Today is International Women’s Day. On this important day, it is critical to remember that Hamas terrorists committed unspeakable horrors against Israeli women and girls—both during the October 7 massacre and in the hellish captivity that followed.
By Rachel Avraham
Today is International Women’s Day. On this important day, it is critical to remember that Hamas terrorists committed unspeakable horrors against Israeli women and girls—both during the October 7 massacre and in the hellish captivity that followed. The mass rapes and other forms of sexual violence that took place on October 7, 2023 and against the hostages in captivity continues to plague Israeli society. It is a national collective trauma, which adversely affects the wellbeing of the entire Jewish population in the State of Israel and across the Jewish diaspora.
Newsweek compared what Hamas did on October 7 to ISIS, declaring that there was footage of “women abducted with their babies, grandmothers taken hostage and paraded down the streets of Gaza. According to one survivor, ‘They came to slaughter, to destroy. I know they kidnapped girls. They raped women even after killing them.’ Another survivor tells of returning to the site later to look for his friends and seeing mostly bodies of young women, lying cold and mutilated.”
Newsweek continued, “Another widely shared video showed a young woman’s nearly naked body, lifeless and mutilated, being paraded through the streets of Gaza in the back of a pickup truck. Palestinian men sat on her, draped their legs over her, pulled at her hair and spit on her, a broken female body brandished like a trophy. Then, there’s a video of a teenage Israeli woman being pulled by terrorists from the back of a vehicle in Gaza. In the video, she is barefoot, wearing sweat pants and a tee-shirt, and as she turns, you can see the back of her sweatpants are covered in blood that came from between her legs.”
Mia Schem, a former hostage, recounted, “I was shot at almost point blank range when my arm almost detached from my body, hanging and bleeding. All around me, I heard screams of people being raped and murdered.” Raz Cohen, another survivor of the October 7 massacre, testified: “They all gather around her. They start raping her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words. Then one of them raises a knife and just slaughters her.”
Sapir, another survivor of the October 7 massacre, told the American Jewish Committee, “The first victim that she said that she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, paints pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her. Every time she flinched; he plunged a knife into her back.”
The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel sent a report to the United Nations, which has been published in entirely on Israeli governmental websites, 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 in the report 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.”
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.”
Hamas terrorists who were taken captive even noted that they were given license to rape women and girls, both the living and the dead. One IDF officer related: “There is evidence of mass rape so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvises, women, grandmothers, children.” When Hamas invaded the Nahal Oz military base, there is video documentation of one of the terrorists telling the female hostages, who were all badly beaten up and bloody, with many of them not even dressed properly: “Here are the girls, women who can get pregnant. These are the Zionists. You are so beautiful.”
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.”
Former hostage Noga Weiss claimed that one of her captors bought her a ring and proposed marriage to her, claiming that all of the hostages would go home except for her. Released hostage Karina Ariev told the Jerusalem Post that she was sexually harassed in Hamas captivity and that it only stopped after she threatened to report one of her captors to his commander, who prohibited such actions. Released hostage Liri Albag claimed that her Hamas captors used to touch her legs when she was asleep and that she did not like it.
The Israeli Ministry of Health reported that many of the women held hostage in Gaza suffered from sexual violence: “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.”
According to the American Jewish Committee, “17 months later, despite overwhelming evidence and survivor testimonies, denial of these horrific crimes persists.” The magnitude of the atrocities that took place on October 7 and afterwards is so grave that there is a tendency among far too many to either deny what happened or to minimize the scope of what happened, alleging that “it is nothing compared to the genocide in Gaza.” Like Holocaust denial, October 7 rape denial is becoming increasingly mainstream in an era of rising global anti-Semitism.
On this important day, let us remember these mothers, sisters and daughters not just as victims but as “courageous survivors who demand justice. And we hold accountable the women’s rights organizations that failed them. Too many remained silent, or worse, turned their backs on Israeli women and girls when they needed them most.”
