First on CNN: New report details ‘systematic’ rape and sexual violence during Hamas’ Oct 7 attack on Israel

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN

(CNN) — Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023 terror attack on southern Israel “to maximize pain and suffering,” a landmark new report has concluded.

Shared first with CNN, the report presents the most comprehensive body of evidence yet of sexual and gender-based violence against women, men and children, which it describes as “systematic, widespread, and integral to” the assault.

“The most important finding is the fact that the sexual violence on October 7 and against hostages in captivity has been a calculated strategy by Hamas,” lead author and human rights expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy told CNN.

The report includes firsthand testimonies from more than 10 survivors who endured extreme sexual violence and sexual abuse during the attack, their abduction or while held in captivity in Gaza.

Some of them, including former hostages Romi Gonen, Rom Braslavski, Arbel Yehud, Amit Soussana, Ilana Gritzewsky and others, have spoken publicly about their ordeal. Other victims have only shared their experiences confidentially with experts, investigators and medical staff.

But the report also includes previously unknown allegations, including a case of two minors who, while held hostage in Gaza, say they were sexually abused and forced by their captors to perform sexual acts on each other.

Some of these details only emerged after some of the previous reports were published, including after the release of hostages from Gaza. Some came from testimonies provided directly to the researchers, while others were gathered in numerous meetings with medical experts, lawyers representing some of the victims, and others.

In one particularly harrowing example, the report details three separate incidents of rape at the site of the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza perimeter, citing a survivor who was hiding in the immediate vicinity of the attack.

“I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams—screams you have never heard anywhere,” the survivor is quoted as saying. Their account is corroborated by another survivor, according to the report, who also spoke about hearing the rapes, as well as others who later saw the bodies of the victims, their clothes torn, legs spread and intimate areas mutilated.

At least six other incidents of people directly witnessing rapes and gang rapes are outlined in the report, with all of the witnesses describing victims being shot dead. In one case, a witness said she saw a young woman being raped by several men, mutilated and shot dead.

Elkayam-Levy said the goal of the report – and a digital archive that contains all the evidence the team collected – is making sure that the suffering endured by the victims could not be “denied, erased, or forgotten.” Like other archives of this kind, the material will not be accessible to the public for a set period of time to protect the privacy of the victims. CNN has not been able to verify all of the contents of the archive, but it has seen many of the visual materials included in it.

The report was publicly endorsed by a number of high-profile experts and campaigners, including Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton.

The team has spent more than two years painstakingly gathering, reviewing and cataloguing evidence from the attack. They say they conducted hundreds of interviews and meetings with survivors, first responders, forensic examiners and medical experts, and spent some 1,800 hours analyzing more than 10,000 photographs and video segments from the attack, including hours of gruesome material recorded by the perpetrators.

The Civil Commission, which describes itself as an independent non-governmental group, was set up by Elkayam-Levy in order to document and preserve evidence from the attack. Its report has identified what the authors say is “clear and convincing evidence” of “patterns” of sexual and gender-based abuse that occurred on multiple occasions across multiple sites.

They say that the repeated nature of the violence – including sexual torture, killings following sexual violence, forced nudity, restraint of victims, threats of forced marriage, and filming and disseminating imagery of sexual violence – indicates this was an integral part of the attack and its aftermath, committed against both women and men.

The report says that many of the victims’ bodies were mutilated on October 7, with the attackers often targeting women’s faces and intimate areas. The researchers reviewed photographs of many of the bodies and interviewed forensic experts as well as people who worked on identifications at the IDF Shura base where most of the bodies were brought. They said dozens were shot or burnt in the chest and groin areas, mutilation that was often inflicted on them after they were dead.

Elkayam-Levy said she believed this was a deliberate part of the attack.

“Sexual violence is meant to torture, humiliate. They mutilated (the victims’) intimate organs, they burned their genital areas, creating such a pain and suffering that will be remembered for generations to come,” she said.

“The victim is a symbol of a nation. It’s the collective impact of it, the collective trauma that it creates, the collective suffering.”

