The Israeli government insists that Hamas formally sanctioned sexual assault on October 7, 2023. But investigators say the evidence does not stand up to scrutiny. Catherine Philp and Gabrielle Weiniger report on eight months of claim and counter-claim
REUTERS, AVISHAG SHAAR-YASHUV
Catherine Philp and Gabrielle Weiniger
Friday June 07 2024, 12.01am BST, The Times
On a cloudy morning in early spring, at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Pramila Patten sat down to deliver her findings on sexual violence during the Hamas-led massacres in Israel.
It had been five months since the October 7 attacks and the ensuing conflict in Gaza was raging, as was the seemingly irreconcilable war of narratives that had characterised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past eight decades.
Perhaps nothing arising from that day had been more contentious than Israel’s assertion that Hamas had not only burned and slaughtered its way through Israeli communities along the Gaza border, killing 1,200 and taking more than 200 hostages, but that it planned and carried out a campaign of mass and systematic rape as a weapon of war.
Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence, knew what she was walking into. Her fact-finding mission to Israel came amid a furious row over whether such allegations should be accepted as fact and accusations that anyone failing to do so was guilty of antisemitic bias against Jewish women.
Litigating sexual violence within a conflict is difficult enough at the best of times, not least on a battlefield of the scale and complexity of October 7, 2023. It becomes even harder without testimony from any survivors, the usual linchpin of such investigations.
What would make the effort over October 7 harder still were the examples of false and misleading information from senior political figures and government-linked civil activists to those in the police and security services tasked with the official investigation. All this in an atmosphere of extreme national fear and trauma.
Lost in all this are the victims themselves, none of whom are definitely known to have survived. The only woman yet to testify about her own sexual abuse is a released hostage, Amit Soussana, who spoke to foreign media about how she was forced to strip and commit a sexual act on her male captor at gunpoint during six weeks in captivity in Gaza.
Those familiar with Soussana said she had decided to speak out following accounts from other hostages about abuse. They hoped it might help those still being held captive who may still be suffering sexual abuse.
“Specific survivors, the only reason they told their story was because they wanted some kind of political pressure on the Israeli government to work harder to release the hostages,” says Dr Sarai Aharoni, an academic at Ben-Gurion University who is helping to compile a historical archive of the events that will be closed for 50 years. “And that is a horrible decision to have to make.”
Relatives of those held hostage have become a powerful political voice in Israel, leading protests against what they see as the government’s failed covenant to protect its citizens and bring hostages home.
A female relative of one woman still held in Gaza tells us that government representatives are no longer even bothering to attend meetings with the families.
Meanwhile, the political establishment has opened a fresh battle with the UN over what the Patten report didn’t say: that sexual violence was beyond reasonable doubt, systematic, widespread and ordered and perpetrated by Hamas. Israeli advocates for the female survivors are now warning that the country’s refusal to co-operate with a full and legal investigation, which the carefully worded report was not, threatens the prospect of ever finding out the full truth about the sexual violence of October 7 and delivering justice for its victims.
FOR JEWISH ISRAELIS, THE SPECTRE OF RAPE was more closely associated historically with the pogroms of eastern Europe, in which thousands of Jews were killed and Jewish women raped by Christian soldiers and antisemitic mobs. That persecution would become one of the driving forces behind modern Zionism and the resettlement of European Jews in the Ottoman province that became British mandate Palestine. These “historical memories”, Aharoni notes, have become a cultural inheritance for the Jewish people, particularly those without a secular education, a fact that would come to play a role in the reporting of what happened on October 7.
The idea of the Arab male as an explicit sexual threat to Jewish women developed in tandem with the movement of Israeli politics to the right.
Months before October 7, national attention was seized by news of the rape of a young Israeli mother by a Bedouin man in southern Israel. The horror was amplified by the fact that the victim had been assaulted in front of her own children. In the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, attention became focused on the Arab ethnicity of the assailant, although police ruled out terror as a motive.
In July 2023, the Knesset passed legislation proposed by lawmakers on the right and far right, quickly dubbed the “sexual terrorism law”, which doubled the penalty for sexual assault or harassment committed with a “nationalistic motive”.
“Clearly it means that Arab or Palestinian men who are accused of rape might be tried according to a totally different procedure from Jewish men who rape,” Aharoni says. She calls the prospect “unthinkable”, pointing out that besides the racial implication, it sought to create “a hierarchy of victimhood” among rape survivors. Israel’s Association of Rape Crisis Centres (ARCCI) fought the law, unsuccessfully, on the same grounds.
