“We’re investigating sexual crimes in opposition to each men and women perpetrated by Hamas terrorists,” Binyamin mentioned. “There have been violent rape incidents, essentially the most excessive sexual abuses we’ve seen, of each men and women. I’m speaking about dozens.
“That is an ongoing investigation,” Binyamin added. “I can not get into particulars.”
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Binyamin mentioned a staff of investigators had gathered “tens of hundreds” of testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the assault, in addition to from troopers and emergency medical employees. He mentioned intelligence officers have been combing by means of banks of video imagery and pictures of the Hamas incursion. They haven’t shared any details about interviewing victims of rape.
Autopsies, forensic proof and confessions from captured Hamas fighters additionally corroborate that sexual crimes have been dedicated, he mentioned.
Israeli authorities have launched little details about particular crimes and victims, however in mid-November, police officers shared a video of an Israeli lady who mentioned she had watched Hamas terrorists gang-raping a younger lady whom they captured throughout a music pageant within the Negev desert.
The witness, whom police didn’t determine, mentioned she had been hiding in the course of the pageant and had seen Hamas terrorists taking turns raping a younger lady, mutilating her after which capturing her within the head.
Her testimony was according to different witness accounts from the music pageant.
High Israeli politicians, together with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have accused Hamas of utilizing rape as a part of a broader marketing campaign of atrocities.
“We’ve had tons of massacred, households worn out of their beds of their houses, girls brutally raped and murdered,” Netanyahu mentioned in early October.
Activists Search Broader Condemnation
Girls’s rights activists have expressed dismay about what they see as a scarcity of credence given to claims that sexual assault was widespread October 7. Up to now, no survivors of rape or assault have spoken publicly about their experiences.
“We have now come thus far in believing survivors of rape and assault in so many conditions,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, the previous Meta government and a number one voice on girls within the office, in an opinion piece for CNN. “But this time, many are ignoring the tales that these our bodies inform us about how these girls spent the final moments of their lives.
“Not loudly condemning the rapes of October 7 – or any rapes – is an enormous step backward for the ladies – and males – of the world,” Sandberg mentioned.
Many individuals in Israel and elsewhere have complained that it took too lengthy for organisations just like the United Nations to subject condemnations, a delay that they took to suggest that the preliminary studies of intercourse crimes had not been believed.
UN Girls, the United Nations organisation devoted to gender equality and feminine empowerment, issued a press release final week calling for all accounts of gender-based violence that occurred on October 7 to be investigated and prosecuted.
“We’re alarmed by the quite a few accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence throughout these assaults,” the organisation mentioned.
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The assertion got here a day after UN Secretary-Basic António Guterres acknowledged “quite a few accounts of sexual violence in the course of the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that have to be vigorously investigated and prosecuted” in a submit on X, previously often called Twitter.
Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan posted on X on November 29 that UN Girls had issued an “fast and harsh condemnation” in each different bloodbath the place “such heinous sexual crimes have been dedicated”.
“However when Israeli girls are the victims,” he added, the organisation “casts doubt on the allegations”.
This text initially appeared in The New York Occasions.