to conclude that rape was used against Israelis during Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack. It also concluded that there’s “clear and convincing” information showing that sexual violence, including rape and “sexualized torture,” has been used and continues to be used against hostages held in Gaza.
The report, which will later be folded into a broader annual report by the U.N. secretary-general, effectively swats down some of the rampant denialism of Hamas atrocities, adding the U.N.’s imprimatur to the allegations of sexual violence that have been contested by skeptics.
Still, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz called the country’s U.N. ambassador back to Jerusalem for consultations, accusing the U.N. of trying to “silence” the document’s findings because officials did not call a Security Council meeting on it.
During a press conference today, U.N. special representative Pramila Patten laid out the findings, which are based on a 17-day trip that she and ten members of her team took to Israel and the West Bank in January and February. Patten is the U.N. secretary general’s envoy on sexual violence in conflict.
The Patten team conducted confidential interviews of 34 people including survivors and witnesses and reviewed more than 5,000 images and about 50 hours of video footage. Patten said her team believes material provided by Israeli authorities to have been “authentic and unmanipulated.”
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations,” the report states, naming the Nova music festival, Kibbutz Re’im, and Road 232 as those locations.
The Patten report also documented accounts from witnesses who spoke of “at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women.”
It referred to “credible sources,” who “described seeing multiple murdered individuals, mostly women, whose bodies were found naked from the waist down, some totally naked, with some gunshots in the head and/or tied including with their hands bound behind their backs and tied to structures such as trees or poles.”
While the U.N. team said it was not able to verify the use of sexual violence against corpses found at the Kibbutz Be’eri, “circumstantial evidence — notably the pattern of female victims found undressed and bound — may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.”
Other conclusions reached by Patten’s team paint a more limited picture than what some witnesses, first responders, and Israeli officials have laid out.
Patten was careful to say that her effort to report on information about the use of sexual violence is distinct from a more exhaustive investigative process and that her team’s work was limited by numerous factors. These included the limited number of survivors of the attacks, the continued treatment of survivors, lack of trust of survivors and victims’ witnesses in the U.N., “absence of comprehensive forensic evidence,” and the short duration of the trip.
As a result, Patten did not make a claim as to whether sexual violence was weaponized or used systematically, and although the report mentions Hamas’s leading role in October 7, it does not attribute any of the incidents it describes to specific groups. “Such attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process,” the report said.
Patten also emphasized that, heading into her trip, she took precautions to ensure that her report would not be instrumentalized by Israel and its supporters to justify the war in Gaza. And she said that her goal was not to tabulate the number of incidents of sexual violence that took place, because the occurrence of even one such attack is unacceptable by itself.
“I didn’t go on a bookkeeping exercise,” Patten said.
The report found that some of the allegations from Be’eri — including that a pregnant woman’s womb was ripped open and the fetus stabbed before she was killed — “were unfounded due to either new superseding information or inconsistency in the facts gathered.”
The Patten team also visited the West Bank and heard “alleged instances of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” by Israeli forces.
Patten’s team, in addition to urging Hamas to release its hostages, called for a humanitarian cease-fire.
“What’s amazing is that there can’t just be a report about sexual crimes against humanity committed by Hamas — it has to get weighted with allegations against Israel, calls for cease-fire, and a hedge against confirming both the systemic nature of these crimes and some of the most heinous incidents,” Rich Goldberg, a senior adviser at Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former White House official, told National Review.