A sweeping new Israeli report on sexual violence dedicated in the course of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assaults and towards hostages in Gaza concludes that the crimes fashioned a part of a deliberate technique. It additionally lays out a roadmap for turning two years of documentation into authorized prosecution.
The report concludes that “sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7 assaults and their aftermath.”
The report comes from Israel’s Civil Fee on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas In opposition to Girls and Kids, an unbiased panel convened within the rapid wake of the assault. The fee was led by Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an lawyer and worldwide regulation skilled who was not too long ago awarded the Israel Prize, Israel’s high civilian honor, for her work.
Beginning by amassing on-line materials filmed or circulated by Hamas, the fee labored for 2 years in an effort to generate a factual document that Elkayam-Levy mentioned may stand up to the scrutiny and denial that has accompanied claims about sexual violence on Oct. 7 and in its aftermath, significantly the concept that the sexual violence was systematic.
Researchers reviewed and analyzed greater than 10,000 images and video segments, amounting to greater than 1,800 hours of footage, alongside greater than 430 testimonies from survivors, witnesses, launched hostages, specialists and members of the family.
They recognized 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence throughout Oct. 7 assault websites, abductions and captivity, together with rape, gang rape and different types of sexual assault, sexual torture, compelled nudity, threats of compelled marriages, postmortem abuse, the general public show of victims and the filming and dissemination of sexualized violence.
The proof “proves that it wasn’t remoted violence, it wasn’t random,” Elkayam-Levy mentioned. “It was a method, carried out with distinctive cruelty on victims and on hostages in captivity.”
Worldwide regulation professor Cochav Elkayam-Levy meets with overseas leaders in Jerusalem, Nov. 23, 2023. (Nicolas Maeterlink / Belga Magazine / AFP by way of Getty Photographs)
The report additionally says genocide have to be examined as a potential authorized characterization, citing the “scale, coordination, and systematic nature of the violence,” the focusing on of civilians as a part of a marketing campaign to destroy Israelis and Jews, and the infliction of extreme bodily and psychological hurt, “together with by sexual violence and torture.”
The report devotes particular consideration to sexual violence towards males and boys, documenting rape, sexual torture, mutilation and sexualized humiliation that the authors say has typically been ignored in public dialogue of Oct. 7.
The report contains testimonies which have already surfaced, reminiscent of from Amit Soussana and Keith Siegel, two former hostages who mentioned that they had been sexually assaulted by their captors.
But it surely additionally contains accounts that had not beforehand been made public, together with circumstances of sexual violence inflicted within the presence or close to neighborhood of members of the family. In at the least one case the researchers documented, members of the family held hostage collectively had been compelled to carry out sexual acts on each other, an instance of what the fee characterizes as “kinocidal” sexual violence, that means violence geared toward destroying household constructions by exploiting familial bonds.
But the report goals to transcend merely documenting horrific traumas. A 70-page authorized part argues that the documented acts assist prosecution for conflict crimes, crimes towards humanity, torture and sexual and gender-based violence linked to terrorism.
It notes that victims of the Oct. 7 assaults represented 52 nationalities, giving a number of governments potential avenues to research and prosecute by home terrorism legal guidelines, extraterritorial jurisdiction or common jurisdiction.
To date, these efforts stay “scarce and fragmented,” the report says, with investigations or authorized steps undertaken in the USA, France, Germany and Canada, in addition to on the Worldwide Prison Court docket within the Hague. Within the case of the ICC, its prosecutor sought warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif over crimes together with rape and different sexual violence, however all three Hamas leaders had been killed by the IDF and the proceedings had been terminated.
The report argues that sexual violence prosecutions do not need to rely solely on direct survivor testimony, a central problem for Oct. 7 circumstances as many victims had been murdered, witnesses had been traumatized and launched hostages may communicate solely after months in captivity. Worldwide courts have relied on direct witnesses, skilled witnesses, forensic materials, circumstantial proof and digital documentation, whereas ICC guidelines don’t require corroboration for sexual violence crimes.
“The report shifts the worldwide dialog from whether or not this occurred to what the implications needs to be,” Elkayam-Levy mentioned in an interview forward of the report’s launch. “We’re going to see a before-and-after second with it.”
Whether or not that involves go stays to be seen. The report arrives in a local weather of denial round sexual violence on Oct. 7 that was fueled partly by early accounts that had been later challenged. Critics of Israel’s claims have repeatedly pointed to disputed components in an investigation printed in The New York Occasions in December 2023, together with the case of Oct. 7 sufferer Gal Abdush, whose relative questioned whether or not there was proof she had been raped, and to accounts of sexual violence by ZAKA first responders that had been later debunked. These circumstances helped denialists assault the broader physique of proof documented by UN officers, Israeli investigators, journalists and teams like Amnesty Worldwide and Human Rights Watch.
Elkayam-Levy herself has been the topic of criticism, with a March 2024 report in Yedioth Aharonoth citing unnamed authorities officers questioning the fee’s construction and the accuracy of a few of her early public claims, together with a extensively debunked account {that a} pregnant girl had been discovered together with her womb lower open — criticism that was picked up by skeptics of Oct. 7 sexual violence claims.
