Israel Lies About Hamas Committing Abuse of Women
Updated 2024-02-25
2024-01-08 Wikipedia – Sexual and gender-based violence in the 7 October attack on Israel [MEK Note: See counter responses at “Hamas Brutalized Women?”] [MEK Note: Buried in this article was this in response to NYTimes Investigation: Video evidence “verified” by New York Times (which does not state what exactly was “verified” e.g. the existence of the video or evidence of rape) included “a woman in a black dress lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed” with her face completely charred, whom Israeli police officials believed to have been raped. The Times identified the woman as Gal Abdush. Abdush’s sister Miral Alter spoke out later on social media, stating that the video of her sister shows no evidence of rape, nor does she feel there is any reason to suspect rape.]
During the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israeli towns, Israeli women and girls were reportedly raped, assaulted and mutilated by Hamas militants. Hamas was accused of committing acts of gender-based violence, war crimes and crimes against humanity in keeping with the recognition of The International Criminal Court (ICC) that sexual violence is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Hamas has denied that its fighters committed rape and assault against women.
The October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israeli communities, in which 1,139 people were killed and 240 hostages were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, reportedly involved widespread sexual violence. In a review of evidence mainly provided by the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli officials, NBC News stated that the evidence “suggests that dozens of Israeli women were raped or sexually abused or mutilated”. Hamas fighters infiltrated Israeli towns, where witnesses said they tortured, raped and sexually assaulted many women and girls of all ages, and some men. Most of the dead were civilians killed in their homes and at an outdoor music festival, and soldiers stationed in bases near the border.
Following attacks, Israeli police, Shin Bet and Israeli military began to collect evidence, take witness statements and to interrogate captured Hamas militants concerning the alleged sexual violence perpetrated during the October 7th attack. Police recorded the difficulty in collecting physical evidence in a war zone. For that reason, the full extent of Hamas’s sex crimes may never be known. Authorities retrieved video evidence, photographs of victims’ bodies, and militants’ testimonies which they said confirmed accounts of sexual assault. Autopsies of victims also corroborated these accounts, according to the Israeli police. Survivors, witnesses, first responders, and military personnel provided accounts of the alleged sexual violence inflicted by Hamas militants. These accounts included allegations of rape and mutilation. An official from Lahav 433 told the Knesset that 1,500 testimonies had been collected. Shelly Harush, the police officer leading the investigation recounted to The Times on 2 December 2023 “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.”
According to Tel Aviv University professor Tamar Herzig, the militants were heard discussing plans to rape specific girls. Herzig also said that they were also seen “parading the rape victims” with their clothes ripped off and blood between their legs. She said that testimony was taken from survivors who were brought to Israeli acute response centers. Herzig said that, over the next few weeks, forensic evidence collected from bodies of Israeli girls indicated that they had been raped, sometimes so violently that their legs and pelvis bones were broken. Survivors also testified to instances of gang rape and the breasts of young women being chopped off. Rescue team members attested to the genital mutilation of dead girls who were found stripped naked and covered with blood and semen in their own bedrooms.
An IDF Captain who was a dentist and member of the medical forensic team identifying bodies said that she had encountered several bodies showing signs consistent with sexual abuse. She said, “I can tell that I saw a lot of signs of abuse in the [genital region] […] We saw broken legs, broken pelvises, bloody underwear”. Ina Kubbe, a scholar specializing in gender and conflict at Tel Aviv University, said that these signs align with sexual violence. However, she emphasized the necessity of a forensic investigation for an official determination of rape. Hamas was accused of using rape as a weapon of war. Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist stationed in the Shura morgue, provided similar testimony based on her observations of the dead, conveyed in a recorded video, which has been verified by the IDF.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an Israeli law academic appointed to head the commission investigating crimes of sexual assault on October 7 confirmed that Hamas weaponized sexual violence in order to harm Israeli morale.
According to a two-month investigation by the New York Times using video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 purported victims or their families, the Times identified at least seven locations where sexual assaults and mutilations of Israeli women and girls were carried out. They concluded that these were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern in which Hamas “weaponized sexual violence” during the attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violence_in_the_7_October_attack_on_Israel
2024-01-08 Wikipedia 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel The attacks began in the early morning with a rocket barrage of at least 3,000 rockets launched against Israel and vehicle-transported and powered paraglider incursions into its territory. Hamas fighters breached the Gaza–Israel barrier, attacking Israeli civilian communities and military bases as well as a music festival near Re’im, resulting in 1,139 deaths – 695 Israeli civilians (including 36 children), 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the security forces.[29] Approximately 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip, including 30 children, with the stated goal to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners. Israel and international media have reported rape and sexual assault by Hamas fighters with documentary footage and photographs, which Hamas has denied.
