As the Israel Police sifts through the massive quantity of evidence from Hamas’ massacre of Israelis last month, it’s working to build the case for charges of rape against many of the terrorists. Meanwhile, the founders of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, outraged at the silence from international women’s and humanitarian organizations, are documenting cases of Hamas’ use of sexual violence as a weapon against Israelis.

A compilation of footage of Hamas atrocities committed on Oct. 7 shown to journalists by the Israeli government includes extensive indications of sexual violence: Shani Louk sprawled, wearing only underwear, her legs bent at unnatural angles, across the back of a pickup truck. Naama Levy, a 19-year-old IDF soldier, pulled out of the trunk of a car in Gaza, with a large bloodstain across the seat of her sweatpants, her hands zip-tied behind her back, as men whoop and shout, “Allahu Akbar.” A woman on the ground, naked from the waist down, legs splayed, bullet holes in her head. Another dead woman with her underwear around her ankles. The face of a woman, her eyes open but seeing nothing, her face charred, gagged by what appeared to be underwear. 

A woman identified by Israeli Police officers only as S, who survived the massacre at the Nova Festival by pretending to be dead in a pile of corpses, described witnessing the gang rape and torture of a woman in testimony viewed by Jewish Insider.

“They bent a woman over and I understand he’s raping her, and then passing her to someone else,” S said. “She was alive. She was standing on her feet and bleeding from the back. I saw the situation. He pulled her by the hair – she had long hair. She wasn’t dressed.”

“He sliced off her breast and played with it,” S recounted.

Then, she said, “someone really penetrated her, and shot her in the head…He didn’t pick up his pants. He shot while he was still inside.”

Oz Davidian, a farmer who rescued about 120 partygoers from the Nova festival, where Hamas terrorists killed hundreds, also witnessed instances of sexual assault during the hours he drove between the festival area and safety, saying, “They shot in every direction. One was raping, the other shooting, continuing to attack, protecting him, continuing to shoot and watching his friend rape.”

A ZAKA volunteer found the body of a woman with “a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed” in Kibbutz Be’eri, and at the Nova party, he found “piles of women. Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked…When you look closer at their heads, you saw a single shot to the brain of each.”

Shari, a volunteer helping identify bodies at the IDF’s Shura morgue, said she saw that “women have been raped, children through elderly women have been raped, forcible entry to the point that bones were broken.”

This is only a fraction of the evidence of mass sexual violence by Hamas being gathered by both police and the civil commission.

“In over 38 years in Israel’s security forces, I never ever saw such cruelty,” Israel Police Chief Kobi Shabtai said in a press briefing this week. “There were sadistic sexual acts, cutting off limbs…A woman’s stomach was cut open and her baby taken out. I could not believe such things would happen in our time.” 

After Oct. 7, most of the authorities’ focus was on collecting and identifying the bodies in the mass casualty event, and crime scene investigation protocols could not be used in most cases.

Rape kits were not administered in most cases, because they can only be used to take DNA evidence within 48 hours, and at that point, the western Negev was “still an active combat zone,” Israel Police international spokesman Dean Elsdunne explained at the briefing.

“We did gather visual and DNA evidence once bodies arrived at Shura,” he said. 

“This is a sensitive, tedious process, and we are working to bring evidence to court and bring the terrorists to justice,” Elsdunne stated.

Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy of Hebrew University, founder of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, said that even without rape kits, there is a preponderance of evidence of mass sexual violence.

“When bodies of women are found without their pants and without their panties, we don’t have to have a rape kit. It’s not that kind of situation. You see vaginal bleeding. You get the bodies with only the tops dressed. And naked girls. Women without organs, without breasts. It’s not the usual rape case,” she told JI.

David Katz, the head of Israel Police’s Cyber Crimes Unit, said his team is sifting through tens of thousands of images and videos from GoPro cameras worn by Hamas terrorists, security cameras, drones, police body cams, phones and computers used by Hamas, social media and more, to create a detailed timeline of what took place on Oct. 7. That evidence will be used to prosecute the terrorists for all of their crimes, including rape.

The police will not specify the number of rape cases it has found so far but has gathered “several” eyewitness accounts of rape out of more than 1,000 accounts taken from the Oct. 7 massacre. 

They do not yet know of any cases of someone surviving rape, though officials briefing journalists pointed out that in cases of trauma, it may often take a long time for someone to speak up.

“Many of the survivors are having trouble talking,” Shabtai said. “Many probably won’t testify.” 

Elkayam-Levy said it would be “irresponsible” to specify a number, because most of the women – and men who were found naked, as well, she said – were murdered, and in many cases, “it takes years, sometimes many years, for sexual assault to be revealed. We know even from the Holocaust that it took many years to find out only partial information about sexual assault that happened.” 

