Believe all Women…Except for Israeli October 7 Survivors

June 20, 2024

by: Charles Bybelezer and Amelie Botbol ~ JNS

Thursday, 20 June 2024 | It’s very sad for me that people would not believe, or deny, the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas,” a former Israeli hostage told JNS.

“I was with the girls in Gaza that were abused and while it’s very difficult to discuss in detail, I saw them after it happened. The girls would not stop talking about their period and I am very worried about them,” she said.

The woman, in her 60s, was freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza in November as part of a cease-fire deal. She asked that her name not be used due to her close connection to another abductee still being held in the Strip.

“I saw that something happened to her. I saw it on her face,” said the ex-captive.

“She was very scared. And she did not tell us at the beginning. She was very quiet. After a couple of hours, she told us that he had touched her in all parts of her body,” she added.

Classic Denialism

This account is one of many excluded from Catherine Philp’s and Gabrielle Weiniger’s June 7 article in the Times of London, titled “Israel says Hamas weaponised rape. Does the evidence add up?”

The piece is a classic example of denialism, cherry-picking information to paint Jews, and by extension their country, as unable to differentiate between reality and fiction due to their political proclivities and past traumas.

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Orit Sulitzeanu and Dr. Sarai Aharoni, all of whom were quoted in the Times piece, released a statement accusing its authors of misrepresentation in service of an agenda.

“We generally do not respond to press articles. However, due to the cynical exploitation of our interviews in the article…we feel compelled to depart from our policy,” the statement reads. “Regrettably, the published article misrepresented our words, twisting them to convey the impression that we support the prejudiced argument that claims of sexual violence are being manipulated by Israel.”

Its authors aim “to discredit and gaslight the victims of heinous acts of sexual violence…In this instance, the reporters’ agenda replaced the professional and ethical commitment to presenting evidence accurately,” the statement continues.

Despite the article’s claims, “The use of sexual violence as a weapon of war was a significant part of the October 7 attack,” it states.

“We Have the Footage”

Halperin-Kaddari is the founding director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University Law Faculty, and a co-founder of the Dinah Project 7/10, which seeks justice for the victims of Hamas’s sexual crimes.

She told JNS that the testimonies she had heard, and which were omitted from the Times piece, “from a legal point of view lead me to the conclusion that sexual violence on October 7 was used as a weapon of war.”

This conclusion, she said, is based on “evidence that sexual violence was perpetrated in several distinct locations, all at the same time during a very short span, and all performed with an extremely high degree of brutality that included mutilation of the breasts and genitalia.”

She added, “We have the footage, the pictures taken at the scene, the testimonies of eye witnesses and those of first responders who found all the bodies.”

The documented incidents followed a similar pattern and were carried out in a similar fashion, she said. “This could not have happened unless there were directions and unless it was a premeditated part of the plan of the attack of October 7,” she added.

Nevertheless, the Times cites a grand total of one October 7 survivor, Amit Soussana, who was freed along with more than 100 others from Hamas captivity as part of a cease-fire agreement in November.

“We Cannot Look Away”

In March, Soussana told the New York Times that she was sexually assaulted during her 54 days of Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip. She described being held in a children’s bedroom, chained by her ankle. On multiple occasions, a guard named Muhammad would enter, sit next to her on the bed, lift up her shirt and touch her.

Soussana recounted that Muhammad had attacked her after briefly freeing her from the shackles to use the bathroom. The terrorist forced her to “commit a sexual act on him” at gunpoint.

The NYT noted that the accounts were consistent with what Soussana told an Israeli gynecologist and a social worker within hours of her release. The newspaper reviewed medical files in order to verify the claims.

On Monday, Soussana recounted her experience during a White House event marking International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict.

“The sexual assault I experienced should never happen to any human being under any circumstances. No one should ever be sexually violated, and there are no justifying circumstances for these crimes,” she said.

US Vice President Kamala Harris vowed not to remain silent after hearing Soussana’s story, saying the Israeli survivor, an attorney, “has bravely come forward with her account of sexual violence while she was held captive by Hamas.”

“These testimonies, I fear, will only increase as more hostages are released,” said the vice president. “We cannot look away. And we will not be silent.”

Harris said that after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel’s northwestern Negev, she witnessed “images of bloody Israeli women abducted.”

“It’s Happening Right Now in Gaza”

Shelly Tal Meron, an Israeli lawmaker, confirmed to JNS that “on October 7, we had a lot of cases of sexual assault, mutilation, rape and different kinds of abuse. We also know that it’s happening right now in Gaza so to hear that people are even doubting it is outrageous.”

Tal Meron went on to say that, “I have been in contact with hostages who returned from captivity and told me what happened to them. I also met a survivor of the Supernova music festival who heard other women being raped around her. We heard testimony from someone else at the festival who watched a gang rape happen during which the terrorists cut out the breast of their victim and played with it. Another victim was stabbed while being raped and then shot in the back of the head.

“There are a lot of bodies that had sharp objects in the women’s groin, they shot or cut off their intimate parts. We saw that this was a systematic way of Hamas terrorists harming these women.”

