The facts do not support the claims put forward by the rape denialists at Press TV. The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel sent a report to the United Nations proclaiming that survivors of the Nova Music Festival Massacre testified that gang rapes occurred, where “women were abused and handled between multiple terrorists who beat, injured and ultimately killed them.”
By Rachel Avraham
In a recent interview with Yedioth Achronot, Moran Gaz, a former lead prosecutor in Israel’s Southern District Prosecutor’s Office, stated that the road to justice for victims of the October 7 massacre is slow and full of obstacles, especially regarding rape allegations on October 7: “It will be very difficult to prove them. In this regard, I would suggest lowering expectations.” She stated this likely because most of the victims are either dead or held hostage in Gaza, thus making it harder to present rape allegations in court.
However, Iran’s Press TV took this interview and then claimed, “An Israeli prosecutor has acknowledged that, 15 months after the Hamas-led operation on October 7, 2023, not a single complaint has been filed to substantiate the alleged incidents of rape and sexual violence by Palestinian resistance fighters.” They went on to refer to the rape allegations as “unsubstantiated claims against Palestinian resistance fighters” who “raped Israeli settlers, citing shadowing witnesses.” They concluded that the rape allegations are a “hoax.”
The recent article published by Iran’s Press TV is part of a large wave of rape denialist sentiment across the globe, which has refused to accept the magnitude of atrocities committed on October 7, especially the brutal sexual violence that took place on that horrific day. In fact, even some well-known Western women’s rights activists, such as Judith Butler and Samantha Pearson, have denied the magnitude of what happened on October 7. However, the facts do not support the claims put forward by the rape denialists at Press TV and other places.
The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel sent a report to the United Nations titled: “Silent Cry: Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War.” In the report, survivors of the Nova Music Festival Massacre testified that gang rapes occurred, where “women were abused and handled between multiple terrorists who beat, injured and ultimately killed them.” They noted that in Kibbutz Beeri, where 90 percent of the residents were murdered: “ZAKA volunteers and rescue forces described a row of houses where bodies with signs of sexual assault were found, including women and girls who were stripped of their underwear, signs of semen, and an insertion of a knife in the genital area.”
As the Association for Rape Crisis Centers in Israel told the Atlantic, “Hamas’s attack on October 7th included brutal sexual assaults carried out systematically and deliberately against Israeli civilians. Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence.” The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel recounts the eyewitness testimony of one survivor who said that the Nova music festival was an “apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.” In addition, it notes that “several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape” as well as accounts from first responders of bodies unclothed and bleeding heavily from the pelvic area, and genital mutilation.
After the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel submitted their report to the United Nations, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict reached similar conclusions. After a two-and-a-half-week mission to Israel, the UN body concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks.” Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, told the Atlantic that investigators “found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.”
But the sexual violence against Israeli women and girls did not end on October 7. A report on the 112 released hostages “provided evidence that revealed that both men and women suffered violent sexual assaults in captivity. In addition to the emotional trauma, the sexual assaults resulted in physical injury and increased the risk of infections such as HIV.” As one of the doctors who examined released hostages told CBS, “There is not a single person who came back that didn’t have a significant physical injury or medical problem. On top of that, some of them were getting medication to look better than they actually were. We definitely saw signs of being handcuffed. We did hear and see evidence of sexual abuse in a significant part of the people we have treated. We also heard evidence and that was one of the hardest parts of abuse against those who are still there, both physical and sexual.”
According to the report released by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, Chen and Agam Goldstein, a mother and her teenage daughter who were kidnapped from Kfar Aza and released after 51 days in captivity, noted that they encountered at least three female hostages who suffered from sexual assault during captivity. Similarly, in the report, Aviva Sigal, also kidnapped from Kfar Aza, spoke of the rape of young women in captivity, including a case of witnessing a woman who immediately after getting raped was taken to the bathroom: “Hamas turned us into puppets on a string.”
Amit Soussana, a forty-year-old lawyer from Kibbutz Aza who was kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza, following the October 7 massacre told the New York Times: “He came towards me and shoved the gun at my forehead. Then he, with the gun pointed at me, forced me to commit a sexual act on him.” Moran Stella Yanai, who was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival, told Channel 12 that her captors did an evasive search inside her vagina and said: “There was the constant fear of being raped at any moment.”
A newer report from the Israeli Health Ministry claimed that the terrorist captors forced two minors, who were held hostage in Gaza, to perform sexual acts on one another and compelled them to take off their clothes in front of them, touched their private parts, and whipped their genitalia, the Times of Israel reported: ““One of the returned hostages described being sexually assaulted at gunpoint by a Hamas terrorist. On several occasions, captors forced women of all ages to undress while others, including the captors, watched. Some women reported that the captors sexually assaulted them. In addition, some women reported that they were tied to beds while their captors stared at them.” Nevertheless, Press TV and their Western allies continue to live in denial, as if the sexual violence that took place on October 7 and afterwards did not happen.