Many of the cases the civil commission has seen follow a pattern observed in past conflicts, Elkayam-Levy said: “When there’s a chance to kill a woman who was raped, she is murdered. They don’t just leave a raped woman.”

“It’s as if Hamas learned the best way to inflict terror. If you read testimony of what happened in Bosnia [in the 1990s] it is very similar to what Hamas did…Pregnant women were slaughtered in Bosnia, there was gang rape, cutting women’s organs, breasts…and they murdered most of the victims after abusing them,” she said.

The Shin Bet has been interrogating Hamas terrorists, some of whom attested to seeing sexual violence or committing it themselves.

“They were given very clear orders to rape, to target women. They were given [Hebrew] translations of words like ‘take your clothes off’…Terrorists interrogated by the Shin Bet specifically said they came to rape everyone, including children and babies. It’s truly beyond comprehension,” Elkayam Levy said.

Though many of the videos, photos and testimony are already available online and shared on social media, denials are rampant and, six weeks later, UN Women and other major women’s organizations have yet to comment on Hamas’ use of rape as a weapon of war against Israelis.

Ahead of the International Day Against Gender-based Violence this week, UN Women launched a campaign saying “there is #NoExcuse for gender-based violence.” UN Women released two reports on Palestinian women last month, but none on Israelis since the Oct. 7 attacks. The U.N.’s special rapporteur on Violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, often comments on the conflict to criticize Israel, but she has not commented on Hamas’ attacks on Israeli women and girls.

Some prominent American feminists, including Angela Davis and over 140 others, made a point of not identifying with Israeli victims of sexual violence, with a letter avoiding the topic, and refusing “the use of colonial feminism and pinkwashing to justify genocide.”

Elkayam-Levy began work to establish the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women on the day on which the massacre took place, reaching out to her network of international law and international relations experts with a focus on gender. 

The civil commission’s initial aim was to send a report to U.N. agencies about what was unfolding, thinking they would proceed from there. The response, however, was silence.

“We saw they did not report even the initial information we sent, with documentation in videos and images,” she said. “We wanted to see some kind of expression of solidarity, just to condemn these crimes. We already knew people were taken hostage. You could see a woman with two of her children wrapped in a blanket and taken into Gaza, naked women taken into Gaza, girls. We wanted to see some kind of response to the unimaginable images and videos.”

“We didn’t even see a simple condemnation of these atrocities.”

After the initial outreach was ignored, Elkayam-Levy decided to write a more extensive report, signed by over 160 international law professors, some of whom were former members and chairpeople of U.N. committees.

“We described the war crimes committed here in Israel. The report specifically addressed crimes against women and children, the most heinous crimes you could imagine. We gave references for every single thing we wrote…We sent it to so many U.N. officials — but still didn’t get any response. That was really shocking – it’s still shocking,” she said.

Two Israeli women launched a grassroots social campaign called #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew to call out the U.N. for its silence, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry produced its own video on the matter.

Regardless of the international response, Elkayam-Levy and the commission continued their work – now with many more volunteers and witnesses joining the effort – because they felt a responsibility to bear witness and document the crimes. 

“We need to start treating this as one of the largest attacks on women in the history of Israel, even globally. We have a historic mission,” she said.

Elkayam-Levy had been invited to speak before the U.N.’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) as a leader of the women’s rights group Building an Alternative. That speech was scheduled for Oct. 31, and ended up being about gender-based war crimes.

“I was the only Israeli representative,” she recounted. “The others said Israel was committing genocide. It was a day after CEDAW published a statement not even mentioning the massacre, as though Oct. 7 disappeared in time… I called on them to condemn the crimes and explained how horrible this was for us as women here in Israel.”

Elkayam-Levy compared the denial of sexual violence by Hamas against Israelis to what many individual women face, at a massive scale.

“As feminists, we believe all women, even in a regular rape case that is not on video, that has no evidence. We believe women who say, ‘I was raped; I’ve been through hell.’ We’re saying ‘we’ve been through hell and beyond,’ and they” – international women’s organizations – “refuse to believe,” she said.

Elkayam-Levy described “the most paralyzing feeling.”

“It’s the same denial mechanisms we see at the individual level now being adopted by international bodies, and their silence is not only insulting, it’s also damaging and abandons women who experienced the most horrible atrocities. [Women’s organizations] are not here for us,” she added.

“It’s not only a crime against Israel and the Jewish people; it’s a crime against everything we believe in. It’s Western liberal democracies’ war against terror. This shouldn’t be our burden to carry alone.”