<\/p>\n
JERUSALEM \u2014 The first suggestion that Hamas terrorists committed acts of extreme sexual violence and rape against victims during their Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel came on social media early on that fateful Saturday morning six weeks ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two short videos, shared by the terrorists themselves, quickly emerged showing groups of cheering Palestinian men, some armed, in the streets of Gaza crowding around half-naked and bloodied young Israeli women.<\/p>\n
In one clip, a woman later identified as German-Israeli citizen Shani Louk, 22, can be seen barely clothed lying unconscious in an unnatural position on the flatbed of a pickup as men spit and abuse her body while screaming \u2018Allahu Akhbar.\u2019<\/p>\n
In another video, 19-year-old Israeli soldier Na\u2019ama Levy is pulled from the back of a jeep by an armed gunman, her hands bound behind her back and \u00a0thick blood stains between her legs, as Palestinian men jeer at her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Louk is now counted among the 1,200 people murdered that day, and Levy is thought to be one of an estimated 240 hostages, including babies and children, being held by the terror group inside the Palestinian enclave.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While the victims of gender-based crimes committed during that brutal attack have yet to come forward, either because they were murdered or kidnapped or are still reeling from the trauma, the Israeli police and Israel\u2019s newly formed Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women believe sexual violence during the terror attack was widespread, systematic and even endorsed by the Islamic fundamentalist group\u2019s religious and spiritual leaders as permissible during war.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet collecting the evidence for this intimate aspect of such a massive, multilevel terror attack, which sparked total chaos inside Israel and launched a full-scale war in the Gaza Strip, has proved challenging for criminal investigators. Those investigators hope to bring detailed charges against hundreds of Hamas terrorists now being held by Israel for their role in the assault and for women\u2019s groups, who say that violent sexual crimes in war must be documented and remembered.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018This is the biggest criminal case in Israel\u2019s history,\u2019 said David Katz, head of the Israeli police\u2019s Lahav 443 criminal investigation\u2019s cyber unit, which is investigating the criminal aspects of the mass atrocity.<\/p>\n
\u2018We are dealing with thousands of murders and other crimes,\u2019 he said. He described how the crime scene, which included more than 20 locations, among them army bases, civilian communities and a sprawling music festival not far from Israel\u2019s border with Gaza, was an active combat zone for the first 48 hours following the attack, hampering police efforts to collect forensic and other evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of the surprise attack, police said, the nation\u2019s main focus was on collecting and identifying hundreds of badly mutilated and burned bodies as quickly as possible. Jewish burials are meant to take place immediately. And, although medical teams worked 24 hours a day in the days and weeks that followed, carefully photographing and documenting some of the worst injuries they said they\u2019d ever seen, the typical process for sexual-based crimes was largely overlooked.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019re still only in the initial phases of this investigation,\u2019 said Katz, describing how his team was working to collect statements from thousands of survivors. It was also going to examine more than 60,000 videos taken by the terrorists on phones and bodycams and other footage taken by victims, first responders, CCTV cameras and dashcams.<\/p>\n
\u2018At this time, there are no known living victims, and many of the surviving victims still cannot speak about what happened to them,\u2019 said Katz, adding that much of the details were under a court-authorized gag order and could not be shared with the public. But he estimated that there were \u2018multiple\u2019 cases of sexual violence.<\/p>\n
At Tuesday\u2019s briefing, the police screened one eyewitness account of a gang rape that she said took place at the Nova Music Festival, where more than 300 people were brutally murdered and thousands were\u00a0injured by hundreds of heavily armed Hamas terrorists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The witness, identified only by the initial \u2018S,\u2019 recounted on camera that while she was hiding from the terrorists, she saw a group of them pass a woman with long brown hair among them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018I understood they were raping her,\u2019 S said. \u2018They were passing her from one person to the next. She was alive and standing on her feet. She was bleeding from her back.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
