On Saturday, October 7, Hamas members attacking Israel attacked many women. As the Israeli authorities investigate, statements from rescuers and survivors emerge.
Rape as a weapon of war. Two months after the October 7 attacks, evidence of violent and sexual crimes by Hamas in Israel is mounting. Investigators have so far collected “more than 1,500 shocking and disturbing witness statements,” a police officer said last week in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.
BFMTV was able to speak with Haim Otmazgin, one of the first Zaka rescuers to intervene at the site of the massacre. At the Supernova festival and in the kibbutz attacked by Hamas, he discovered hundreds of corpses, lifeless, mutilated and sometimes abused.
That Saturday, October 7, faced with the horror, he took out his phone and automatically began taking photos of these abuses. To identify bodies and document crimes he witnesses.
“We see a woman taking off her clothes and being slashed with a knife,” says Haim Otmazgin on BFMTV. “There, another one with scissors in his vagina.”
“Sliced chest”, “a bullet in the head and another in the vagina”
Within the first few hours, the rescuer realized that dozens of women had been sexually abused before being shot by Hamas fighters. “We found a woman with a torn shirt and bra, she is almost naked, her underwear is very pulled up. She has a bullet in her head and another in her vagina.”
In an interview with BFMTV, Haim Otmazgin explains that he has almost 3,000 photos documenting these rapes and femicides. “I was there, I saw it with my eyes, I collected those bodies with my hands, I took those photos with my cell phone,” he assures.
On Monday, November 27, Shelly Harush, head of the investigation into the sexual atrocities committed by Hamas on Saturday, October 7, quoted the testimony of a survivor of the Supernova Festival before the Israeli Parliament.
“I remember a terrorist who pulled a girl by her hair, the woman was completely naked, he cut off her breast and threw her on the ground. They started playing with it,” says the police officer who names this survivor, whose name was not communicated. “He continues to pull her by the hair, then someone else penetrates her and shoots her in the head.”
A statement that appears to have been shared with several media outlets, including Britain’s BBC, which published a lengthy investigation on the subject. Hamas itself documented the abuses committed by its soldiers on October 7th. In videos posted by the Islamist group on social media, a German festival-goer is seen naked and unconscious being loaded onto a pickup truck. In another document we see a young woman with handcuffs and traces of blood on her crotch.
“They stopped when they thought I was dead.”
In the columns of Le Parisien at the end of November, a survivor of October 7th testified about the rape to which she was a victim. Esther (an assumed first name) explains that she was “raped in front of her boyfriend and beaten at the same time, forced to watch with a knife to her throat.”
“It was so painful that I lost consciousness, they stopped when they thought I was dead,” she told the daily. Mutilated, she now suffers from paralysis “that may never go away,” according to Le Parisien.
“And even if I walk again, I will limp. “I will always be the living image of the pogrom,” Esther summarizes.
Cochav Elkayam Levy, president of the parliamentary commission on October 7 crimes against women, said in November that “the vast majority of victims of the October 7 rapes and other sexual assaults were murdered and will never be able to testify.”
Others are still hostages. Washington says the Islamist movement is refusing to release the last women held in Gaza because it doesn’t want them to “tell what happened to them during their detention.”
“Mass rape”
This Tuesday, US President Joe Biden called for “unambiguously and forcefully condemning the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas terrorists.”
“All of us (governments, international organizations, civil society and the business world) must unequivocally and firmly condemn the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas terrorists,” he said.
In France, the minister responsible for equality between women and men, Bérangère Couillard, called for the “recognition of mass rape” this Wednesday. The United Nations, criticized by Israel and accused of “pro-Palestinian bias,” was “concerned about the devastating impact” of Hamas’ actions “on civilians, including women and young girls.”
“Since the Hamas attack, we have condemned and will continue to unequivocally condemn, anywhere in the world, any act of violence against women and girls in Israel and Palestine, including sexual violence, which is considered an unacceptable violation of human rights,” he stressed. November in a press release from UN Women, the United Nations branch for gender equality.
Hamas denies, speaks of “lies”
Hamas, for its part, said Monday that it “rejects” allegations that the Palestinian Islamist movement committed “rape” and sexual violence during its Oct. 7 attack, calling them “lies.”
In its statement, the Islamist movement criticized “Zionist campaigns that spread lies and unfounded accusations to demonize the Palestinian resistance.”
These “lies,” he continues, are the latest in “a series” and refer in particular to “the lie that Al-Chifa Hospital was used for military purposes,” which the Israeli army affirms but which Hamas denies .
On October 7, 1,200 people died in Hamas attacks in Israel. The Palestinian group also took 240 people hostage, some of whom were released in late November as part of a multi-day ceasefire.
In retaliation, Israel has been carrying out extensive military operations in the Gaza Strip for months. According to the Hamas Health Ministry, Israeli bombings killed 16,248 people, more than 70% women, children and teenagers, in the Palestinian enclave.
Nicolas Coadou, Théo Touchais, Nadav Halami and Ariel Guez