Hamas said its attack was in response to the continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, rising Israeli settler violence, and recent escalations. At least 44 nations denounced the attack as terrorism, while some Arab and Muslim countries blamed the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as the root cause of the attack. The day was labeled the bloodiest in Israel’s history and the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel
2023-12-31 Israeli Hostages Describe RAMPANT Sexual Assault, Rape On Oct 7 In BRUTAL NYT Piece Jessica Burbank and Amber Athey react to troubling reporting regarding the attacks of October 7th. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwUojeva5D4
2023-12-06 New signs emerge of ‘widespread’ sexual crimes by Hamas, as Netanyahu alleges global indifference
[MEK Note: Israel controls the crime scene and the witnesses! Why wasn’t forensic evidence preserved with and without photos? 60K videos should provide evidence! Israel has been caught in numerous lies and admits its IDF used crossfire, tanks and, helicopter at festival and kibbutz which killed, and burned people along with cars and homes! But Hamas had leisure time to sexually molest women, many probably IDF trained soldiers!]
A man hiding in a pit during the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on an outdoor music festival in Israel said he heard someone nearby screaming she was being raped. Ron Freger fled the music festival when Hamas attacked and said he heard a woman screaming for help. “I was lying in a pit (and) I heard (a girl) yelling: ‘They’re raping me, they’re raping me!’” he told the AP.
Elsewhere in the area, a combat paramedic saw the body of a young woman with her legs open, her pants pulled down, and what looked like semen on her lower back. An army reservist who was tasked with identifying those killed by the militants said some of the women were found wearing only bloodied underwear.
Last month, Israel’s police chief presented to the international news media videotaped testimony of a rape witness at the music festival. Her face blurred, she said she watched militants gang-rape a woman as she lay on the ground. The men then stood her up as blood trickled from her back, yanked her hair and sliced her breast, playing with it as they assaulted her. The last man shot her in the head while he was still inside her. The woman in the video described watching the militants as she pretended to be dead.
A combat medic told the AP that he came across half a dozen bodies of women and men with possible signs of sexual assault when he reached one of the attacked communities. One girl had been shot in the head and was lying on the floor, her legs open and pants pulled down, with what looked like semen on her lower back, said the medic who spoke on condition of anonymity because his unit was classified. Other bodies had mass bleeding around the groin with limbs at distorted angles, he said.
At the Shura military base where victims are being identified, Shari Mendes, a member of the army reserve unit that deals with the identification and religious burial preparation of female soldiers, said some of the women’s bodies came in with little clothing, such as parts of their pajamas. Some only had bloodied underwear.
Separately, a doctor who treated some of the 110 released hostages told the AP that at least 10 men and women among those freed were sexually assaulted or abused, but did not provide further details. He spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the hostages’ identities.
Such accounts given to The Associated Press, along with first assessments by an Israeli rights group, show that sexual assault was part of an atrocities-filled rampage by Hamas and other Gaza militants who killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 hostages that day.
“I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation — where the hell are you?” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a news conference Tuesday, switching to English to emphasize the point.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, priority was given to identifying bodies, not to preserving evidence. Police say they’re combing through 60,000 videos seized from the body cameras of Hamas attackers, from social media and from security cameras as well as 1,000 testimonies to bring the perpetrators to justice. It has been difficult finding rape survivors, with many victims killed by their attackers.
Before this war, Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, wasn’t known to use rape as a weapon, said Colin P. Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consulting firm. Its tactics included suicide bombings and shooting attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.
A country like Israel should have the means to do rigorous testing to confirm if people were sexually assaulted in a more systematic way, said Nidhi Kapur, a specialist on sexual abuse in situations of armed conflict. “Forensic testing should have been a priority to build a full picture of the attack,” said Kapur, who has worked in the region. “In a conflict you first take care of the survivors, you don’t count bodies.” https://apnews.com/article/sexual-assault-hamas-oct-7-attack-rape-bb06b950bb6794affb8d468cd283bc51
2023-11-30 UN commission to investigate Hamas sexual violence, appeal for evidence
[MEK Note: Israel makes lots of wild claims to paint Hamas as barbaric, yet it didn’t treat the areas of attack as crime scenes by gathering evidence and it refuses to cooperate with an UN investigation.]
A U.N. commission of inquiry investigating war crimes on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict will focus on sexual violence by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and is about to launch an appeal for evidence, its chair told Reuters on Wednesday.
