Earlier this week, the Israeli government presented evidence at the United Nations about rape and mutilation committed by Hamas militants during the attack on October 7th, in which more than twelve hundred people were killed. “I was called down on October 7 to collect bodies and remains from the terror attack,” Simcha Greinman, a volunteer medical worker, said. “I saw in front of my eyes a woman. She was naked. She had nails and different objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that we cannot identify her, from her head to her toes.” An Israeli police superintendent shared testimonies from eyewitnesses, including one who saw girls with broken pelvises from “repetitive rapes.”
While some accounts of the horrific violence have now been corroborated by reporting from the BBC and other news agencies, one of the first comprehensive examinations of the sexual and gender-based violence on October 7th was conducted by a nonprofit called Physicians for Human Rights Israel, whose mission is to combat medical discrimination and improve access to health care in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. In a position paper, published last month, the organization called for an investigation into “widespread” sexual violence. “Based on the currently available information and the accounts indicating that sexual and gender-based violence occurred across several locations,” the report states, “an inquiry must be conducted to examine whether their scope and manifestations amount to crimes against humanity under international humanitarian law.” (The Israeli government has criticized the United Nations, saying its women’s-rights agency remained silent about the accusations of sexual violence until almost two months after the attack. Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sexual violence.)
I recently spoke by phone with one of the paper’s authors, Hadas Ziv, who is the director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and who lives in Tel Aviv. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why gathering information about sexual violence perpetrated on October 7th has been so difficult and contentious, how the report was put together, and the importance of collecting horrific stories to insure that survivors receive proper care.
What do we know about the sexual violence that occurred on October 7th?
Our position paper is based on materials that we collected from public media outlets and videos that we saw in groups on Telegram, as well as discussions with a legal adviser and a doctor who volunteers with a civil-society group that’s supporting the hostages and the families. We haven’t interviewed actual witnesses.
What I can say with a really high degree of certainty is that it wasn’t a few cases. It wasn’t here and there, or only on one occasion. There were many cases of different gender-based and sexual violence, and they were in the kibbutzim and in the Nova music festival: the most extreme gang rapes, mutilation of body parts, putting objects into women’s bodies, and having women paraded like trophies when they were taken into Gaza.
You say that you have not talked to the victims themselves. Is that because most of the victims are now dead? Are there people who are still alive who you’ve tried to talk to? I know this is very bleak and complicated. I’m just trying to understand.
Our decision was not to approach the actual victims or the eyewitnesses because we thought that this was too short a time afterward, and that we were not equipped to talk to them and treat them. Every time you ask them to tell the story, it’s opening up the trauma, and we are not professionals in this. What we wanted to do in this early stage was to try to portray the picture as we see it, and not leave the women’s groups alone on this—because we thought, It’s a human-rights issue, and it’s our obligation to look at what has happened. Actually, we issued two position papers after October 7th. One was about how Hamas specifically targeted rescue teams in order to prevent evacuation, prevent treatment; they shot paramedics, and they shot the tires of ambulances. The other issue was the sexual assault.
Can you talk more about how you put this report together?
It is a unique report for us because usually we don’t work on issues like this. As far as the conflict is concerned, it’s the first time that we have analyzed the actions of Hamas, of the Palestinian militants, because usually what we do is we speak about patients in Gaza and the humanitarian situation in Gaza and freedom of movement. That’s our expertise. Now we had to take our expertise into our own society and look into what happened during the conflict. I watched a lot of videos and I asked for connections within different groups and people in the Army, who sent me photographs. Then I looked on Telegram and I went into the materials that were made public. Roni Ben Canaan, my partner on this, was experienced in gender-based violence. She came from a hotline that helps women who were victims, and now she’s working with Physicians for Human Rights.
We had three aims. One was to see what has happened and to give a picture to the Israeli public and to the international public. The second was that we cared about the hostages and, from history and other cases, we know that violence doesn’t stop with the abduction. It sometimes continues when you are held hostage, and we wanted to pressure our government to do everything within its power to release them as soon as possible. Another significant aim was to make our medical and health-care system aware and create a trauma-sensitive system to accept victims and to treat them.
So one concern was that, given the scale of sexual violence on October 7th, sexual violence could continue—and that was one reason it was imperative to get the hostages back as soon as possible?
Yes. We know that people who witness sexual violence or experience sexual violence are in need of really, really urgent treatment. We know they do not receive this treatment while in Gaza, but in fact suffer further violence and neglect.
I’m trying to understand whether we have some sense of how many people experienced this on October 7th.
