The Gaza War: Hamas terrorists raped hostage Israeli women, says a UN team
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: A United Nations team has found “clear and convincing” information that Israeli women hostages terror group Hamas took to Gaza after its October 7 invasion of the Jewish state were sexually abused.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that the sexual violation is ongoing,” Pramila Patten, Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict and Under Secretary-General at the United Nations, told reporters on Monday.
The October invasion, in which Hamas reportedly killed over 1,200 Israelis and some other foreigners, triggered the ongoing Gaza Conflict in which nearly 30,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and nearby areas died so far.
The UN team also found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred during Hamas’ October 7 terror attack in Israel, in what is the most definitive finding by the global organization on sexual assault allegations in the aftermath of the attack, the media reported on Tuesday.
The UN team, led by Patten, visited Israel between January 29 and February 14 for a mission “aimed at gathering, analyzing, and verifying information on conflict-related sexual violence” during October 7 and its aftermath, it said in a 24-page report.
The team also went to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank where stakeholders alleged “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment… including the increased use of various forms of sexual violence, namely invasive body searches; threats of rape; and prolonged forced nudity” on Palestinians in detention, the UN report wrote.
Patten stressed that the mission “was neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature,” adding the team had 33 meetings with Israeli institutions while in Israel, interviewed 34 people, including survivors and witnesses to the October 7 attack, and released hostages, as well as reviewed 50 hours of footage of the attacks.
Earlier, Hamas denied that its militants committed rape during the October 7 attack.
“We strongly reject and denounce the coordination of some Western media outlets with the Zionist misleading campaigns that promote unfounded lies and allegations aimed at demonizing the Palestinian resistance, the latest of which is the allegation that resistance members committed ‘sexual violence’ during the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th,” Hamas’ political office said in a statement on Telegram in December 2023.
The UN report said the mission team found that, across various locations in Israel, “several fully naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down were recovered – mostly women – with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head.”
Although circumstantial, the report continued, “such a pattern of undressing and restraining of victims may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.”
Patten said grave violations, most involving rape, were identified in at least three locations, “namely the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”
The UN team’s research was constrained by “the extremely limited availability of victims, survivors and witnesses of sexual violence due partly to the internal displacement of affected communities, the lack of public trust and confidence in national and international institutions, including the UN,” she said.
Some widely reported alleged incidences were also determined by the mission to be “unfounded,” she said. These included an unverified claim of a gruesome attack on a pregnant woman and her fetus. An official from an Israeli search and rescue organization told CNN in October that they had found a pregnant woman shot from behind and stabbed in the stomach.
The report also said the team was unable to verify a reported case of rape in Nahal Oz military base and genital mutilation. “Concerning the latter instance, while the forensic analysis reviewed injuries to intimate body parts, no discernible pattern could be identified, against either female or male soldiers. However, seven female soldiers were abducted from this base into Gaza,” the report added.
