At first she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”
In a grainy video, she is seen lying on her back, her dress torn, her legs spread, her vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
The video was filmed in the early hours of October 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis the day before.
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The video went viral and thousands of people responded, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was her missing friend, sister or daughter.
One family knew exactly who they were: Gal Abdush, a mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave with her husband that night.
As the terrorists closed in on her and she found herself trapped in a line of cars on a highway with people trying to flee the party, she sent a final WhatsApp message to her family: “They don't understand.”
Based largely on the video evidence – confirmed by The New York Times – Israeli police officials said they believed Abdush was raped and that she had become a symbol of the horrors faced by Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks had happened.
Israeli officials say Hamas terrorists brutalized women wherever they struck – at the rave, in the military bases along the Gaza border and on the kibbutzim.
A two-month Times investigation uncovered painful new details and found that the attacks against women were not isolated incidents but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Using video footage, photographs, cell phone GPS data and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, the Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appeared to have been sexually abused and mutilated.
Four witnesses described in graphic detail how women were raped and killed at two different locations along Route 232, the same highway where Abdush's half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.
And the Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and on two kibbutzim that were in a similar condition to Abdush's – legs spread , torn clothing, signs of abuse on her legs genital areas.
Many of the reports are difficult to stomach and the visual evidence is disturbing.
The Times saw photos of a woman's body that rescue workers discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz, with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
The Times also viewed a video provided by the Israeli military showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in the vagina.
Hamas has rejected Israel's allegations of sexual violence. Israeli activists were outraged that UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the UN Women agency only acknowledged the numerous allegations weeks after the attacks.
Investigators from Israel's top national police unit, Lahav 433, have continually collected evidence, but they have not provided figures on how many women were raped. They say most are dead – and buried – and that they will never know. None of the survivors have spoken publicly.
Israeli police have acknowledged that they did not focus on collecting semen samples from women's bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes during the shock and confusion of October 7, the deadliest day in Israel's history. At this point, authorities say their priority is to beat back Hamas and identify the dead.
A combination of chaos, great sadness, and Jewish religious duties resulted in many bodies being buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, such as the rave scene where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were taken away by the truckload.
This leaves the Israeli authorities unable to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Abdush's relatives, for example, never received a death certificate. They are still looking for answers.
When sexual violence is widespread during war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.
“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on pursuing criminal charges later.”
Very often, he said, sex crimes cases are prosecuted years later based on the statements of victims and witnesses.
“The eyewitness may not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify, 'I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,' that may be enough.”
“Scream without words”
Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police's key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified and says that if her last name were revealed she would be followed for the rest of her life.
She took part in the rave with several friends and provided the investigators with graphic statements. She also spoke to the Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted how groups of heavily armed gunmen raped and killed at least five women.
She said she hid under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree at 8 a.m. Oct. 7, just off Route 232, about 4 miles southwest of the group. She had been shot in the back. She felt weak. She covered herself with dry grass and lay as still as she could.
About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks approaching. She said she saw “about 100 men,” most in military uniform and combat boots, some in dark tracksuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men gathered along the street, passing assault rifles, grenades, small rockets and seriously wounded women among them.
“It was like a gathering place,” she said.
The first victim she saw was a young woman with copper-colored hair, blood running down her back and her pants reaching to her knees. A man pulled her hair and forced her to bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched as another woman was “torn to pieces.” While one terrorist was raping her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and cut off her breast.
“One keeps raping her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the street,” Sapir said.
She said the men slashed her face and then the woman disappeared from view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three more women being raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
Sapir provided photos of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officers stood by her statement and released a video in which she, her face blurred, recounted some of what she saw.
Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot and was seen in one of Sapir's photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who met at the party. In an interview, Karol said he barely raised his head to look at the street, but he also described seeing a woman being raped and killed.
Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that has spread across her upper body and she can barely sleep, waking up at night with her heart pounding and drenched in sweat.
“That day I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally distant, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at it all as if I were photographing her with my eyes, without forgetting every detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”
That same morning, along Route 232 but at a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had recently worked in Congo training Congolese soldiers — said he was hiding in a dry stream bed. It offered some protection to the attackers who combed the area and shot anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview at a restaurant in Tel Aviv, Israel.
About 40 meters in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up, its doors flying open.
He said he then saw five men in plain clothes, all with knives and one with a hammer, dragging a woman across the floor. She was young, naked and screaming.
“They all rally around her,” Cohen said. “She stands up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a semicircle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.
“Then one of them raised a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered them.”
Shoam Gueta, one of Cohen's friends and a fashion designer, said the two hid together in the creek bed. He said he saw at least four men get out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between her legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and screaming” and that one of them repeatedly stabbed her with a knife and “literally butchered” her.
Hours later, the first wave of volunteer paramedics arrived at the scene. In interviews, four of them said they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing – some with their hands bound by ropes and zip ties – in the party area, along the street, in the parking lot and in outdoor fields around the rave site .
Jamal Waraki, a volunteer paramedic with the nonprofit ZAKA Emergency Response Team, said he couldn't get it out of his mind when a young woman in a rawhide vest was found between the main stage and the bar.
“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down to her knees.”
Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave's production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking lot east of the party along the route 232 went to check on survivors.
He found the body of a young woman near the highway, on her stomach, without pants or underwear, with her legs spread. He said her vaginal area appeared to have been cut open, “as if someone had torn her apart.”
Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be'eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told the Times that they found a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls in at least six different houses, naked or half-naked, some mutilated, others bound and often alone.
A medic with an Israeli commando unit said he found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be'eri.