In response, Elkayam-Levy mentioned a few of the early mischaracterizations mirrored the confusion of the primary days after the assault, when first responders and people recovering a whole bunch of our bodies had been working in traumatic circumstances.
“It’s exactly due to that early chaos, and the widespread denial, that this report was ready beneath the strictest worldwide verification requirements, with each testimony and piece of proof rigorously cross-checked and corroborated,” she mentioned.
Sheryl Sandberg speaks throughout particular occasion to deal with sexual violence on Oct. 7 held at UN Headquarters in New York Metropolis, Dec. 4, 2023. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket by way of Getty Photographs)
Elkayam-Levy mentioned the backlash she personally skilled was “very scary,” with threats to her life and antisemitic teams circulating her picture alongside accusations that she was “mendacity about Hamas.”
The staff, made up of about 20 staff and extra volunteers and contributors, labored from a hidden location, with some researchers selecting to stay nameless all through.
Elkayam-Levy mentioned the discharge of the archive could not cease denial from “social media trolls,” but it surely modifications the evidentiary panorama in methods critical observers can not ignore.
She pointed to remarks made early on within the conflict by thinker Judith Butler, who forged doubt on stories of rape on Oct. 7, feedback Elkayam-Levy mentioned triggered deep anguish to victims and people documenting the crimes.
“Each merchandise is now archived and right here to remain, for her to really feel ashamed of what she did and to be remembered as an individual who didn’t stand with the victims, who forgot the aim of her work as a feminist,” she mentioned.
Elkayam-Levy is optimistic that prosecutions may outcome. She mentioned accountability could unfold over years and throughout borders, with some Hamas leaders and perpetrators already hiding in Turkey and Qatar and others more likely to attain Western international locations.
“I feel will probably be the identical because the Holocaust, that completely different Nazi leaders had been prosecuted around the globe,” she mentioned.
Nonetheless, Elkayam-Levy mentioned even profitable prosecutions wouldn’t be sufficient to convey the magnitude of the crimes or protect their place in historic reminiscence.
“You don’t study in regards to the Holocaust from the prosecution of a single individual,” she mentioned. “You study it from the documentation, from the witnesses, the survivors.”
The report requires an “incontrovertible judicial document,” citing the Nuremberg trials, latest German prosecutions of ISIS crimes towards Yazidis and Ukraine’s war-crimes documentation as fashions for authorized efforts that may set up a permanent document in addition to punish perpetrators. It recommends a coordinated technique combining Israeli proceedings with worldwide cooperation, evidence-sharing, specialised war-crimes models and prosecutors educated in sexual and gender-based crimes.
The Civil Fee isn’t alone in arguing that the sexual violence of Oct. 7 requires a authorized response. The Affiliation of Rape Disaster Facilities in Israel submitted an early report back to the UN in 2024, and the Dinah Mission, led by authorized specialists at Bar-Ilan College’s Rackman Middle, printed an 84-page report in July concluding that Hamas used sexual violence as a “tactical weapon” in the course of the assaults and in captivity. A month later, the UN Secretary-Normal listed Hamas amongst events “credibly suspected” of patterns of rape or different sexual violence in armed battle.
Elkayam-Levy mentioned the brand new report shouldn’t be handled solely as a doc for prosecutors, authorized students or ladies’s rights advocates. Sexual violence is just too typically handled as a difficulty that “belongs to ladies’s committees,” she mentioned, when the findings also needs to be studied by these chargeable for nationwide safety and counterterrorism.
Accountability also needs to lengthen to social media platforms, after Hamas-led perpetrators filmed and circulated photographs of victims to “glorify the atrocities in actual time,” based on the report.
The fee has drawn assist from excessive profile figures together with David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Particular Court docket for Sierra Leone, former Israeli Supreme Court docket president Aharon Barak, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and tech government Sheryl Sandberg, who has campaigned internationally for recognition of Oct. 7 sexual violence.
The archive is led by Karen Jungblut, a former archivist on the USC Shoah Basis. The fee has additionally been approached by folks making an attempt to doc sexual violence in different atrocity settings, Elkayam-Levy mentioned, together with Druze contacts in search of steerage after latest assaults in Sweida, Syria.
The report’s launch got here a day after the Knesset overwhelmingly handed a regulation establishing a particular navy tribunal to attempt captured Hamas-led Oct. 7 perpetrators, with authority to impose the loss of life penalty in some circumstances. But it surely warns that capital punishment may deter worldwide assist and extradition, noting that comparable hybrid courts combining home and worldwide components don’t allow capital punishment.
Executions, Elkayam-Levy additional argued, may overshadow the authorized document, divert consideration from victims’ struggling and switch the proceedings into a worldwide controversy. “My worry is that the terrorists might be remembered extra within the common, historic reminiscence than the victims themselves.”
In taking testimonies from survivors, Elkayam-Levy mentioned, one of many last questions her staff requested was what gave them power and what justice meant to them. The solutions, she mentioned, had been placing for the way little they needed to do with indictments or convictions.
“Greater than anything, they need the reality to be heard and for them to be acknowledged and believed,” she mentioned.
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