A team of United Nations experts tasked with gathering information on sexual violence linked to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel found “reasonable grounds to believe” that some victims were sexually assaulted, including rape and gang rape, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
“In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed,” a press release announcing the report’s findings said. “The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations.”
The 23-page report said the team also found “clear and convincing information” that some of the women and children taken back to Gaza that day by Hamas as hostages were subjected to “rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” There were “reasonable grounds to believe,” it said, “that this violence may be ongoing.”
I think it’s important to separate the narrative of the hostages themselves versus the scores of dead bodies left on October 7th, which were the focus of this report. I have been looking for evidence to confirm or refute these allegations for months, and the issues surrounding it can be summarized mainly as stemming from evidence collection.
Due to the active fighting in the area, forensics did not arrive to process the body until days later, leading to a significant loss of forensic evidence as the bodies decayed in the heat for days. Without that, there’s no evidence to indicate exactly what transpired in terms of sexual crimes and why the investigation has gone down its current path.
I don’t know how much of the evidence they’ve collected will be made public, but the descriptions in the linked report are very graphic and leave little doubt that sexual assaults took place.
