“’Me too’ unless you’re a Jew,” hundreds of protesters chanted in front of the United Nations building in New York on Monday. In front of the angry crowd, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, legal scholar and founder of the Civilian Commission on Hamas’s Crimes Against Women and Children, repeated what she has been denouncing for weeks: UN agencies and international institutions do not adequately recognize the terrorists’ sexual violence. The voices of Israeli women are not taken seriously. Meanwhile, international diplomats listened to Israeli experts, representatives of civil society and first responders in the halls of the UN headquarters.
Among them was Shari Mendes, who worked as a reservist at the Shura military base in the days after the attacks, tending to the bodies of dead female soldiers for burial. She told the United Nations hearing that she had seen broken pelvic bones and mutilated genital areas on corpses. Your testimony is one of the many reports that have been increasing for weeks. As early as October 7th, the terrorists’ live streams, which have since been deleted, showed women with torn clothing and traces of blood between their legs. In the days and weeks after the attacks, more and more reports of rape and genital mutilation became public, both against women and men. Witnesses reported gang rapes and naked corpses stacked on top of each other.
Risk of retraumatization
The evidence of sexual violence by the Hamas terrorists has been there since day one – but even experts in Israel do not necessarily agree on how far it extends and how it should be responded to. The accusation has been made again and again that the international community is keeping quiet about the sexual violence against Israeli victims, while in recent weeks it has repeatedly commented on the situation of Palestinian women and children in Gaza.
The civilian commission founded by Elkayam-Levy speaks clearly of systematic war crimes against women and children in Israel. “We need to get the international community to recognize and condemn what happened here,” said Yifon Bitton, a women’s rights activist, president of the Achva Academic College of Education and a member of the civil commission. But even Bitton cannot specify what exactly happened. Most of the rape victims were executed; the forensic evidence could not be secured due to the situation. The victims often took the evidence with them to their grave. “The crime scene was still a war zone in the first few days,” said Bitton.
The first responders were just able to secure the bodies; securing evidence and documentation were out of the question. A subsequent investigation is difficult because the traces of sexual violence disappear, and interviews can sometimes trigger re-traumatization. Even though the investigations were still in their early stages, the evidence clearly points to systematic sexual violence, says Bitton.
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