The United Nations has heard from an Israeli emergency responder about what he found in the days after the October 7 terrorist attack, including his recollections of women he described as “brutally abused” by their Hamas-led attackers.
The presentation by Israel’s mission to the UN was organised to bring attention to the alleged sexual violence committed by Hamas-led militants against Israeli civilians on October 7.
WARNING: Readers may find some of the details in this story distressing.
The Israeli and Jewish community has become increasingly frustrated by the lack of acknowledgement of these alleged crimes from the wider women’s rights sector, including UN Women.
Former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg told the UN gathering “silence is complicity”.
The crowd of 800 people listened as Israelis working on the ground after October 7 described what they saw.
A member of Israeli search and rescue organisation ZAKA, Simcha Greinman, told the audience he saw “horrific things” with his own eyes.
“I was called down on October 7 to collect bodies and remains from the terror attack,” he said.
“One of the days, I was called into a house. I was told there are a few bodies over there and I walked into the house and I saw in front of my eyes a woman laying, she was naked.”
Struggling through his next sentence, Mr Greinman said the woman “had nails and different objects in her female organs”.
“Her body was brutal [brutalised] in a way that we could not identify her from her head to her toes. She was abused in a way that we could not understand and we could not deal with,” he said.
In response, Israel declared war and vowed to eliminate Hamas, launching an air, sea and land offensive that has now killed more than 15,000 people inside Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
Piecing together the evidence
There have been allegations of sexual violence on October 7 since the attack and Israel launched an official police investigation into the reports several weeks ago.
That investigation is being led by David Katz.
His unit, Lahav 433, has been working to gather evidence from Israelis who survived the October 7 attack and say they witnessed sexual violence, plus surveillance footage and interrogations of Palestinian militants who were arrested in the aftermath.
“We have no living victims who said “we have been raped” … [but] we have multiple witnesses for several cases,” Katz told a press conference last month.
He did not provide the number of cases under investigation, but said the inquiry could take “six to eight months”.
Israel is levelling the allegations of sexual violence specifically against Hamas militants.
Hamas officials have denied them, saying any sexual atrocities were committed by other armed groups that crossed into Israel after Hamas militants breached the Gaza border fence.
Hamas has also called Israel’s claims of sexual violence “Zionist claims and lies” designed to distract from videos of hostages receiving “good treatment”.
As Katz said, there are no survivors who say they have been raped and forensic evidence is limited as a “matter of time” passed between the alleged sexual crimes and when Israeli responders reached the civilians who were killed.
At the centre of the allegations are a series of interviews with survivors of the October 7 attack who say they witnessed sexual violence, as well as images from several key locations in the attack released by Israeli police.
Overnight, United States President Joe Biden forcefully denounced the reports of sexual violence, citing the alleged witness accounts.
He called on the world to condemn such conduct “without equivocation” and “without exception.”
“Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive — of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them,” Biden said.
“It is appalling.”
The witness accounts that have been released
Israeli police have released footage from interviews with witnesses who were at the scene of the Supernova music festival where Hamas militants opened fire and killed hundreds of attendees.
One of those witnesses, a survivor who has not been identified, told police she saw gunmen gang rape one woman, and then cut off her breast and throw it on the road.
“They forced someone to bend over and I actually understand that he is raping her, he was basically shifting her position … and then they pass her on to another person,” she said.
The compilation also included interviews with two other unidentified women who told police they had seen bodies of victims at the festival grounds with gunshot wounds and signs of assault on their breasts and genitals.
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Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, told the New York Times this week that his unit had documented “dozens” of “violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen”.
Israeli human rights lawyer Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who established a non-governmental civil commission into Hamas’s alleged crimes against women on October 7, has also detailed several accounts of rape and sexual assault.
Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy has been publicly pushing for international recognition and investigation into these alleged war crimes since October.
She addressed the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) on November 1 to share evidence the civil commission had gathered from footage released by Israeli police as well as interviews with eyewitnesses, first responders and survivors.
In the three-minute speech, Dr Elkayam-Levy told CEPAW that the civil commission had compiled medical and forensic reports that confirmed brutalities including widespread rape.
“Some with their pelvic bones broken, evidence of multiple semen specimens collected from bodies, teenage girls found in their beds, pants pulled down with vaginal bleeding and shot to their heads,” she said.
An Israeli police spokesman told reporters in November that investigators had gathered “visuals and DNA evidence” from bodies that were recovered “in the combat zone” and taken to Shura military base.
In another address, this time to the Harvard Medical School on November 13, Dr Elkayam-Levy said the vast majority of victims of rape and other sexual assault on October 7 had been murdered, and would never be able to testify.
In an interview with Reuters this week, Dr Elkayam-Levy again read from a report summarising what she had seen, referring to videos and photos released by Israeli police that they said were captured by Hamas militants, showing women with injuries that appeared consistent with sexual trauma.