Chair Navi Pillay on Wednesday said she would pass the evidence onto the International Criminal Court and called for it to consider prosecutions amid earlier criticism from Israel and families of Israeli hostages that the U.N. had kept quiet. “I’m now sitting as chair of a commission with the power to investigate this. So there’s no way we will not do so,” said Pillay, chair of the three-member commission of inquiry into abuses committed in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Already, she said some people are keen to provide testimonies and that these would be handed over to prosecutors.
However, a major challenge for Pillay is that Israel has not cooperated with the commission, which it says has an anti-Israel bias. The commission could struggle to gather sufficient evidence to support future charges if access is not granted. “Since the establishment of the COI (Commission of Inquiry) in 2021, Israel has made it clear: it will not cooperate with this discriminatory body and its Commissioners,” Israel’s permanent mission to the U.N. in Geneva said in a statement to Reuters on Thursday.
Hamas has denied the abuses and was not available for comment. Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said on Thursday the commission had “pre-existing biased prejudices against Israel”. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-commission-investigate-hamas-sexual-violence-appeal-evidence-2023-11-29/
2023-11-25 Israel investigates an elusive, horrific enemy: Rape as a weapon of war The first indications of possible sexual violence came as early as Oct. 7, the day that thousands of Hamas and other fighters streamed into Israeli towns and began live-streaming bloodshed and torture. Footage showed several women stripped of their clothing. One video showed a woman, her hands zip-tied behind her back, with blood on the crotch of her pants. Later came testimony from witnesses and first responders. One witness described in graphic detail a gang rape at the Nova rave site near Re’im. An Israeli reserve combat paramedic told The Post that he found the bodies of teenage girls with signs of sexual assault. Combatants from Gaza overran 22 Israeli communities, killed at least 1,200 and took 240 hostage in the surprise attack. But their greater goal, sexual trauma specialists say, was to introduce terror against women — and children and other unarmed civilians — as a means of spreading fear. “The torture of women was weaponized to destroy communities, to destroy a people, to destroy a nation,” said Cochav Elkayam Levy, the head of a nongovernmental commission investigating crimes perpetrated against women and children on Oct. 7.
Hamas denies that its fighters use rape or assault against women as a weapon of war. To do so, Hamas official Basem Naim said, would go against its founding Islamic principles. The group, he said, considers “any sexual relationship or activity outside of marriage to be completely haram” — forbidden by Islam. “Whoever does this kind of act is committing a major infraction and would be punished both legally and on Judgment Day,” he told The Washington Post. “So our soldiers would not go close to this forbidden” act. Earlier this month, Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau based in Qatar, also said in an interview with the BBC that “women, children and civilians were exempt” from Hamas’s attacks — despite a death toll that was made up mostly of those groups.
The Israeli commission, established by Elkayam-Levy, is working to compile a comprehensive database of the assault that day, based on the testimonies of survivors, witnesses, medical examiners, first responders, police and militants themselves, many of whom participated first from behind the camera, as they recorded their actions, and later in front of the camera, as they were interrogated by Israeli security forces. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/25/israel-hamas-rape-sexual-violence/
2023-11-22 Sexual Violence Evidence Against Hamas Is Mounting, but the Road to Court Is Still Long Extensive evidence indicates that Hamas committed various kinds of serious sexual and gender-based violence against women on October 7, in addition to its other crimes against the residents of Gaza border communities. The evidence continues to pile up as investigators do their work.
Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Prosecutor Amit Aisman have publicly stated that Hamas’ crimes on October 7 included rape, leading to pressure on Israel to prove the allegation. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-22/ty-article-magazine/.premium/sexual-assault-evidence-against-hamas-is-mounting-but-the-road-to-court-is-still-long/0000018b-f6bb-dafe-a18f-f7fb0a570000
2023-11-10 Israel women’s groups warn of failure to keep evidence of sexual violence in Hamas attacks Many of the atrocities committed by Hamas, as well as what are believed to be civilians or criminal gangs from Gaza who also took advantage of the chaos, have been included by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in a 40-minute reel of war crimes, screened to journalists and politicians. However, the most distressing material has not been released, on the grounds that it is too difficult to watch, and to preserve the victims’ dignity.
A major worry for Israeli women’s rights groups is that it also appears that very little, if any, investigative work was done to document sexual violence before bodies were returned to their families for funerals, meaning that the gender-based nature of some of the violence has largely gone under the radar in Israeli and international media.
