Israeli investigators examining the aftermath of the brutal October 7 attacks have found evidence that both men and women suffered sexual violence and rape at the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad attackers, activists claim.
Yael Sherer, a spokeswoman for the Israeli advocacy group Survivors of Sexual Violence, said there was physical evidence as well as eyewitness accounts of sexual violence against both genders in the attacks.
Sexual violence and rape occurred in these communities in southern Israel…we have some living survivors – not many – of both sexes. “This happened not only to women but to men too,” Yael Sherer told BBC Radio 4.
“Apart from finding bodies of murdered people, many corpses have been mutilated… Terrorists have ensured that these people are disgraced and dishonored,” she added.
Israeli police launched the largest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women ever in the country.
The head of the investigation, Shelly Harush, said: “It is now clear that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to frighten and humiliate people.”
Police have collected thousands of statements, photos and video clips that were unbearable to watch from a mother’s perspective, including “girls whose pelvises were broken because they were raped so many times.”
An Israeli officer walks at the site of the Super Nova festival in Re’im, Israel, on October 17, 2023, which was attacked by Hamas on October 7
After the attacks, a pile of corpses lies among the rubble at the Nova festival
Sigal Manzuri, whose daughters Norelle and Roya were killed while attending the Nova festival, hugs family friend Lior Goldstein during a tribute to the people killed in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas gunmen at the site of the festivals were killed
Revelers flee the supernova peace festival during the October 7 attacks that killed more than 1,200 Israelis
Abandoned and burned vehicles at the site of the October 7 attack on the Supernova desert music festival in southern Israel
Personal items left behind by Israelis after an attack that killed more than 260 music fans during a festival on October 7 near Re’im, Israel
Yoni Saadon, 39, who survived the Nova music festival attack by hiding under corpses, gave a harrowing account this weekend of the sexual violence he committed against women at the campsite.
One horrific image he described was the moment a woman’s decapitated head rolled across the street after she was beheaded because she refused to strip naked.
As the sun rose over the desert festival and Hamas terrorists stormed in, Yoni took shelter under a music stage. But a woman hiding next to him was identified by terrorists.
“She fell to the ground, shot me in the head and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it looked like I was dead too,” he told the Sunday Times.
“I will never forget her face.” Every night I wake up with it and apologize to her by saying, “I’m sorry.”
After an hour the shift manager looked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her.”
The woman screamed “Stop it,” he said, begging the terrorists to kill her to put her out of her misery.
“When they were done, they laughed and the last one shot her in the head,” he said.
The father of four admitted that his mind kept reminding him that it could have been one of his daughters or his sister who pulled out of the festival at the last minute.
The horror was far from over for Yoni when, hiding in the bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters catching a woman.
“She fought back and wouldn’t allow it to be taken off her,” he recalled. “They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and decapitated her and her head rolled across the ground. ‘I see that head too.’
Yoni told the Sunday Times his story at a support group for festival survivors in Sitria, southeast of Tel Aviv.
Three times a week, survivors from all over Israel meet with the parents whose children were among those murdered.
Among the volunteer therapists was 58-year-old Bar Yuval-Shani, who had her only sister Deborah and brother-in-law Shlomi Matias, both musicians and peace activists, killed at the Holit kibbutz by militants who broke into their safe space.
Festival goers flee from Hamas attackers. The identities of alleged victims of the sexual violence investigation have not been disclosed by Israeli police
According to the Israeli military, Hamas fighters crossed the Israeli border into the Gaza Strip using paragliders
Student Noa Argamani sits on a terrorist’s motorcycle and points at her helpless friend with her arms outstretched. She begs for her life
Yoni Saadon’s account is one of several rape witness accounts Yuval-Shani has heard from survivors of the festival, all of whom, she says, are “deeply traumatized.”
But Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a lawyer and professor at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and a gender-based violence advocate, has hit out at international organizations that she said were unwilling to recognize the Oct. 7 attacks as crimes against humanity.
“We have written letters to the CRC Committee, to the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, to UN Women and to numerous other UN bodies, asking them to recognize that this has happened, to condemn it and to recognize that it is “It’s a crime.” against humanity.
“We have continued to write to them – a petition from over 800 lawyers and gender rights experts… Regrettably, until a week ago, none of them said the explicit words ‘sexual violence’ perpetrated by Hamas against Israel.”
“That took too long… far, far too long.”
Eight weeks after the attacks that killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostage, evidence of widespread rape on October 7 is mounting.
According to the people who had to remove the lifeless bodies from the massacre sites, many of the women were left naked and showing severe signs of bleeding from their genitals.
Haim Outmezgine, commander of a Zaka special unit that collects remains of corpses, said: “We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival grounds and kibbutzim.” Nobody saw more than us.
“It was clear that they were trying to spread as much horror as possible – to kill, burn alive, rape… it seemed that their mission was to rape as many as possible.”
David Katz, head of Lahav 443 Criminal Investigation Department, did not give an exact figure on the number of cases being investigated, but said the investigation could take “six to eight months.”