New York Times reveals gruesome details of sexual violence during Oct. 7
Everywhere Hamas terrorists struck on Oct. 7 — at the rave near Kibbuz Re’im, at the military bases along the Gaza border, and kibbutz after kibbutz — they brutalized women, the New York Times reported, citing Israeli officials.
An extensive, two-month New York Times investigation determined these assaults on women were not random, isolated incidents but rather part of a greater pattern of Hamas-perpetrated gender-based violence.
For months, Israeli activists strongly condemned U.N. Secretary General António Guterres along with the U.N. Women agency for failing to promptly acknowledge initial allegations of abuse until weeks post-attack.
“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 earlier this month, switching to English to emphasize the point.
President Joe Biden has called the reports of sexual violence “appalling” and has urged the world to condemn “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty.”
New York Times journalists pinpointed no less than seven sites where available evidence suggests Israeli women and girls endured sexual violation or mutilation.
A man hiding in a pit during the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on an outdoor music festival in Israel said he heard someone nearby screaming she was being raped.
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 terrorists said some of the women were found wearing only bloodied underwear.
Such accounts given to The Associated Press, along with assessments by an Israeli rights group, show that sexual assault was part of the atrocities-filled rampage by Hamas and other Gaza terrorists who killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 hostages that day.
Israel Hayom recently interviewed the women working to collect testimony and preserve evidence of the horrific sexual violence from that day.
One deeply distressing photo captured a female corpse defiled by dozens of nails pierced through her thighs and genital region.
Israeli military footage displayed two deceased female IDF soldiers who underwent apparent fatal gunshots directly to their vaginas.
A witness informed colleagues that one Hamas fighter raped an Israeli woman while another severed the victim’s breast.
The group Physicians for Human Rights Israel published an initial assessment in November.
“What we know for sure is that it was more than just one case and it was widespread, in that this happened in more than one location and more than a handful of times,” said Hadas Ziv, policy and ethics director for the organization.