Yet the world’s leading women’s rights organisations – usually so swift on the flimsiest of evidence to call out male sexual violence against women – remain largely silent – despite “Silence is Violence” being a favourite slogan of woke groups such as theirs.
Furious at the silence of the world’s feminists, plus the concerted efforts by many on the left and in the Muslim world to deny that any Hamas sexual atrocities ever took place, Israel on Monday 4th December staged a special conference about the evidence at UN headquarters in New York.
Hamas, whose terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis, 300 of them women, continues to deny the accusations that they mutilated, sexually abused and raped Israeli women as “unfounded lies”.
But even left-wing CNN in its coverage of the conference at the UN, described the evidence of sexual violence presented as “ample and overwhelming”.
Israeli police investigators have now assembled about 60,000 video files – which include captured Hamas bodycam footage - and more than 1,000 witness statements. They are also relying on autopsies, forensic evidence and confessions from captured Hamas terrorists. Meni Binyamin, head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said in an interview with The New York Times that “dozens” of women had been raped by the terrorists. However, nearly all victims are believed to be dead.
One key witness, who found the body of dead woman in a house, testified “She had nails and different objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that we could not identify her.”
Another, who found two dead women with their hands and legs tied to a bed, said: "One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed.”
A third, who says she witnessed a woman being gang-raped, said: "They sliced (off) her breast and threw it on the street.” The victim was then passed to another terrorist. “He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He shoots and ejaculates.”
The first two witnesses - Simcha Greinman who spoke at the conference - and Nachman Dyksztejna whose testimony is only in writing – were volunteers who helped collect the bodies of the dead in the aftermath of the 7th October massacre. In addition, Dyksztejna, said he saw dozens of dead women whose “clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked."
The third witness – known only as “Witness S” – was at the Supernova music festival at which Hamas terrorists killed 364 people and survived by pretending to be dead. She was filmed by Israeli police, with her face smudged, in a video shown to journalists in November.
Gilad Erdan, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, told the audience of 800 people from 40 countries: “Hamas used rape and sexual violence as weapons of war. These were not spur-of-the-moment decisions to defile and mutilate girls and parade them while onlookers cheered; rather, this was premeditated,” Erdan said. “Sadly, the silence of international bodies who are supposedly defenders of women has been deafening.”
Conference co-organiser Sheryl Sandberg, former Meta chief executive who is Jewish, told those assembled: “On Oct. 7, Hamas brutally murdered 1,200 souls and, in some cases, they first raped their victims. We know this from eyewitnesses, we know this from combat paramedics, we would know this from some victims if more had been allowed to live.”
So angry are Jewish women at the lack of solidarity from women’s groups in particular that they have created a new hash-tag: #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew. https://www.metoo-unlessurajew.com This targets a favourite MeToo Movement catch-phrase “We believe you!” aimed at any woman who accuses a man of sexual violence – unless, that is, they are an Israeli woman.
At the conference, Israel Police superintendant, Yael Richert, quoted testimony from survivors and first responders who had witnessed Hamas sexual violence, or who had seen clear evidence of it.
“There were girls with broken pelvises due to repetitive rapes, their legs were split wide apart in a split,” Richert quoted one survivor of the Supernova music festival massacre as saying.
Shari Mendes, an Israel Defence Forces reservist who worked at an army base in southern Israel, used to identify and prepare for burial the bodies of the victims, recalled how many of them arrived in “just an underwear and their underwear was often very bloody” and several “who were shot in their crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast.”
Captain Maayan, an army reservist dentist at the same base, interviewed by the BBC in Israel, said: “We see women of all ages. We see rape victims. We see women who have been through violation. We have pathologists and we see the bruises, we learn about the cuts and tears, and we know they have been sexually abused." Asked what proportion of the bodies she handled showed signs of sexual violence she replied: “Abundant.”
Evidence that emerged much earlier includes captured Hamas bodycam footage that shows one women, handcuffed and taken hostage, with cuts on her arms and a large patch of blood on the seat of her trousers. In other captured footage, women taken hostage appear to be naked or semi-clothed. There are also multiple photographs that show the bodies of women naked from the waist down, or with their underwear ripped to one side, legs splayed, with signs of trauma to their genitals and legs.
Despite all this, neither UN Women – the UN’s agency for the protection of women’s rights – or the MeToo Movement has expressed unequivocal solidarity with Israeli women let alone condemned Hamas for its sexual violence against them.
UN Women, for instance, has been far too worried about the plight of Palestinian women but finally, it issued a statement on 4 December - two months after the massacre – which said: “We unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October. We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.”
Yes, it now condemns the brutal attacks by Hamas, though it cannot bring itself to say “on Israeli people”. But it does not condemn the brutal sexual attacks by Hamas on Israeli women which it refers to as “accounts” - despite all the compelling evidence that they are facts.
“Statement after statement by organizations like UN Women, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have failed to condemn these crimes”, wrote Israel’s First Lady Michal Herzog in Newsweek “They failed us, and all women, at this critical moment.”
When asked by the Times of Israel for comment about the Hamas sexual violence against Israeli women, MeToo International replied with a statement about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that did not mention Hamas or Israeli women.
The response among the majority of groups committed to ending violence against women and girls has been threefold: to keep quiet, to disbelieve the victims, or to insinuate they deserved their fate.
Perhaps the most succinct is summed up by the refusal of 140 American “prominent feminist scholars”, to stand in solidarity with Israeli women as to do so would be to give in to “colonial feminism”.
The Jews, these days, are regarded by the woke as white imperialists.
As Ruth Halperin- Kaddari, Israeli women’s rights expert at Bar-Ilan University, told journalists: “The body of the woman is perceived to be the symbol of the body of the nation. So violating, invading the body of the women is taken as if the whole nation has been invaded anad violated.”
Sexual violence against women, above all rape, has been used as a weapon of war at least since the 8th century BC when in Homer’s The Iliad Ajax rapes Cassandra and Nestor warns the victorious Greek soldiers: “Therefore let none make haste to go till he has first lain with the wife of some Trojan.”
Given that it fell to men to defend communities and countries, the rape of their women embodied their defeat, both literally and figuratively. But rape was also a prize of war. Conquered women were legitimate booty: sexual objects and valuable property.
Until the second half of the 20th century, rape in war was regarded as its inevitable consequence and went largely unpunished. The triumphant Red Army raped up to two million German women after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 – an estimated 10 per cent of whom then committed suicide.
Since the Balkan and Rwanda civil wars in the 1990s systematic rape by armed groups is regarded by the UN as a crime against humanity and a war crime and in some circumstances also genocide – if the intent is to destroy in part or in whole the enemy.
When asked what effect seeing the mascara on the eyelashes of the dead Israeli women had on her captain Maayan the army base replied: “Terror," she replied. "It terrorises us.”
Nicholas Farrell