A screen capture shows two identical paragraphs between Bethan McKernan’s Guardian article and one written six weeks earlier by NBC’s Anna Schecter.
Original Article:
Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks
Our (Standalone) Analysis of the Article:
Several news stories have recently been published about the “weaponization”, “systemic” or “mass” rape by Hamas on October 7. Many of these articles include the same stories from the same sources. In at least one case, two articles include paragraphs with the exact same language - Bethan McKernan’s 19 Jan article in the Guardian repeats the exact language of the 5 Dec NBC article by Anna Schecter.
The sources in these stories and their reliability are detailed in the “Sources in Common” section.
In one photo, a burned body appears to project anguish. In another, a woman lies naked from the waist down, her underwear hanging from her leg. In interviews, first responders haltingly describe finding naked female corpses tied to beds and survivors recount witnessing a gang rape at the music festival.
All of this is part of a mounting body of evidence of the gender-based crimes carried out by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7.
Over the last several weeks, NBC News has reviewed five interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, an Arabic-language document that instructed Hamas how to pronounce “Take off your pants” in Hebrew, six images of naked or partially naked deceased female bodies, seven eyewitness accounts of sexual violence including both rape and mutilation, 11 testimonies of first responders, and two accounts from workers in morgues who handled the bodies of women after they were recovered from the massacre.
The evidence, primarily from the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli officials, suggests that dozens of Israeli women were raped or sexually abused or mutilated during the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. According to first responders, one was mutilated with a pair of scissors and another stabbed with a knife. The genitals of some men who had been killed were mutilated as well.
Israeli officials say that Hamas militants were instructed to systematically carry out sexual violence on women and children. “This was systematic gender-based violence that was so horrific it’s hard for me to find the words,” said Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the chair of a newly created Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.
More than 1,200 people were killed on Oct. 7 in Israel, the deadliest terrorist attack in the nation’s history.
Hamas has denied its militants committed sexual crimes against women.
Two Israeli investigators cautioned against the use of precise numbers of rape victims at this stage. They told NBC News that evidence continues to come in and that the investigation is likely to go on for months.
“In Israel we have never met with such a complex investigation, regarding the cruelty of actions [and] the masses of corpses that we need to examine to identify,” said Mirit Bar Moran, a spokesperson for the police department that is leading the investigation. “We’re still in the beginning of the investigation, even though almost two months have gone by.”
Bar Moran said investigators are pouring over hours of testimony and 200,000 images from the Oct. 7 attack to get the full picture of what occurred.
U.S. officials say that reports of sexual violence need to be fully and credibly investigated. President Joe Biden on Tuesday called for global condemnation of what he called “horrific” sexual violence carried out by Hamas militants.
“Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive, of women’s corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling,” the president said.
Heather Barr, the associate director of Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights division, said that any accounts of sexual violence should be thoroughly investigated. “Any accounts of sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence on Oct. 7 are of great concern and should be investigated urgently, in a way that is thorough, credible and centered on survivors’ well-being,” she said. “Victims have a right to justice and accountability.”
Human rights investigators say that they believe that sexual violence and gender-based violence was carried out by Hamas, including mutilation. But they are not yet certain about the scale and there is not a large amount of evidence that is available to human rights organizations.
The most voluminous evidence is of bodily mutilation of sexual organs by bullet, knife or even scissors, according to an NBC News analysis of the evidence currently available. “They had a thing with sexual organs, both in women and men,” a first responder told police in videotaped testimony.
A woman whose job it was to open the body bags of women and prepare their bodies for burial told NBC News in an interview Monday that she saw multiple female corpses that had been mutilated. “They were shot in the vagina, they were shot in the breast,” she said. “And this seemed like a systematic attempt at genital mutilation.”
The most detailed eyewitness account of rape is from a young woman who attended the Supernova music festival where more than 350 young people were killed.
“They laid a woman down and I understood that he is raping her …they passed her on to another person“ the witness told police in a video reviewed by NBC News. “And he cuts her breasts, he throws it on the road they are playing with it.”