Tal Meron is also the chair of the Global Women’s Coalition Against Gender Based Violence as a Weapon of War, and has been speaking in parliaments around Europe.

“Right now, it’s happening in Israel to Jewish women but this is at the doorstep of every country in the world, we have instances in Ukraine, against Yazidi women in Iraq, and in Africa,” she explained.

Blaming Jewish “Historical Memories”

After attempting to portray Soussana as a political tool, the authors [of the Times piece] then attribute fantasies of rape on October 7 to “historical memories” imprinted on the Jewish psyche during centuries of pogroms in eastern Europe—“a fact that would come to play a role in the reporting of what happened” during the Hamas massacre.

According to Philp and Weiniger, this mental problem is compounded because Jews harbor an “idea of the Arab male as an explicit sexual threat to Jewish women,” which, to hammer home their prior point, was “developed in tandem with the movement of Israeli politics to the right.”

The groundwork is thus laid to discredit ZAKA, an organization made up primarily of ultra-Orthodox Jewish volunteers who have for decades sifted through the carnage of Palestinian terror attacks in a bid to identify victims and provide them with burials in accordance with Jewish law.

ZAKA played an instrumental, albeit imperfect, role in identifying the bodies of hundreds of Israelis mutilated by Hamas terrorists on October 7. The authors suggest that such religious Jews are also unable to identify evidence of sexual atrocities because they are faithful to their wives.

“At ZAKA, we have close to 4,000 volunteers: Men and women, Jews, Muslims and Christians, so hearing that we cannot identify rape because we never saw a woman naked aside from our wives is outrageous,” veteran ZAKA volunteer Simcha Greiniman told JNS. “Every volunteer goes through training to understand how to deal with remains without contaminating the scene and to leave it in optimal condition for those coming afterwards to collect evidence.

“According to Jewish law, a man can bury a woman and can handle her body. ZAKA volunteers don’t walk away from women who were killed in car accidents and we didn’t walk away from women killed on October 7,” continued Greiniman. “I have many pictures and videos that I took. The police got pieces of evidence from ZAKA, including 200,000 images from the scene. A lot of the bodies were shot in their private parts so there wasn’t even the possibility to gather samples.

“We won’t give it to anyone out of respect. Whatever was taken by us was given to the police and it is their responsibility to make sure what needs to be shown is shown and the rest is not,” he added.

Yet the Times article suggests that Israeli police have done next to nothing and have no evidence at all.

“The Israel Police is currently investigating the heinous crimes and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, 2023. As part of this complex investigation, our detectives and officers are meticulously examining sexually based offenses,” according to a statement provided to JNS.

“While substantial evidence of various types has already been collected and reviewed, this sensitive matter requires the utmost care to ensure integrity, allowing us to properly process the evidence through the criminal justice system. Beyond the evidence cleared for public release, statements given, and admissions of guilt by the terrorists, we remain committed to upholding due process by reserving the right to not divulge additional sensitive information,” added the statement.

No Other Interpretation

In January, Haim Otmazgin, another ZAKA volunteer, described to an Israeli parliamentary committee how his team worked to collect bodies while the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] was battling terrorists nearby because there was a threat of corpses being kidnapped to Gaza.

“Another woman is cuffed, another one is stripped, another one has her body parts cut off. It’s like a series of pictures being repeated again and again. We saw the same things at [Kibbutz] Re’im and later in [other] kibbutzim [collective community],” recounted Otmazgin.

“We found a young girl, on the bed, clothes rolled up, shot in the head and her throat split. Her pants rolled down, without underwear on her. There are too many instances like these…The images we saw tell a story that cannot be interpreted in any other way,” he added.

Thirty-four paragraphs into their article, the authors finally reach a brief evidentiary stage, in which they admit that sexual violence was, in fact, rampant on October 7.

They write: “On March 4, Pramila Patten sat down before journalists to deliver her findings. There were, she said, ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe there had been rape and sexual assaults on October 7, particularly at the Nova festival ground, and ‘clear and convincing information’—a higher standard of evidence—of rape and sexual torture of hostages held in Gaza.”

What they omit is that Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence and conflict, visited Israel in late January and early February at the government’s invitation.

Her team found that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses.

“The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations. Although circumstantial, such a pattern may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Sulitzeanu, one of the experts who released the statement denouncing their inclusion in the Times piece, is the head of the Association of Rape Crisis Centersin Israel [ARCCI]. The authors take out of context her explanations regarding ZAKA’s special mission in Israeli society, quoting her as calling them “ultra-religious” and questioning their training.

Somehow, Philp and Weiniger fail to mention that Sulitzeanu’s ARCCI in February released a report documenting the “sadistic sex crimes” committed during the Hamas-led invasion on October 7.

“The report finds that the Hamas attack included brutal acts of violent rape, often involving threats with weapons, specifically directed towards injured women. Many rape incidents occurred collectively, with collaboration among the perpetrating terrorists. In some cases, rape was conducted in front of an audience, such as partners, family, or friends, to increase the pain and humiliation for all present,” the report found.

