Over 300 Jewish leaders, together with ladies’s rights advocates and rabbis, urged the United Nations on Tuesday to take away Reem Alsalem, the U.N. rapporteur on violence in opposition to ladies and ladies, for denying that rape occurred throughout Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel.
The letter, which was addressed to U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres, got here two weeks after Alsalem claimed in a publish on X that “No unbiased investigation discovered that rape passed off on the seventh of October.”
Within the letter, its signatories categorical their “horror and outrage” at Alsalem’s rhetoric, and cite two U.N. reviews from March 2024 and July 2025 that concluded that there was “cheap grounds” to consider that sexual violence had taken place throughout the assaults “in a number of places, together with rape and gang rape.”
The petition was organized by Amy Elman, a professor at Kalamazoo Faculty who has authored books on antisemitism and state responses to sexual violence, and Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Research. It was shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Company quickly after being despatched to Guterres.
“The focused sexual abuse of Israelis by Hamas and its supporters is one weapon within the arsenal of these looking for Israel’s obliteration,” Elman mentioned in a press release. “It’s outrageous that deniers similar to Reem Alsalem are aiding and abetting the sexual violence by claiming it by no means occurred. These apologists needs to be ashamed of themselves.”
The letter’s signatories embrace Deborah Lipstadt, the previous antisemitism envoy; Judith Rosenbaum, the top of the Jewish Girls’s Archives; Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the previous chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Rabbi Deborah Waxman, the president of Reconstructing Judaism; and Hebrew Faculty president Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld.
Dispute over whether or not sexual violence passed off as Hamas murdered about 1,200 individuals in Israel on Oct. 7 has solidified as some extent of sustained curiosity for a few of Israel’s staunchest critics who allege that Israel and its supporters are utilizing claims of rape as propaganda. Even the United Nations, steadily maligned by Israel and its supporters over its document towards Israel, has drawn allegations of complicity within the propaganda marketing campaign from pro-Palestinian voices — although the U.N. rapporteur on Palestinian rights, Francesca Albanese, who has confronted her personal requires dismissal from the Trump administration, has additionally publicly questioned the claims.
Along with the U.N. reviews, unbiased reporting and analysis by an Israeli nonprofit have validated claims of sexual violence on Oct. 7.
Within the X alternate that spurred the brand new letter, Alsalem was arguing with one other person in regards to the Israeli authorities’s prosecution of troopers accused of abusing a Palestinian detainee.
A day later, Alsalem posted a hyperlink to a Substack podcast from October the place she criticized the credibility of the March 2024 U.N. report and mentioned she had sought contact with the Israeli authorities to substantiate its findings however had not obtained a response.
“The media, sure organizations and the world mainly fell into the entice that Israel arrange, which is to venture that there was barbaric sexual violence being dedicated by these barbarian Palestinian males, and it was spun round and disseminated and really a lot used with the intention to then justify the genocide,” mentioned Alsalem on the podcast.
Medoff mentioned in a press release that Alsalem’s continued employment mirrored inconsistent requirements on the subject of Israel and antisemitism.
“If a UN official made such a comment regarding rape victims from some other ethnic or non secular group, there can be a global uproar,” he mentioned. “The identical normal ought to apply to Israeli Jewish ladies who have been sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists.”