IN THE EARLY MORNING OF OCTOBER 7, thousands of heavily armed Hamas fighters poured across the border having breached the special security fence, slaughtering the mostly female Israeli soldiers who monitored the border. The invasion was both minutely planned and chaotic: at least hundreds of civilians streamed into Israel unprompted, along with other militants armed and unarmed as well as Hamas-armed allies such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Their targets were the kibbutzim along the Gaza border. They also found a previously unknown soft target in the shape of the Nova music festival, where about 4,000 young people were dancing in the early morning light.
Hamas’s own live streams from body-worn cameras showed them ruthlessly gunning down men, women and children, torching homes, shooting dogs and hauling off screaming and crying civilians as hostages. When the scale of the carnage became clear, it was described as the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Less commented on is the damage it did to the Zionist dream of an inviolable safe country for the Jewish people, a place where “never again” could become reality after centuries of persecution and expulsions at the hands of European Christians. No event in the history of the modern state of Israel has more brutally demonstrated the logic of its necessity.
Talk of rape began circulating almost before the massacres themselves were over. Much of it came from what Patten would later call “non-professionals” who supplied “inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations” of what they found, creating an instant but flawed narrative about what had taken place.
Among the first responders on October 7 was Zaka, an ultra-orthodox volunteer force. Zaka members are not trained in forensics, nor were they directed to do any more than retrieve remains from what was still an active battle zone. The decision to send them in has come under heavy assault in the Israeli media, including from military officers who believe if they had been deployed, forensics might have been preserved.
Orit Sulitzeanu, the executive director of ARCCI, notes the volunteers’ lack of familiarity with the women’s bodies they were finding and their tendency to focus on injuries they believed pointed to sexual violence, such as smashed pelvises and gunshot wounds to sex organs, ignoring other injuries that muddied the picture.
“They are all religious guys; most of them are ultra-religious. They never saw a woman except their wife,” Sulitzeanu says. “So to see all these bodies, how did they deal with that?”
Aharoni and others are struck by how closely the Zaka accounts cleaved to stories handed down about the horrors of the pogroms. “The first framing of rape and sexual violence was automatically linked with European histories,” she says, particularly by those with a religious education. “So there is a Zaka volunteer whose main education is religious. He’s read a lot of Jewish texts that depict the raping of women. These texts kind of reappear again and again in Jewish stories and they reappear every time there is a major event against Jewish communities.”
Journalists first on the scene of the massacres spotted immediately the echoes of the collective historical trauma of the Jewish people. “You are about to enter Bergen-Belsen,” Richard Hecht, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman, told one of these reporters on October 10 as he ushered in the first group to enter Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Bergen-Belsen was the Nazi concentration camp where British forces found thousands of bodies exposed and unburied when they reached it in 1945.
Yossi, a volunteer from another religious group called United Hatzalah, told the reporters he had seen a “pyramid of bodies”, although no such thing was found. His description seemed to echo a photograph of a mountain of corpses at the crematorium mortuary at Dachau concentration camp. The now debunked story of the pregnant woman and her slaughtered foetus is well known from the pogroms. Many other erroneous tales involved babies — one Zaka figure claimed to have found a baby baked alive in an oven.
But women too made forensic assessments they were far from qualified to make, while others repeated stories after they were proved false. One of them was the legal expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who formed what she called a “civil commission” following the attacks to collect evidence of sexual violence. She was joined by Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a highly respected jurist and specialist in international women’s rights, who marshalled powerful legal assistance.
As time went on, however, Halperin-Kaddari grew increasingly anxious about the conduct and motives of her colleague — a close associate of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu — whose work had included a legal manual on the force-feeding of prisoners. “I realised that I cannot accept the way she’s handling things — talking at some points irresponsibly without checking the credibility of information, repeating questionable accounts,” Halperin-Kaddari said. Among them was the apocryphal story about the pregnant woman and her foetus, which was also repeated by Michal Herzog, the president’s wife, in a still uncorrected Newsweek article. Elkayam-Levy also circulated photographs of murdered female soldiers that turned out to be images of Kurdish fighters in Syria. Halperin-Kaddari and her legal team quit the commission and turned to the UN for help. Elkayam-Levy has nonetheless remained the most prominent public voice on the sexual violence of October 7, winning the country’s highest civilian honour, the Israel Prize, in April.
Asked to address the allegations she has knowingly circulated false information, Elkayam-Levy’s spokeswoman tells us that she has been “meticulously working to collect information and testimonies that will serve for generations to come for justice and remembrance.