Fighting denials

The issue of sexual and gender violence on October 7 became heavily politicized in its aftermath, partly because some accounts of horrific violence shared by officials immediately after the attack were later found to be false.

To counter potential deniers, Elkayam-Levy said every piece of evidence included in the report had been carefully cross-referenced and fact-checked.

Each case cited has been corroborated by witnesses, including first responders who attended the scene. She said the team behind the report – comprising some 25 experts and contributors – had also worked with a group of researchers who geolocated photos and videos from the scene, pinpointing the location of each victim and cross-referencing it with other evidence.

The authors say they decided not to rely on any information obtained through state interrogations – a standard practice in compiling such reports, aimed at preserving the independence of the work. Hamas has repeatedly denied sexual and gender-based violence took place during the attacks or against those held captive.

The denials continued despite the United Nations’ special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, concluding after a fact-finding mission that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred.” Patten said she was not able to meet any survivors during her visit, but her team visited the sites of the attacks and interviewed dozens of witnesses and officials.

The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an independent group of Israeli researchers known as the Dinah Project, and various national and international media investigations all also concluded that rape and sexual abuse were part of the attack. The new report goes further, calling the violence systematic and calculated.

Hamas has previously denied that its militants committed rape during the October 7 attack.

The International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders over their alleged responsibility for war crimes, including rape and other forms of sexual violence. However, all three were killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza, so the court closed the proceedings.

Some Israeli officials criticized international bodies for not paying enough attention to the issue of sexual and gender-based violence, arguing this was down to antisemitism.

Meanwhile, some of Israel’s critics denied it took place and accused Israel of using the allegations as an excuse for its brutal war in Gaza. More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began two and a half years ago, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Those who questioned the allegations homed in on the absence of first-hand testimonies from victims immediately after the attacks. Israeli authorities say this is because many of them were murdered on October 7.

It was only when forensic experts examined their bodies and looked at photographs and videos from the attack, seeing clear signs of sexual violence, that researchers were able to piece together what happened.

Another factor was that in the immediate aftermath of the initial attack – with fighting still raging in the area – some emergency crews broke law enforcement protocol, failing to collect forensic evidence and examine victims at the scene. There were almost no records or photographs of the crime scenes as they were found.

Within days of the attacks, while emergency workers were still recovering the bodies, Israeli authorities brought journalists, including CNN, to some of the sites. Access was nearly unlimited, with dozens of people allowed to walk through the crime scenes in private homes.

When CNN has previously asked about evidence gathering, Israeli authorities and emergency responders pointed to the security constraints of working within an active combat zone as well as the need to identify and bury the victims.

This is not unusual in cases of sexual violence, Elkayam-Levy said. What was unusual was the weaponization of the lack of forensic evidence to discredit the allegations.

“Anyone who has ever represented victims of sexual violence knows that questioning and denials come almost immediately. But what pains me the most was actually not the hesitation by the public, it was the experts who said, ‘Show me the evidence,’” Elkayam-Levy said.

“I don’t remember ever in my 20 years of experience that I heard a feminist scholar come and say, show me the evidence to a victim of sexual violence,” she added.

Some of the first responders were volunteers with no formal training on how to handle evidence. Many were overwhelmed and traumatized, and some gave accounts of things they had seen that later turned out to be false – but not before they were widely circulated in the media, by Israeli officials and, in one case, by Elkayam-Levy herself.

She was criticized publicly by some colleagues as well anonymous government officials who were quoted in Israeli and international media questioning her motives.

These incidents were later used by some critics to discredit other claims, even when evidence was clear and corroborated by multiple sources.

Elkayam-Levy quickly became one of the most vocal advocates for the victims. She was awarded the 2024 Israel Prize, widely considered to be the country’s highest civilian honor.

Like many advocates for victims of sexual violence, Elkayam-Levy has received threats, including death threats, related to her work – work which she believes is worth it.

“These men and women, victims of sexual violence, have been silenced in the worst way and cruelest way possible. Hopefully what we did is to put an end to this.”

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