“Some Hamas members pursued victims who escaped the massacre, dragging them by their hair with screams. The majority of victims were subsequently killed during or after the sexual assault. Several testimonies, interviews, and additional sources indicate the use of sadistic practices by Hamas terrorists, aimed at intensifying the humiliation and fear of sexual abuse. Many victims’ bodies were found mutilated and bound, with sexual organs brutally attacked, and in some cases, weapons were inserted into them. Some bodies were discovered deliberately booby-trapped,” it added.

“When you have a few dozen victims naked, mutilated, you understand that it was intentional and not by chance. The more information came and the more we understood that it took place all over,” she said.

Equally incredible is that the Times authors fail to note any other instances of witness testimony, such as that provided by Chen Almog-Goldstein, who was released from Gaza after 51 days in Hamas captivity and told Israeli media in December that hostages had been sexually abused.

“We heard three stories from a first-hand source and another story that was told to us. Things that happened a few weeks after the stay in Gaza [began]. They are physically injured. With the way they sexually assaulted them and desecrated their bodies—they don’t know how they will cope,” Almog-Goldstein said.

In an interview with the New York Sun in January, she added: “The captors took advantage of the girls’ moments of vulnerability. When the girls were sad, crying and yearning, their captors would stroke them and touch them in their most intimate parts. They described even more harsh accounts of sexual abuse under gunpoint. And this sexual abuse occurred on a regular basis, not just on the day they were kidnapped.”

“The Devil Took Over”

Britain’s Daily Mail last month released footage of two captured Hamas terrorists, Jamal Hussein Ahmad Radi, 47, and his son Abdallah, 18, confessing to rape and murder on October 7.

“My father raped her, then I did, and then my cousin did, and then we left, but my father killed the woman after we finished raping her,” Abdallah told an Israeli interrogator. “Before this woman, we had raped another girl as well; I killed two people, I raped two people, and I broke into five houses.”

In March, the IDF released footage of Manar Mahmoud Muhammad Kasem, 28, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad [PIJ] terrorist captured by Israeli troops in Khan Yunis, admitting that he raped a girl on October 7.

“I entered the kibbutz and went inside the nearest house. I entered a room and someone was there who was scared,” he says in the video. The girl begged for help, said Kasem, but he “laid her down, started undressing her and did what I did. The devil took over me. I raped her.”

In December, the New York Times reported that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck on October 7 they brutalized women. A two-month investigation determined such assaults were not isolated incidents but rather part of a greater pattern of Hamas-perpetrated gender-based violence.

The piece pinpointed seven sites where available evidence suggests Israeli women and girls endured sexual violation or mutilation. One witness recounted that a Hamas terrorist had raped an Israeli woman as another severed the victim’s breast.

The same month, the Associated Press reported that at least 10 of the hostages released during the ceasefire in November, both men and women, were sexually assaulted or abused, citing a doctor who treated those released from captivity.

In December, the Israeli mission to the UN sponsored an event at the international body titled, “Hear Our Voices: Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the October 7 Hamas Attack.” It took place against a backdrop of what critics called a “shameful silence,” including by UN Women.

A Special Form of Mental Gymnastics

During the event, Simchat Greyman, a volunteer for ZAKA, told participants that on October 7, he saw a dead woman with “nails and different objects in her female organs.”

Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist tasked with preparing female soldiers’ bodies for burial, said that “many young women arrived in bloody, shredded rags or just in underwear, and their underwear was often very bloody.”

She added that “our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina or shot in the breast.”

All of this information is publicly available, leading US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller to say that Hamas was likely refusing to release additional women hostages to prevent testimony on sexual violence committed against them.

To downplay such horrors or deny them outright requires a special form of mental gymnastics, which the authors of the Times article have perfected along with their fellow denialist travelers.

Case in point: Briahna Joy Gray, the former national press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 US presidential campaign, was sacked after rolling her eyes at and cutting off an interview with Yarden Gonen, whose sister Romi was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from the Supernova music festival during the October 7 invasion.

Yarden had visibly frustrated Gray by imploring her and others to believe Israeli women who come forward with stories of sexual violence perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists.

A day later, Gray let loose on Twitter: “We already knew this [because] of excellent reporting by independent left outlets, but The Hill fired me for pushing back against a guest who tried to use the platform to spread the mass rape hoax, & congress members like @RitchieTorres lie about it almost daily.”

To support her claim of a “hoax,” Gray linked to the Times article.

To clarify: There is ample evidence that Hamas perpetrated widespread sexual violence on October 7. That the scope remains unknown and might never be fully understood is because so many of the victims were killed; that plenty of evidence was lost due to the fog of war and the overriding difficulties associated with collecting samples in the aftermath of a massacre perpetrated by 3,000 invading terrorists; since victims have not yet come forward; or their stories are still working through the justice system of a country at war.

Not due to some nefarious rightwing Israeli conspiracy.

Posted on June 20, 2024

Source: (Excerpt of an article originally published by the Jewish News Syndicate on June 20, 2024. Time-related language has been modified to reflect our republication today. See original article at this link.)

Photo Credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90/jns.org