Trigger warning: This article contains detailed information about rape and sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can seek help by calling the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673). For more resources on sexual assault, visit RAINN, End Rape on Campus, Know Your IX, and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
On October 7, Hamas militants attacked Israel in what President Biden described as the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.” An estimated 1,200 people were killed and over 240 Israelis and foreigners were taken hostage, including women, children, and the elderly.
In the wake of the unprecedented attack — which sparked an ongoing war that has killed more than 18,000 Palestinians, including at least 7,700 children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry — mounting evidence shows that Hamas used rape and sexual assault as a weapon of war, according to coroner, Israeli first-responder, and eyewitness accounts. A bipartisan group of 33 senators has urged the United Nations (UN) to open an independent investigation into the “growing body of evidence” that Hamas engaged in acts of sexual violence.
Sexual assault and rape during wartime are notoriously difficult to document, track, and corroborate. And, as in far too many instances of rape and sexual assault in any circumstance, the lack of physical evidence can make it easier for people to deny allegations that an assault occurred. Some said the bodies were so mutilated it was difficult to determine whether sexual assault had occurred.
In Israel, traditional Jewish custom demands bodies be buried immediately, and in some areas the fighting lasted for days, delaying the recovery of many bodies and inhibiting the collection of crucial evidence. Police have said that most of those who were alleged to have been raped or abused by Hamas apparently did not survive, and that they did not have any firsthand testimony, according to CNN.
This is what we know about sexual violence on October 7.
The Washington Post reported that footage from the attack on October 7 shows several women stripped of their clothing. In one viral video, a woman kidnapped by Hamas, 19-year-old Naama Levy, can be seen being taken into a jeep in Gaza with her hands zip-tied behind her back and what appears to be blood on the seat and crotch of her gray tracksuit pants.
“Of course, I see the terror in her eyes and the brutal way that she is being dragged by the hair,” Ayelet Levy-Shachar, Naama’s mother, told MSNBC’s José Díaz-Balart on December 8. “I see her injured in the face and her arm and I see her bloody pants — her sweatpants; her pajamas that she’s wearing. And of course what I am worried about is the obvious — the sexual assault — and the consequences of that. It’s so difficult for me to even think, to even speak about it, but I have to. I have to have the world know and be aware of all these atrocities that have been done and maybe that keep on going. She’s still there.”
A survivor of the Nova rave massacre said she witnessed a woman being gang raped in an attack at the rave site in the Negev Desert, close to the Gaza border, and described the incident in graphic detail to the Israeli government, according to footage shown to journalists, Reuters reported.
An Israeli reserve combat paramedic told The Washington Post he found multiple bodies of teenage girls that all showed signs of sexual assault.
During a UN hearing on the sexual and gender-based violence carried out by Hamas on October 7, Simcha Greiniman, a volunteer rescue worker, said he found a woman laying naked on the floor of her home in a kibbutz that was attacked by Hamas. The attack on October 7 happened in southern Israel, in towns and areas near the Gaza border. “She had nails and different objects in her female organs,” said Greiniman. “She was abused in a way we could not understand and could not deal with.”
In the same hearing, a video was shown in which a first responder described seeing deliberate gunshot wounds to women’s breasts and genitals.
“There was humiliation through rape on the morning of October 7,” Israeli Police Chief Kobi Shabtai told The Washington Post. “There was worse evidence that we were not able to show. They cut limbs and genitals, they raped, they abused corpses.”
Hamas has denied that its militants committed sexual war crimes against women.
Despite what Israel says are more than 1,500 eyewitness accounts of rape and evidence of sexual violence, feminist, reproductive justice, and international women’s rights organizations were slow to officially condemn the documented accounts of rape and sexual assault committed by Hamas on October 7.
On December 1 — 55 days after the October 7 terrorist attacks — UN Women, the United Nations women’s rights agency, issued a statement addressing the ongoing war. The statement read in part, “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted with the rights of the victim at the core.”