Israeli officials pointed to a Hamas pamphlet discovered on Nov. 2 that gives detailed instructions about how to pronounce phrases in Hebrew including “raise your hands and open your legs” and “take off your pants.”
During interrogations, captured Hamas militants talked about raping women and children as a Hamas tactic of war. “To have our way with them, to dirty them, to rape them,” said one Hamas militant during a videotaped interrogation.
Another captured militant refers to dead bodies raped on Oct. 7. “Having sex with dead bodies,” the militant said in a videotaped interrogation reviewed by NBC News. “Meaning the body of a dead young woman,” the militant told interrogators.
NBC News could not independently verify the authenticity of the interrogation videos released by Israeli officials. Officials declined to provide unedited versions of the interrogations.
An IDF rescue unit soldier gave testimony that he witnessed two girls lying in a bedroom, one of them half naked, with her legs spread and he said he saw what appeared to be sperm on her back.
First responders described several women bleeding from their crotch area. “There was a body of a woman that had a blood stain on her genitalia. At first, I thought she might have had a mishap out of fear,” a first responder told police investigators in a videotaped testimony. “When we picked her up we knew for sure it was blood.
One of the videos posted to Telegram by Hamas shortly after the attack shows a young Israeli woman with bloodied sweatpants at her crotch. The video shows her hands tied and she is pushed into a Jeep with multiple jihadists. The woman is believed to be one of the remaining hostages still held in Gaza.
A delegation of Israeli women came to New York City this week to attend the U.N. panel on sexual violence against Israeli women.
“We have to draw a red line and it doesn’t matter what your political view, you can’t politicize rape and you can’t contextualize rape,” Moran Zer Katzenstein, founder of Bonot Alternativa that promotes gender equality in Israel, told NBC News outside the U.N. on Monday. “Rape is rape and rape.”
Volunteer Yaffit Salmanson, outraged by the silence from international women’s groups in the early weeks after the terror attack, compiled a list of every piece of evidence she could find in the public domain, including the Hamas interrogations, eyewitness accounts and accounts of first responders.
“The overwhelming evidence of sexual violence perpetrated on Oct. 7 should have elicited a robust response from the international community and women’s organizations,” said Salmanson. “As time passed, many of us grew increasingly outraged.”
Bar Moran said that since the dead women can’t speak for themselves, it is imperative for a proper and thorough investigation to be conducted. She added that survivors remain traumatized.
“We have to go carefully. We’re going slowly and carefully,” she said. “We don’t have many survivors. And second, not all of them are really able to speak at the moment yet.”
More than 10 weeks after the bloody Hamas attack on Israel, accounts of sexual violence are on the rise.
But the scarcity of survivor testimonies and the lack of forensic evidence make it difficult to assess their scale.
“Hamas used rape and sexual violence as weapons of war,” Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan said in early December, as Israel accused international bodies of an inadequate response.
In recent weeks, officials have reiterated allegations that the militants who crossed over from the Gaza Strip on Oct 7 committed violent gang rape, genital mutilation, and engaged in sexual acts with children and corpses.
Witnesses and experts interviewed by AFP said a full picture of the atrocities or their systematic nature had still not been established after the chaos of the huge attack, which killed about 1,140 people in Israel, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
In the days after Oct 7, hundreds of bodies arrived at the Shura military base in central Israel, some so burnt and disfigured that delicate work was required for examination.
Police spokeswoman Mirit Ben Mayor said there have been no forensic reports of sexual violence, while Hamas has rejected the accusations, saying they were intended to “demonise” the group.
“The bodies were not checked for rape; they were checked for identification” before the swift burial Judaism traditionally requires, she said.
AFP spoke to one of the reservists tasked with identifying and washing the bodies of female soldiers after the attack.
“We were in such a state of shock,” said Ms Shari, whose full name is being withheld at the army’s request.
“Many young women arrived in bloody shrouded rags with just their underwear, and the underwear was often very bloody.
“Our team commander saw several soldiers who were shot on their... intimate parts,” she said.
“It is very difficult to give you exact numbers,” Ms Shari said.
An architect by trade, she said she was not trained to deal with atrocities on such a scale.
Signs of mass femicide
The Hamas attack was the deadliest in Israel’s 75-year history.