One was lying on her side, he said, her boxer shorts were torn and her groin area had bruises. The other was face down on the floor, he said, her pajama pants pulled up to her knees, her bottom exposed, cum smeared on her back.
Since it was his job to look for survivors, he moved on and did not document the crime scene. Neighbors of the two slain girls – sisters, 13 and 16 – said their bodies were found alone and separated from the rest of their family.
The Israeli military allowed the medic to speak to reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in an elite unit.
Many of the dead were taken to the Shura military base in central Israel for identification. Here too, witnesses said they saw signs of sexual violence.
Shari Mendes, an architect who was called up as a reserve soldier to help prepare the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said she saw four that showed signs of sexual violence, including some with “a lot of blood in the pelvic area.”
A dentist, Captain Maayan, who worked at the same identification center, said she saw at least 10 bodies of female soldiers from observation posts in the Gaza Strip showing signs of sexual violence.
Due to the sensitivity of the topic, Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and last name. She said she saw several bodies with cuts in the vagina and blood-soaked underwear, and one whose fingernails had been ripped out.
The investigation
Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence of the October 7 attacks. They have collected hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dash cams, security cameras and cell phones showing Hamas terrorists killing civilians, as well as many images of mutilated corpses.
But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman for the Israeli National Police, said: “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.
After the attack, police officials said forensic experts were sent to Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies. Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.
Examiners worked quickly to provide a sense of closure to the anguished families of the missing, determining through a process of elimination who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.
According to Jewish tradition, funerals take place promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were buried without medical examination, leaving potential evidence now buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that while it was possible to recover some evidence from the bodies, it would be difficult.
Fintzy said Israeli security forces still found images showing women being brutalized. Sitting at his desk in an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he opened his phone, tapped it, and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vaginas, which he said was shot by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.
A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, police chief, said she believed the brutality against women was a combination of two cruel forces: “the hatred of Jews and the hatred of women.”
Some paramedics now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they moved bodies, cut cable ties and cleaned up sites of carnage. They inadvertently destroyed evidence out of respect for the dead.
Many volunteers who work for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and work under strict rules that require great respect for the dead.
“I didn’t take any photos because we’re not allowed to take photos,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “Looking back, I regret it.”
According to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel's Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs, there were at least three women and one man who were sexually abused and survived. “None of them were willing to physically come for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they worked with a woman who was raped at the rave and was unable to speak to investigators or reporters.
The trauma of a sexual assault can be so severe that survivors sometimes don't talk about it for years, several rape counselors said.
“Many people are looking for the golden proof of a woman saying what happened to her. But don't look for it. Don’t put that pressure on this woman,” said Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. “The bodies tell the story.”
The woman in the black dress
One of the last living images of Abdush – captured by a security camera mounted on her front door – shows her leaving the house with her husband Nagi at 2:30 a.m. on October 7 to go to the rave.
He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. She wore a short black dress, a black scarf around her waist, and combat boots. As she struts out, she takes a sip from a glass (her brother-in-law remembers it was Red Bull and vodka) and laughs.
You have to live life as if it were your last moments. That was her motto, her sisters said.
At daybreak, hundreds of terrorists approached the group from various directions and blocked the highways leading out. The couple jumped into their Audi, hurling a series of messages.
“We are at the border,” Abdush wrote to her family. “We go.
“Explosions.”
Her husband called his family himself and left a final audio message for his brother Nissim at 7:44 a.m.: “Take care of the children,” he said. “I love you.”
Shots were fired and the news stopped.
That night, Eden Wessely, an auto mechanic, drove to the rave site with three friends and found Abdush half-naked on the road next to her burned car, about 9 miles north of the site. She did not see the body of Abdush's husband.
She saw other burned cars and other bodies and shot several videos in the hope that they would help people identify missing relatives. When she posted the video of the woman in the black dress on her Instagram story, she was inundated with messages.
“Hello, according to your description, did the woman in the black dress have blonde hair?” Read a message.
“Eden, the woman in the black dress you described, do you remember the color of her eyes?” another said.
Some members of the Abdush family saw this video and another version of it filmed by one of Wessely's friends. They immediately suspected that the body was Abdush, and based on the way her body was found, they feared that she may have been raped.
But they kept alive the glimmer of hope that somehow it wasn't true.
The videos also caught the attention of Israeli officials. Very soon after October 7, they began collecting evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Abdush's body in a presentation to foreign governments and media organizations, using Abdush as a representation of the violence committed against women that day.
A week after her body was found, three government social workers appeared at the gate of the family's home in Kiryat Ekron, a small town in central Israel. They spread the news that 34-year-old Abdush had been found dead.
But the only document the family received was a one-page letter from Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressing condolences and hugging him. The body of Abdush's husband, 35, was identified two days after that of his wife. It was badly burned and investigators used a DNA sample and his wedding ring to determine who he was.
The couple had been together since they were teenagers. It seems like only yesterday to the family when Nagi Abdush set off to work repairing water heaters with a bag full of tools over her shoulder, and Gal Abdush made mashed potatoes and schnitzel for her two sons, Eliav, 10, Refael cooked, 7.
The boys are now orphans. They slept with an aunt the night their parents were killed. Gal Abdush's mother and father have filed for permanent custody and everyone is helping.
Night after night, Gal Abdush's mother Eti Bracha lies in bed with the boys until they fall asleep. A few weeks ago, she said she was trying to quietly leave her bedroom when the younger boy stopped her.
“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”
“Darling,” she said, “you can ask anything.”
“Grandma, how did mom die?”
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