This post contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence
“Why have feminists been so slow to condemn the Hamas rapes,” Katha Pollitti asked in The Nation in mid-December. Letty Cottin Pogrebin had an answer. “Jew hating,” she wrote in The Forward, “is not a new feminist phenomenon.”
It may not be new, but it is no less shocking. Within days of the October 7th attacks, the stories began circulating, and the evidence mounting, of women and girls brutally raped, tortured, and murdered by Hamas terrorists. And there was deafening silence. Worse, Israel – when it sought to prove what had gone so horribly wrong – was accused of fabricating the evidence and exploiting the horror for propaganda points. Apologists excused the brutality, and demanded that it be put in context, as if there is any context for cutting off a woman’s breast and tossing it in the air while she is gang raped and murdered.
It took UN Women eight weeks to speak out for the first time about the sexualized violence. NOW – the National Organization for Women – took until November 30 to issue a press release in which national president Christian F. Nunes said “rape must never be part of a battle plan,” still without mentioning the words “Israel,“ Hamas,” and “October 7.” Planned Parenthood was silent until December.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin writes of how she and Gloria Steinem, co-founders of Ms. magazine, tried to persuade its current editors to cover what happened to women and girls in Israel. When the Magazine ran a piece online in November on combatting terrorism and misogyny, it did not even make a passing reference to its victims in Israel; and when it did address women who were casualties of war, its only focus was female journalists who were killed, not the women and girls who were tortured and murdered and violated by Hamas. Imagine similar disinterest if Israel perpetrated such wholesale sexual violence.
The international media was quick to blame Israel for the suffering of Gazans, for bombings (including those attributable to Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and for targeting hospitals (including those hiding Hamas terrorists and tunnels), and slow to credit the accounts of Israeli victims and witnesses. The world waited, and it equivocated. Leftists complained that Israel was somehow responsible for these horrific crimes, and apologists for the misogynists and murderers insisted that it was Israel that was committing war crimes.
On December 28th, The New York Times confirmed what Israelis had been trying to get the world to pay attention to. Based on interviews with some 150 people, the reporters documented how Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7th. In graphic detail, the article reported on the gang rapes, torture, maiming and murder of Israeli girls and women at the hands of the Hamas terrorists. Tossing a woman’s breast back and forth while they gang rape her and stab her to death. Cutting the heads off of women after they repeatedly rape them. Leaving them lying in the road after they slice open their vaginas. A corpse with dozens of nails driven into the woman’s vagina and her thighs. Some 30 women and girls at the rave site and at two neighboring kibbutzim were found with all their clothes torn off, legs spread, and signs of abuse of their genitals. Soldiers found naked with gun shots in their vaginas. Terrorists carrying the heads of beheaded women. A witness described seeing a woman being raped and stabbed every time she flinched and another being “shredded into pieces.” Two teenage sisters were found sprawled on the ground, pajama pants pulled down, semen smeared on one girl’s back while her sister lay dead with her clothes cut off and bruises in her groin. Some 24 bodies of women and girls at another kibbutz, naked and half naked, mutilated and tied up. Seven locations cited on a map where women and girls were raped and killed.
And what of the hostages? State Department spokesman Matthew Miller gave voice to a widely held fear: that women and girls who have been taken by Hamas have been horribly abused as well. “The fact that it seems one of the reasons they don’t want to turn women over, that they’ve been holding hostage, and the reason this pause fell apart, is they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody,” Miller said, in reference to the sexual violence against women. “Certainly, there is very little that I would put beyond Hamas when it comes to its treatment of civilians, and particularly its treatment of women.”
This is not the stuff of war. This is butchery, brutality, inhumanity that should shock the world. As one police chief superintendent put it, it was a combination of two “ferocious forces,” the hatred of Jews and the hatred of women.
That day’s paper wrapped the next day’s fish for much of the world.
This month, two UN appointed independent experts described the growing body of evidence about reported sexual violence on October 7th as “particularly harrowing.” Referring to widespread incidents of sexual torture including gang rape, mutilations and gunshots to genital areas, the experts opined that “[t]hese acts constitute gross violations of international law, amounting to war crimes which, given the number of victims and the extensive premeditation and planning of the attacks, may also qualify as crimes against humanity.”
Genocide of Jewish women and girls. Crimes against humanity. If the weaponization of sexual violence does not qualify, what does? We are inundated daily with tales of suffering in Gaza at the hands of Israelis. The suffering is real. Of course it is deeply troubling. Conditions are harrowing. But the suffering of Israeli women and girls cannot be swept aside, as the world has been so eager to do. Who treats a teenage girl like this? How do you tell her parents that these were the last minutes of their daughters’ lives?
This is not what anyone expected to find, not what the rescuers were looking for when they arrived to cart away bodies for swift burials, consistent with Jewish law. No autopsies were performed in the chaos. This is only what we know about, for certain. Untold numbers of bodies were buried before they could even be examined to determine if they too were brutalized before being slaughtered. Witnesses and survivors too traumatized to speak. Horrors too awful to share. Screams without words.
And what does the world say to Israel?
Stop fighting? Let them get away with it?
Would you?
The world did not believe it, did not want to believe it, when the Israelis were the only ones saying it. Maybe they will believe it now.