“The contested information reported on behalf of leading experts in the field regarding a pregnant woman tragically killed was, at the time, backed by both a testimony and several other reliable sources. We were all relieved to learn it was not from Israel and immediately ceased referencing it. Above all, this incident exemplifies the trauma and difficulties of giving voice to victims of atrocities.”
Aharoni expresses her concerns about how both political leaders and others linked to the prime minister’s Likud party “have used the feminist agenda in a very opportunistic way for a very specific political narrative associated with the Netanyahu government”, with little concern for the actual victims. “The politicisation of rape by the Israeli government was part of the political agenda of this government,” she warns. “The question of believing the survivors has become a test of your loyalty to the nation.” On November 11, the foreign ministry launched a campaign under the hashtag #BelieveIsraeliWomen. “I did not think that was sensible,” Sulitzeanu says. “They didn’t mean ‘believe Israeli women’. They meant ‘believe Israel’.”
CRITICS ARGUE THAT ISRAELI OFFICIALS have regularly wielded the rape claim as a cudgel to silence critics of their assault on Gaza. On November 11, the same day the hashtag campaign was launched and more than 300,000 people marched in London in support of a ceasefire, the Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy tweeted a photograph, quipping that, “I don’t think London has ever seen such a large demonstration of rape apologists before.” Levy was suspended from his job in March after picking an online fight with David Cameron over the blockade of aid to Gaza.
On November 14, the police held their first press conference for the international media on their investigations into sexual assault. Despite promising new evidence on its systematic nature, none was provided. A short video clip was aired with testimony by “Witness S”, who described in horrific detail witnessing a gang rape and murder while hiding at the festival. To this date, police have not interviewed a single survivor. On December 24, the police issued a decree to hospitals ordering them to hand over accounts of any rape survivor who had sought treatment. On January 4, the police put out a fresh appeal for witnesses, saying they had succeeded in interviewing just three and had been unable to match their accounts with the bodies collected from the massacre site.
On March 4, Pramila Patten sat down before journalists to deliver her findings. There were, she said, “reasonable grounds” to believe there had been rape and sexual assaults on October 7, particularly at the Nova festival ground, and “clear and convincing information” — a higher standard of evidence — of rape and sexual torture of hostages held in Gaza. She warned that sexual violence against hostages could be ongoing, confirming the fears of their families in Israel, who by then had evolved into a powerful political force against Netanyahu, whom they blamed for prioritising the unrealistic destruction of Hamas — and his own political survival — over the lives of their loved ones.
It was not a legal investigation, Patten explained, as Israel had not allowed one: that mandate could only be fulfilled by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which Israel has refused to work with since its inception. She hoped that would change.
Halperin-Kaddari praises the report as “excellent, a solid, serious piece of work” with a “very careful, meticulous analysis of the information.
“I think it’s a game-changer,” she says. “I think that after it, anybody with some degree of ethics and basic morality can no longer simply say it didn’t happen. It’s no longer possible to deny it outright.” What the report did not say was whether sexual violence was part of the battle plan. Nor did it name Hamas, given the chaotic array of actors that day. “I think that just strengthens the credibility of the report,” Halperin-Kaddari adds. The document calls out a number of fabricated and mistaken claims, including those about the discovery of raped young women in Kibbutz Be’eri and the false story about the pregnant woman.
Patten made it clear there was sufficient evidence of acts of sexual violence to merit full and proper investigation and expressed her shock at the brutality of the violence. The report also confirmed Israeli authorities were unable to provide much of the evidence that political leaders had insisted existed. In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found.
The report would prove confusing to the Israeli political establishment. On the one hand, it gives substantial and substantiated credence to the sexual assault claims; on the other it does not show them to be systematic and specifically says Israel has been unable to produce evidence it has claimed to possess of Hamas’s written orders to rape. Patten also asked that Israel investigate “credible allegations” of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls gathered by the UN’s legal mandate mission in the Palestinian territories. Israel swiftly rejected Patten’s request, calling it “a derisive and deliberate Palestinian manoeuvre aimed at creating an intolerable equivalence between the horrific crimes that were committed, and continue to be committed, by Hamas and malicious and baseless claims made against Israel and Israelis”.
Patten’s other recommendations included calling for a ceasefire to facilitate the rescue of hostages who she feared were suffering ongoing sexual abuse, and she asked the Israeli government to sign a framework of co-operation with her office so a full legal investigation could take place with international assistance.
Israel refused point blank, turning its ire away from Patten and towards the UN Secretary General, accusing him of trying to suppress the report — which Patten strongly denied — and blocking the naming of Hamas as systematic users of sexual violence even though Patten herself had said such a move would require the full legal investigation. Israel recalled its UN ambassador and the foreign minister, Israel Katz, travelled to New York for a showdown at an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss the report.
