Israeli Victims Detail Harrowing and Horrific Experiences in Captivity as Rape Reports from October 7 Get Overdue UN Attention

Recent reports have emerged that at least 10 Israeli civilians men and women, held hostage by Hamas, were subjected to sexual abuse and assault. This alarming information, corroborated by a doctor treating these victims, has been further substantiated by firsthand accounts at a meeting with the Israeli war cabinet and freed hostages.

This issue of Palestinian sexual abuse of Israelis gained international attention at a United Nations meeting, where Israeli officials, frontline workers, and senior US politicians, including former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, condemned the silence and inaction of women’s rights activists and UN officials on these atrocities.

Sandberg emphasized that “silence is complicity,” advocating for a comprehensive UN investigation. Clinton criticized those ignoring the victims of Hamas, and US President Joe Biden, at a campaign fundraiser in Boston, denounced the alleged sexual violence as “appalling,” citing reports of repeated rape and mutilation of women by Hamas terrorists​​.

Ronen Tzur, director of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, highlighted the severity of the situation, revealing that freed female hostages described sexual abuse occurring in the tunnels where captives were held​​. The US State Department suggested that Hamas’s reluctance to release all women and children hostages is likely to prevent them from testifying about the sexual abuse they experienced​​.

Israeli police and first responders are working to piece together evidence of these crimes. Police are examining 60,000 videos and 1,000 testimonies to identify and prosecute perpetrators. The complexity of the investigation is compounded by the difficulty in finding rape survivors, many of whom were killed by their attackers​​.

Amit Susana, an Israeli hostage, being kidnapped, stripped and prepped for rape by 7 Palestinians on Oct 7#HamasRapists#GazaGenocide
Vid by @SAzrayevpic.twitter.com/f9J0ASyHNS

— Akshat Deora (@tigerAkD) December 4, 2023

Meni Binyamin, head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, stated that “dozens” of women and men were raped by Hamas militants, based on autopsies, forensic evidence, confessions from captured fighters, and various forms of visual and testimonial evidence​​.

“Rape is too weak a word to define what was done to our women.” pic.twitter.com/I2KQVCtjDA

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) December 4, 2023

Expressions of agony survived their deaths, army reservist Shari Mendes said as she described what experts saw when they identified and prepared for burial the bodies of female victims of the massacres of October 7.

“These women arrived with their eyes open, their mouths grimacing, their fists clenched,” said Mendes, whose IDF rabbinical unit worked with the bodies brought to the IDF’s base at Shura.

“The soldiers that we dealt with had expressions of agony on their faces still,” she said. “I remember one young woman whose arm was broken in so many places it was difficult for us to lay her arm in the burial shroud, her leg too. In her case, the entire left side of her body was shredded, torn apart, most likely by a grenade.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN Women issued a condemnation of such acts only last week.

“Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the vagina – or shot in the breast. This seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims,” Mendes said.

In a filmed testimonial played at the event, a survivor said she watched a terrorist who had cut off a woman’s breasts and played with them – after he had raped her.

“Our unit has seen bodies that were beheaded or had limbs cut off, mutilated,” Mendes said. “One young woman came in with no legs: they had been cut off. We saw several severed heads, one with a large kitchen knife still embedded in the neck.”