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| Gaza women abuse |
The Israeli police have been working on the identification of the bodies of those killed in the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival. Witnesses have reported seeing multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts, and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners. Video testimony of an eyewitness at the festival site, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation, and execution of one victim.
Videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack and photographs of bodies taken at the sites afterwards suggest that women were sexually targeted by their attackers. Few victims are thought to have survived to tell their own stories. Their last moments are being pieced together by survivors, body-collectors, morgue staff, and footage from the attack sites.
Israel's Women's Empowerment Minister, May Golan, told the BBC that a few victims of rape or sexual assault had survived the attacks, and they were all currently receiving psychiatric treatment. However, the majority were brutally murdered. They are not able to talk, not with the government or the media.
Videos filmed by Hamas include footage of one woman handcuffed and taken hostage with cuts to her arms and a large patch of blood staining the seat of her trousers. In others, women carried away by the fighters appear to be naked or semi-clothed. Multiple photographs from the sites after the attack show the bodies of women naked from the waist down or with their underwear ripped to one side, legs splayed, with signs of trauma to their genitals and legs.
Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a legal expert at the Davis Institute of International Relations at Hebrew University, described the details that Hamas knew about what to do to women: cut their organs, mutilate their genitals, rape. He said that it brings me chills just to know the details that they knew about what to do to women: cut their organs, mutilate their genitals, rape them.
Israel's police chief Yaacov Shabtai said that many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to talk and that he thought some of them would never testify about what they saw or experienced. Eighteen young men and women have been hospitalised in mental health hospitals because they could no longer function. Other survivors are reportedly suicidal. One of those working with the teams around survivors told the BBC that some had already killed themselves.
Much of the evidence has come from volunteer body collectors deployed after the attacks and those who handled the bodies once they arrived at the Shura army base for identification. One of the body collectors volunteering with the religious organisation Zaka described to me signs of torture and mutilation, which included, he said, a pregnant woman whose womb had been ripped open before she was killed. Her foetus was stabbed while it was inside her.
Hundreds of bodies were collected from the attack sites by volunteers. Investigators admit that opportunities to document the crime scenes or take forensic evidence carefully were limited or missed in the first chaotic days after the attacks. "This was a mass casualty event," police spokesman Dean Elsdunne told journalists at a briefing.
The Shura base in Gaza, Israel, has been the scene of a series of horrific attacks by Hamas militants on 7 October. The Israeli military has been bombarding Gaza, and teams have been identifying bodies from the makeshift hub of tents and refrigerated shipping containers. The bodies are being examined for signs of rape and sexual violence, including broken pelvises from sustained violent abuse. The number of victims is difficult to define due to the state of the bodies, but some soldiers have confirmed that there are "abundant" women and girls of all ages who have been sexually abused.
The civil commission headed by Dr Elkayam-Levy is calling for international recognition that the events on 7 October were systematic abuse, constituting Crimes Against Humanity. There are definite patterns in the violence visited on the bodies that arrived at the Shura base, with groups of women from the same place being treated similarly. This suggests that different groups of terrorists had various forms of cruelty.
Israel's government points to documents found on Hamas fighters that appear to support the idea that sexual violence was planned. It has released clips of interrogations with some captured soldiers in which they seem to say that women were targeted for this purpose. UN Women condemned the brutal attacks by Hamas and expressed alarm over the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.
Dr Elkayam-Levy has said that international women's rights organisations have taken far too long to respond to her call for support. She believes that this is the most documented atrocity humanity has known. The most challenging moments for women in the Shura identification unit are seeing the mascara on their eyelashes or the earrings they put on that morning. As a woman, she says that "terror" is what terrorises her.
This article is republished from BBC News by Lucy Williamson. Click here to read the original article.