S then described how one of the terrorists sliced off the woman\u2019s breast and began playing around with it. Another, the witness said, shot the woman in the head while he was still penetrating her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018He did not even lift up his pants and shot her in the head,\u2019 S said, adding that she spied another terrorist haul a naked, dead woman over his shoulder and walk off with her. Another, she said, cut off someone\u2019s head and was walking around with it like a trophy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Additionally, the police shared graphic photographs and video footage from the festival showing women, charred and bloody, their underwear visibly ripped and their legs spread apart.<\/p>\n
Videotaped interrogations of some of the captured terrorists show them confessing that they had orders to murder, rape and kidnap Israeli civilians. One suspect told Israeli interrogators he and his men had received religious permission to kill children \u2018because they\u2019ll grow up to be soldiers\u2019 and to decapitate \u2018to sow fear among the Israelis.\u2019<\/p>\n
First responders from both the Israeli military and the country\u2019s civilian services have described in detail the disturbing brutality and atrocities carried out by an estimated 3,000 Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists who entered Israel Oct. 7.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A\u00a0commander with the Israeli army\u2019s National Rescue Unit told journalists in the initial days after the attack that he had found multiple bodies of dead women who had been stripped naked. In one case, on Kibbutz Be\u2019eri,\u00a0Col. (Res) Golan Vach, said he found two women tied together on the same bed with no clothes on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018I don\u2019t know what happened to them before they were killed,\u2019 he said.\u00a0\u2018But I do know that most regular women go to bed wearing pajamas.\u2019<\/p>\n
In another case, a soldier from the army\u2019s special forces unit who was sent to search for survivors on a kibbutz told one media outlet he found the dead bodies of two young girls together in one room. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018There was a teenage girl, 14 or 15. She\u00a0was lying on the floor, on her stomach, her pants were pulled down, and she was half naked. Her legs were spread out, wide open, and there was the remains of sperm on her back,\u2019 he said. \u2018Someone executed her straight after he brutally raped her.<\/p>\n
\u2018It was like a slap in the face,\u2019 the soldier said. \u2018It was the first time I realized that we are not acting against terrorists here, we are acting against savages.\u2019<\/p>\n
In the morgue, too, those working to identify the dead and prepare their bodies for burial spoke about brutalities consistent with rape and sexual assault.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018We saw evidence of rape,\u2019 Shari, who works with a team of female volunteers tasked with cleaning the bodies of murdered women, told Fox News Digital in a previous interview. \u2018Pelvises were broken, and it probably takes a lot to break a pelvis. \u2026 And this was also among grandmothers down to small children. These are things we saw with our own eyes.\u2019 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking this week on a Zoom panel organized by the Maimonides Society at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, chair of Israel\u2019s newly formed Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, said her team had also been working to compile a database of gender-based atrocities \u2018to ensure that the Oct. 7 victims of sexual and other violence against women are never forgotten and that their stories are adequately told.\u2019<\/p>\n
Elkayam-Levy, a legal expert from Hebrew University added, \u2018We established the commission on the eighth day of the war as more and more evidence of gruesome crimes against women and children emerged,\u2019 she told the panel.<\/p>\n
She said that even though some of Hamas\u2019 crimes, which were broadcast in real-time on social media, \u2018showed clear violations of international law and brutal crimes committed against women and children,\u2019 there was little international condemnation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Therefore, we took it upon ourselves to call for recognition and action,\u2019 Elkayam-Levy said. \u2018We also realized that these crimes must be documented and brought to the attention of the international community.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018This is not an isolated event in history where crimes against women can be ignored. What we\u2019ve seen in Israel were rape and gender-based crimes under clear orders and under full control.<\/p>\n
\u2018It was rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape and crimes made to kill and torture women, using them and their bodies as an instrument to force exile of those communities in Israel. It was rape to be seen and heard by others, women\u2019s and girls\u2019 bodies used as spectacles of victory, trophies of war.\u2019<\/p>\n\n
Warning: This article includes graphic and disturbing accounts from the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. JERUSALEM \u2014 The first suggestion that Hamas terrorists committed acts of extreme sexual violence and rape against victims during their Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel came on social media early on that fateful Saturday morning six weeks ago.\u00a0 Two <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}