Patten spoke movingly of her encounters with communities left traumatised by the terror attacks. “I saw the pain in their eyes,” she said. “It was a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors.” But she also hit back with unusual force against Israel’s refusal to look into the allegations by Palestinian women — to “believe Palestinian women”, in its own cadence — both in the present climate, where detentions have soared, and in the past, over decades, in which such allegations have been raised.
“In this regard I wish to express my disappointment that the immediate reaction to my report by some political actors was not to open inquiries into those alleged incidents but rather to reject them outright via social media,” Patten said.
The Palestinian representative to the UN, where Palestine holds observer status, challenged the Israelis to agree with Patten’s recommendations and allow a full independent investigation into October 7 sexual violence. “Let the facts speak. Let the law decide,” Riyad Mansour said. He noted the same false reports Patten had dismissed in her report, which had fuelled many of the outright denials from pro-Palestinian and far-left commentators. “Shamefully this was never about the Israeli victims. This was about justifying the atrocities that Israel intended to commit against Palestinian victims,” Mansour argued.
WILL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SEXUAL VIOLENCE OF OCTOBER 7 EVER FULLY BE KNOWN? Women’s rights advocates in Israel are doubtful. The mistakes that were made, say most, came from the hasty decision to send in Zaka to retrieve the slain rather than the IDF’s Home Front Command or another organisation. “These people deserved better volunteers,” Sulitzeanu says. In her report, Patten said the scale of what happened might never be made clear. But, she added, “I do not have numbers in the report because for me one case is more than enough,” she told reporters. “The first letter that I received from the government of Israel talked about hundreds or thousands of cases of brutal sexual violence perpetrated against men, women and children. I have not found anything like that.”
But Patten also spoke of the grave difficulties of ascertaining the truth in a case where most who suffered sexual violence were probably dead. Soussana’s account, along with that of other hostages, allowed for more certainty about the abuse of hostages; there remain 19 women either dead or still captive whose stories may never be heard unless they are freed alive. After a number of freed hostages spoke about the abuse of others still held, some families urged them to be quiet, fearful it was now too easy to identify them. We are aware of several stories of the abuse of women and children that, if recounted, would rob the victims of their privacy. Families have lobbied the government about their fear, including whether they could send abortion pills into Gaza in case their loved ones fell pregnant by their abuser.
About 10 out of 900 survivors treated by the non-governmental group SafeHeart recounted either hearing or seeing sexual violence, all of which ended in murder. None of them has reported being assaulted themselves. Dr Reut Plonsker, a senior psychologist with SafeHeart, believes the focus on sexual violence has been unhelpful for Nova festival survivors wrestling with their trauma. “I don’t think there were a lot of sexual assaults,” she says. “There was a lot of murder. That’s what happened there. People were hiding and watching very horrible things.” She is sceptical that political leaders have the victims’ interests in mind. “Therapists are interested in the victims and the survivors,” she says. “I think politicians are interested in the image of Israel.”
Halperin-Kaddari now heads Dinah Project 7/10, aimed at collecting evidence to support prosecutions for sexual violence committed that day. Dinah is a tragic figure from the Bible, a daughter of Jacob raped by Shechem, a prince from a rival tribe, setting in motion a chain of events during which Dinah’s brothers massacre the men of Shechem’s tribe and enslave the women and children. In anger, Jacob expels and curses the brothers. Dinah’s voice is never heard.
Halperin-Kaddari hopes to restore a voice to any future survivor who may emerge. “The question of even the estimated scope will probably remain unknown for ever,” she says. “Given how long it typically takes survivors of sexual violence to open up, the possibility that survivors will decide to speak out exists. And it’s really critical that there will be the most appropriately qualified mechanism to engage with them. We are very hopeful that Israeli authorities will understand the importance of further co-operation with the office of the special representatives.”
Patten is less hopeful. “When I discussed it in Israel I did not get any positive feedback,” she explains. “The ball is in the court of the government of Israel.” Angered by its stance, the families of some of those killed and taken hostage on October 7 are taking their complaint to the International Criminal Court, despite Israel’s refusal to engage with that body on a state level. In the meantime, Patten has seen her findings instrumentalised by both sides: the denialists who focus on the evidentiary failings in Israel’s version of events, and those who have used the claims in support of the brutal campaign being visited on Gaza and its civilian population. “On one hand we have the fog of war, and that often silences crimes of sexual violence. But we have also seen in history instances where sexual violence can be weaponised,” she told reporters. “Truth is the only path to peace.”
Written by The Times of London