New details of Hamas’s sexual violence against Israeli women revealed

Article content

Warning: Graphic content

Article content

Naked, half-naked, bruises, nail marks, sliced genitals, bodies of dead women and girls with their legs spread and underwear missing.

Article content

A woman stabbed as she is gang raped.

New details of Hamas’s sexual violence committed on Oct. 7 have been revealed in an investigation published by The New York Times, which demonstrates the scale of cruelty against women in the terrorist attack.

The Times reviewed photographic and video evidence and spoke to witnesses who described the scenes of sexual violence that they saw during the terrorist attack. The voices of victims’ screams still resonate in some witnesses’ heads.

“They all gather around her,” said Raz Cohen, one of the music festival attendees who survived the attack recounted to The Times.

Article content

“She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

A woman known as “the woman in the black dress” who appeared in a grainy video after the attack lying on her back, her dress torn, and her legs spread exposing her genitals, was identified. She is Gal Abdush, a working-class woman and a mother of two. She disappeared with her husband after the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival began.

Article content

Article content

Israeli police officials said they believed that she was raped.

Repetitive patterns of abuse and violence marked on women and girls’ bodies found in different locations around the music festival site and in two kibbutzim in Israel indicate what happened to Israeli women was neither random nor isolated.

The two-month investigation by The Times identifies at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls were sexually attacked.

Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team told The Times he still sees the image of a young Israeli woman.

“Her hands were tied behind her back,” Waraki said. “She was bent over, half-naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”

The Times interviewed more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counsellors. It verified video footage, photographs, and GPS data from mobile phones.

Article content

One witness named Sapir, who was wounded and hidden under branches of a tree during the attack on the music festival, described a shocking scene. The terror witnessed by the 24-year-old accountant is haunting.

Sapir said she saw a young woman with blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. A man pulled her by her hair and made her bend over while another came to the scene and penetrated her. Sapir said whenever the victim startled because of the pain, a knife was plunged into her back. After the gang rape, the victim was killed savagely.

The victim was one of at least five women that Sapir saw that day. Sapir did not use her full name out of fear that she would be hounded if her identity was revealed.

Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, was hidden with Sapir at the same spot. He told The Times that he was detached from his emotions and feelings as he was witnessing the cruelty and barbarism the victims endured. He just wanted to survive.

Article content

“That day, I became an animal,” Karol said.

Another witness Yinon Rivlin, who is a member of the rave’s production team, said he found a body of a young woman who was thrown on her stomach; she had no underwear, her legs were spread apart, and her genital area was badly damaged.

More than 30 bodies of women and girls were seen by soldiers and volunteer medics in the same conditions: naked or half-naked, spread legs, and signs of abused genitals.

The Times findings match what BBC found earlier this month.

People who spoke to the BBC witnessed female bodies with multiple signs of sexual violence that included broken pelvises, bruises and cuts.

Testimonial details of gang rape, execution and women’s bodies having no underwear are almost identical to The Times report.

Article content

The UN issued a statement on Dec. 1 condemning the targeting of women — almost two months after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.

“We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core,” the statement says.

Hamas has denied the accusations of sexual violence.

At the music festival where many of the sexual assaults took place, hundreds of people were slaughtered in a few hours. The bodies were hauled away by the truckload.

Most of the dead were buried quickly to comply with Jewish religious rites.

As a result, very few autopsies were completed following the massacre that left as many as 1,200 dead. Evidence of the sexual assaults is mostly in the form of witness testimony and photographs and video recovered from Hamas.

Article content

The majority of victims were buried and those who survived are traumatized, living under tremendous trauma.

The Times reported that Israel says at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted survived the attack. No sexual violence survivor has spoken publicly yet. They may never be ready to talk.

“Many people are looking for the golden evidence, of a woman who will testify about what happened to her. But don’t look for that, don’t put this pressure on this woman,” Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, told The Times. “The corpses tell the story.”

Article content