I think it was widespread. But, from what I understand, there are few difficulties. First of all, some of the bodies that reached the national forensic institute were beyond identification. They were completely burnt. The rescue teams were traumatized. Because it was the first time that we saw sexual violence in conflict—this is something we haven’t seen before—they did not come prepared to collect the testimony and collect the evidence that is needed. Much of the material has not been released yet. It’s in the hands of the police.
When you say this had never happened before, you’re saying that there’d been attacks in Israel from Hamas militants and others, but there’d never been sexual violence like this—and when the police and military came that they weren’t prepared to work with survivors or victims of sexual violence?
They did not expect it. They were surprised. For example, as in one of the testimonies, if an ambulance driver or a paramedic sees a woman, a youth, legs spread, lower body exposed, semen on her back, he says she was raped, but he’s not an expert. All we know is there was sexual abuse here because of how we found the body, but he’s not an expert to say that she was raped. But, as far as the mutilation is concerned, this is something that we are certain of because you don’t need to be an expert in order to see that a breast is cut off.
When you talk about watching Telegram videos, can you explain what you mean?
This is something that I’ve done because, in the beginning, when we started writing the report, we did not think that we would find ourselves in a situation where people would ask us, “Prove it. How do you know?” We thought that the testimonies we used in our report from two women at the Shura military base, where most of the bodies were taken, and a paramedic from the Army and some eyewitnesses—we thought that was enough. One of the women was assigned to the forensic medical team. One was responsible for handling the bodies of female soldiers. But more and more, we were asked, “How can you say it? How can you prove it?” Then I found that I needed to look at some of the videos.
I saw two videos that are widely distributed. There was one of a woman who has been pulled into a jeep and her pants are bloody, and you see that they are really violently dragging her into the vehicle. And the other one is of a woman half-dressed and her body’s in an open truck and she’s being paraded like a trophy. I think she’s dead already, but I can’t be certain and people are spitting on her. I also saw the beheading of a man, and bodies that had been burned. I went into this one Hamas group on Telegram, but I stopped because it was too much.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, “The extensive evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 should not be contaminated by unverified stories disseminated by Israeli search and rescue groups, army officers and even Sara Netanyahu.” Sara Netanyahu is the wife of the Prime Minister. It does seem like there are false stories circulating as well as true stories. How did you deal with that?
We were very careful in not trusting sources that we thought might be unreliable. For example, the Israeli security agency released confessions of Hamas people and we took those with more than a grain of salt. We thought, It can be that they were threatened. It can be that they are tortured because we know that sometimes torture is used on Palestinian prisoners and detainees. We thought, We cannot rely on them.
In order to say that it was systematic, you need to show orders and a method, but saying that something was “widespread” was easier to feel sure about. It’s for the legal teams to investigate whether it was systematic and to define whether the scale is large enough to define it as a crime against humanity. We ask for people to investigate. When I looked at the videos, and I spoke to a doctor to confirm, for example, that doctors saw mutilation. I consulted and heard from a doctor, and he spoke to his colleagues and they saw torn vaginas.
I know that maybe some cases will be refuted, but I think that we have enough to say that the picture is still correct. I don’t trust politicians at all. If Sara Netanyahu says something, she’s not an eyewitness, she’s not part of a rescue team.
When you said you talked to a doctor, did you mean that if a media report would quote a doctor, you would try to reach out to that doctor?
No. I spoke to a doctor who is involved with supporting the families of the hostages, and I asked him to speak to doctors in hospitals and rescue teams and to see whether they can confirm that it was widespread, whether they’ve seen evidence of that. And he spoke to a few of his colleagues and then he said, “Yes, it did happen.”
You spoke earlier about how this was new for your group. How do you think this work fits into its larger mission?
First of all, we always work with Israeli residents, but not in relation to the conflict. This is the first time that we analyzed what Hamas was doing to Israelis because we work on policy matters—public health and against privatization and with migrant workers and with prison detainees. I think the message is important that we are doing it because we are a human-rights organization. To look the other way and leave women’s organizations alone would not be respectful. They will need to deal with most of the cases, because many women who are raped will not go to the police. First of all, they go to the hotlines. We know it from civil rapes, not just in armed conflict.
I think one should have a big enough heart to look at victims anywhere. For me as a woman, it was extremely traumatic to see, and it was important to acknowledge it, to recognize what has happened, to call on our government not to abuse the victims as tools in propaganda but, rather, really look into what they need to regain control of their lives. This is what we wanted—to support them. ♦
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