Israel’s relentless retaliatory bombardment and ground assault in Gaza has killed at least 20,057 people, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Dr Dvora Bauman, a gynaecologist in Jerusalem who specialises in helping victims of sexual abuse, said the recognition of sexual violence in Hamas’s attack came too late.
Most rescue workers, often Orthodox men, “didn’t think of rape at all” as they rapidly responded to the crisis, she said.
Mr Eli Hazen, 56, a volunteer with the Zaka organisation which recovers and identifies bodies in accordance with Jewish tradition, said “there was a tremendous amount of miscommunication” at the time.
There was a lack of coordination “between different aspects of the rescue mission, the army, the police”, he said.
“It’s hard to say exactly what happened in every particular square cm.”
While he said “we obviously didn’t see anything before or during” the events, he described finding the body of a woman shot in the back of the head in Kibbutz Beeri, naked from the waist down.
Mr Hazen said her body was kneeling at the foot of a bed in a position suggesting she had been abused.
In another ruined house in the same kibbutz, the body of a young woman lay beneath the corpse of a militant, neither of them fully dressed, he said.
The bodies were in bad condition, having begun to decay, and it is very difficult to be sure about what happened, Mr Hazen said.
Another Zaka volunteer, Mr Simcha Greeneman, said in one kibbutz he had discovered a dead woman with sharp objects in her vagina, including nails.
French legal expert Celine Bardet, founder of the non-governmental organisation We Are Not Weapons of War, which advocates against conflict-related sexual violence, said it was a clear example of sexual violence.
Another she cited was the treatment of Shani Louk, a young German-Israeli woman captured and killed by the militants.
Images and footage on social media showed her stripped body in the back of a pick-up truck, battered and spat upon.
In cases of rape the situation is more complex.
Experts said the victims had been killed and exhumation, prohibited in Judaism, was unlikely.
Eyewitness accounts are mounting in the media, especially from survivors of the Supernova music festival where about 3,000 people had gathered in the desert near the Gaza border.
One of the event’s organisers, Mr Rami Shmuel, returned to the scene the day after the attack.
He described finding three young women, “naked from the waist down, legs spread”.
“One had the face burnt,” he said. Another was “shot in the face” while the last had been “shot all over the lower part of her body”.
More than 360 people were killed at the festival, according to Israeli figures.
Mr Shmuel found body after body, but said he never saw “a naked man, a man whose legs were spread”.
On social media, there is a tide of images alongside condemnations of “mass femicide”.
The Israeli army has shared documents it said were found on the bodies of Hamas fighters, including a phrasebook explaining how to say “take off your trousers” and “take off your clothes” in Hebrew.
In at least two unsourced videos of interrogations of alleged Hamas members, they are heard talking about instructions given to rape women.
Contacted by AFP, Israeli security agency Shin Bet, the police and the army said they had not released these videos.
Piece by piece
As it stands, “we can’t establish the scale or the precise details of the abuses, the modus operandi, or how many people were involved”, said Ms Bardet.
She said she was disappointed the Israeli authorities were “not cooperating”, including by rejecting an independent international investigation.
Israeli diplomats contacted by AFP branded the UN Human Rights Council’s commission of an inquiry “biased”, accusing its members of being “anti-Semitic” and “anti-Israel”.
The International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor Karim Khan has visited the region since the war began, could decide to investigate sexual violence.
But this will likely take years, according to law professor Cochav Elkayam-Levy, head of an inquiry commission on child and gender-based violence during the Hamas attacks.
She emphasised that women subjected to sexual violence often take years to come forward.
“We’ll never know what happened to women. We’ll never know the extent of the crime,” she said.
It’s a “damaged puzzle that we are now building, piece by piece”.
AFP
At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”
In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.
The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.
One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.
As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”
Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.
Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.
A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.
And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.
Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.
The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.
Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not [acknowledge the many accusations](https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/statement/2023/12/un-women-statement-on-the-situation-in-israel-and-gaza#:~:text=We deeply regret that military,on Israel on 7 October.) until weeks after the attacks.
Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.
The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.
A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.
That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.
In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.
“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”
Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.