Tal Hochman, a government relations officer at the Israel Women’s Network, said: “Most of the women who were raped were then killed, and we will never understand the full picture, because either bodies were burned too badly or the victims were buried and the forensic evidence buried too. No samples were taken. “Women are not believed when they report sexual violence even in normal times, and now that chance for justice and dignity has been lost. There are some survivors we are working with or are being treated privately. We also have no idea about what is happening to women currently being held by Hamas in Gaza,” she said.
“We issued an urgent letter to UN Women, and to the UN committee on sexual violence, but so far they have failed to condemn what happened on 7 October in relation to the use of sexual violence committed by Hamas as a tactic of war.”
A report published by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth suggested that much evidence from the scenes of the attacks that hit more than 20 different locations across southern Israel had not been properly photographed, preserved or forensically examined before bodies were buried, partly because the investigations were carried out by four different organisations without coordination. It also alleged that people were allowed to return to the sites too early, potentially damaging evidence. The lack of a synchronised collection system could mean that a full accounting of the violence would never be reached, and could hinder attempts at justice in international legal forums, the paper said, referencing by way of comparison the painstaking work undertaken by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in documenting Russian war crimes.
In a response to Yedioth Ahronoth’s article, Israel’s ministry of justice said: “The allegations of negligence on the part of the state are irresponsible and have no basis.” It added that “since 7 October, intensive investigative and legal activity has been carried out, with an overall view of the entire terrorist attack, in all its aspects,” in cooperation with the police, Israel’s internal security service and the IDF, under the supervision of the state attorney’s office. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/10/israel-womens-groups-warn-of-failure-to-keep-evidence-of-sexual-violence-in-hamas-attacks
2023-10-23 Israel-Palestine war: Israel is caught lying time and again. And yet we never learn Western politicians and media act as if they are caught in a permanent spell, sympathetically indulging even the most wildly improbable denials from Israel that it has committed war crimes. As Lenin famously observed: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”. We can go further. It never matters how often Israel is caught out in a lie, because its next lie will be given the benefit of the doubt. Western media refuse to learn from the past.
In the days leading up to the attack on al-Ahli hospital, 23 other medical centres in northern Gaza received warnings to evacuate immediately. Dozens have been hit, according to the World Health Organization. Israel had told us precisely what it was going to do. But when it then did it, Israel began its now familiar gaslighting operation. It denied it was the guilty party, accusing a Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad, of the war crime instead. It said a Palestinian rocket had misfired and fallen onto the hospital. Israel’s claim was ridiculous. On a video of the actual strike, you can hear the loud whistling sound of an incoming, high-velocity missile or shell moments before it explodes. Palestinian groups in Gaza have only primitive rockets that lumber through the sky. If one fails, it tumbles at free-fall speed, not at near-supersonic velocity. Disinformation over the blast at Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital worked as planned, taking the focus off the victims and lifting pressure on Israel to stop its rampage. The casualty rate alone proved it had to be an Israeli missile. No Palestinian rocket has ever killed more than a handful of people, not hundreds as this one did.
But Israel was ready with a campaign of lies and disinformation. Embarrassingly, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had issued a social media post celebrating Israel hitting a supposed “terrorist base” in the hospital. The post was hurriedly deleted.
The goal here, as ever, was not to produce evidence but to win the propaganda battle through misdirection, planting a seed of doubt that western politicians and media could then exploit to cloud the issue for their publics. Instead of giving the victims proper attention, instead of finally galvanising anger over Israel’s wanton killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in two weeks, the media’s reporting reverted to a predictable formula. It weighed claim and counter-claim over the hospital strike, it carried profiles about Islamic Jihad, and – most importantly for Israel – it adopted a wait-and-see, don’t-rush-to-judgment approach.
This is all too familiar to anyone who has followed decades of the media’s endlessly forgiving coverage, when it matters, of Israel’s occupation and illegal colonisation of the Palestinians’ historic homeland. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-lying-time-again-never-learn
2023-10-12 Hamas ‘sliced baby out of pregnant Israeli’s womb’ while bodies of 20 children found tied The mother was found with her stomach wide open and a bullet in her head. Brutal Hamas terrorists sliced a baby out of a pregnant Israeli’s womb, it has been claimed as the bodies of 20 children are found tied up and burned. Israel troops discovered the horrors in Be’eri Kibbutz following Saturday’s hellish attacks on the country. “We see a pregnant lady on the floor, and we turn her around…and the stomach is wide open, there’s an unborn baby connected to the cord, stabbed with a knife, and the mother shot in the head,” Yossi Landau told i24News. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1823110/hamas-israel-attacks-sliced-baby-out-pregnant-womb
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