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The body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs”. In another house, a person’s genitals were so mutilated that “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Simcha Greinman, a volunteer who helped collect the remains of victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assault on Israel, took long pauses as he spoke those words at an event at the United Nations.
Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli military reserve unit tasked with preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial, said her team saw several who were killed on Oct. 7 “who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others had mutilated faces, or multiple gunshots to their heads. Since the attack,Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence — rape and sexual mutilation — particularly against women. Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny amid the larger Israel-Hamas war.
Israelis and many Jews around the world say they feel abandoned by international social justice community. On Monday, some 800 people, including women’s activists and diplomats representing about 40 countries, crowded into a chamber at UN headquarters in New York for a presentation laying out the evidence of large-scale sexual violence, with testimony from witnesses like Mendes and Greinman. “Silence is complicity,” Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive, told those assembled. She, along with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, was among the event’s organisers.
Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sex crimes, which it said would violate Islamic principles. But ample evidence has been collected, like the bodies of women found partially or fully naked, women with their pelvic bones broken, the accounts of medical examiners and first responders, videos taken by Hamas fighters themselves, and even a few firsthand witnesses like a woman, in a video made public last month by police officials, who said she had watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilate her and then shoot her in the head. Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, has said that it had documented “violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen,” on Oct. 7, against women and some men.
In Israel, PM Netanyahu accused the international community, particularly the UN, of ignoring the pain of Israeli victims. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said it requested access to Israel and the Palestinian territories to allow it to collect information, but Israel has not responded. Meanwhile, US President Biden called the reports “appalling” and urged the world to condemn “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty.”
Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli military reserve unit tasked with preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial, said her team saw several who were killed on Oct. 7 “who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others had mutilated faces, or multiple gunshots to their heads. Since the attack,Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence — rape and sexual mutilation — particularly against women. Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny amid the larger Israel-Hamas war.
Israelis and many Jews around the world say they feel abandoned by international social justice community. On Monday, some 800 people, including women’s activists and diplomats representing about 40 countries, crowded into a chamber at UN headquarters in New York for a presentation laying out the evidence of large-scale sexual violence, with testimony from witnesses like Mendes and Greinman. “Silence is complicity,” Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive, told those assembled. She, along with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, was among the event’s organisers.
Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sex crimes, which it said would violate Islamic principles. But ample evidence has been collected, like the bodies of women found partially or fully naked, women with their pelvic bones broken, the accounts of medical examiners and first responders, videos taken by Hamas fighters themselves, and even a few firsthand witnesses like a woman, in a video made public last month by police officials, who said she had watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilate her and then shoot her in the head. Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, has said that it had documented “violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen,” on Oct. 7, against women and some men.
In Israel, PM Netanyahu accused the international community, particularly the UN, of ignoring the pain of Israeli victims. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said it requested access to Israel and the Palestinian territories to allow it to collect information, but Israel has not responded. Meanwhile, US President Biden called the reports “appalling” and urged the world to condemn “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty.”
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