A spokesman for the US State Department told reporters this week that US intelligence suggested one of the reasons that negotiations over a ceasefire extension had broken down was that Hamas did not want to free female hostages out of concern that women would speak publicly about sexual violence.
“It seems one of the reasons they don’t want to turn women over [who] they’ve been holding hostage … is they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Tuesday.
He did not give details on how these hostages were treated, but said the United States had “no reason to doubt” reports of sexual violence allegedly perpetrated by Hamas.
“There is very little that I would put beyond Hamas when it comes to its treatment of civilians and particularly its treatment of women,” he said.
The process of investigating possible war crimes
Rape and sexual assault could constitute international war crimes and breach international humanitarian law.
The UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry is investigating possible war crimes and violations of human rights law committed in the occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem, and Israel on and since October 7.
In the scope of its investigations, the commission is dedicating particular attention to allegations of gender-based crimes, with an emphasis on murder and hostage-taking, rape and other forms of sexual violence.
Individuals, groups, foreign countries and organisations have been invited to submit evidence of crimes as part of the investigation.
Israel’s presentation at the UN criticised the international body, as well as the broader global community for what the speakers said has been a lack of support for women and alleged sexual violence victims in the October 7 attack.
But some groups say Israel isn’t making it easy to investigate.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office, told the Associated Press that Israel has not responded to its requests for access to the country and the Palestinian territories.
Ms Shamdasani said investigators were looking to collect information from the events that took place on October 7 and 8, and since then.
Human rights experts told AP the UN is best placed to conduct a fair, credible and impartial investigation.
But Israel has claimed the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has pre-existing biases against the country and it will not cooperate.
Officials told AP they would consider all options for independent international mechanisms to investigate.
The commission’s investigation will run for some months and the findings will be presented in reports to the Human Rights Council during a session in June 2024 and in a separate session to the General Assembly in October 2024.
The investigations will also be shared with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague as part of its probe into allegations of war crimes and with relevant judicial systems in other countries.
Meanwhile, Israeli is conducting its own investigations into the October 7 attack. Mr Binyamin told the New York Times that Israeli police had gathered “tens of thousands of testimonies” from survivors and witnesses of the October 7 attack as well as from soldiers and emergency workers.
But he told the New York Times the Israeli police investigation was ongoing and that he could not go into details.
Women’s rights groups in Israel have previously warned of significant failings in preserving forensic evidence from the October 7 attack before bodies were returned to families for burial.
“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,” Tal Hochman, a government relations officer at the Israel Women’s Network, told the Guardian.
The unprecedented nature of the attack on October 7 and the fact it caught Israel by surprise may have impeded efforts to recover bodies, with days-long battles making it difficult for defence forces to enter some areas.
Chen Kugel, head of the Israel National Center of Forensic Medicine, told Reuters ordinary protocols for forensically proving rape are nearly impossible when bodies arrive in such a stage of decomposition.
While some evidence was gathered, police told Reuters they faced a challenge after opportunities were lost to gather perishable evidence to link atrocities to specific suspects.
A war crimes expert and founder of the NGO We Are Not Weapons of War, Celine Bardet, told France 24 criticism levelled at the UN and other feminist groups “is a little unfair” given information about the gender-based nature of the violence was still emerging.
“We know that, due in part to the ongoing fighting, the investigation of sexual violence was not made a priority in the days and weeks following the attack,” she said.
“That means a lot of the work still needs to be done, but it’s much more difficult now.”
Netanyahu on the UN: ‘I didn’t hear their outrage’
Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with families of hostages who had been released.
After that meeting he delivered a press conference where he said he had been told stories of sexual assault.
“I heard stories that broke my heart, I heard about the thirst and hunger, about physical and mental abuse, about the little witnesses that are still whispering from fear, about the darkness the loved ones still live under,” he said.
“I heard and you also heard, about sexual assault and cases of brutal rape unlike anything.”
He went on to criticise international human rights organisations, specifically the UN, for the delay in responding to these allegations.
“I must say that until a few days [ago], I didn’t hear human rights organisations and women’s rights organisations … in the UN, I didn’t hear their outrage,” he said.
In the weeks since October 7, statements from UN Women and other human rights groups have largely focused on what is happening in the Gaza Strip, which has been under intense Israeli bombardment.
In a statement updated earlier this week on December 3, UN Women noted that more than 10,000 Palestinian women and children had been killed and more than 800,000 had been displaced from their homes, based on data from the Gazan Media Office.
On October 27, CEDAW urged “all parties to systematically address the gender dimension of conflict”.
Late last week, UN Women directly addressed the accounts of gender-based violence by Hamas-led militants on October 7, and called for an investigation.
On Friday, as fighting resumed between Israel and Hamas after the temporary ceasefire arranged to secure the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners, UN Women said it was “alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities”.
UN chief Antonio Gueterres then called for these claims to be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted”.
Dr Elkayam-Levy responded to the UN’s statement, saying it was “about time”.