HALIFAX, Canada — Before traveling to this chilly Canadian city on the rocky northern Atlantic coast, thousands of miles from Israel, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an Israeli attorney who specializes in human rights law, pondered what she would say to 300 senior foreign-policy experts, defense officials and lawmakers. 

Most of the time at this year’s Halifax International Security Forum was dedicated to discussing how to shore up support for Ukraine and for global democracy. The war in Gaza, and the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, were not at the forefront of the conference agenda.

“I was really asking myself, what should be the key message? I think it’s the evolving nature of war,” Elkayam-Levy told Jewish Insider in an interview in Halifax on Saturday. “It’s important for me to say this to all of these leaders, national security leaders — they are much more innovative than all of us.”

Elkayam-Levy spoke to the confab in its first plenary session on Friday evening on a panel titled “New Eras Arrive,” alongside a Yemeni human rights activist, a senior NATO official and a top-ranking general at the U.S. Space Force. In an emotional address, she outlined a term that she coined to describe the grotesque violence that occurred on Oct. 7: “kinocide,” which Elkayam-Levy, chair of Israel’s Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes Against Women and Children, defined as the “targeted abuse of families.” 

“They made homes — they made family houses — a front line. A target,” Elkayam-Levy said of the Hamas terrorists.

When Elkayam-Levy began to study what happened on Oct. 7, talking to victims and relatives of those who were killed, and watching videos of the attacks, it became clear to her that something not seen before in modern war was happening: The attackers were committing violence against some family members and making others watch. Sometimes people who had just seen their loved ones killed were taken hostage. In some cases, the terrorists shared messages or footage from the attacks to the social media accounts of the people they killed or kidnapped, which then appeared in the feeds of other family members and friends. 

“It made me call international scholars around the world, asking them, have you heard of this? Is there a definition for this kind of pride of abusing families, of intensifying suffering by abusing familial relations?” Elkayam-Levy explained. 

She knew she had settled on a grim new concept in international humanitarian law when she met with Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister and the founder of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. 

“I told him, ‘Listen, Irwin, we’re seeing another abuse and another abuse of families, and I think there is something here. I think it’s a new crime against humanity,’” she recalled.

In recent months, Elkayam-Levy and her team have created a database documenting what happened to each family affected by the Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 people. She will be publishing a report on it next month.

With a sigh, Elkayam-Levy — a legal scholar whose work documenting the sexual violence of Oct. 7 earned her the Israel Prize, the state’s most prestigious honor, this spring — acknowledged that this was not the direction she expected her life to take. Before Oct. 7, she was an international law expert and scholar who studied gender inequality.

“Before Oct. 7, I was working on our dream for an equal society,” she said. “I find myself now describing evil and giving it names.”

Elkayam-Levy must also reckon with the fact that many of her colleagues in the feminist movement have abandoned Israel. 

“I taught the International system and its importance, a human rights system that was established from the ashes of the Holocaust and from the ashes of World War II. And I taught about the feminist movement that I felt a deep connection to,” she noted. “Oct. 7 — I felt shattered, like my inner beliefs have been shaken to my core by the lack of response, by their silence.”

Her responsibility wherever she goes, particularly in a place like Halifax with senior global leaders, is to remind everyone of what happened on Oct. 7, and what is still happening, with 101 hostages remaining in Gaza. 

But Elkayam-Levy views her work as an urgent rush against the growing denial of the atrocities of Oct. 7. 

“The denialism has become far more sophisticated than it was in the beginning, far more intelligent,” she said. “At the beginning, it was social media trolls. Now it’s respected journalists saying, ‘We’re not sure,’ questioning everything.” 

Among the defense- and democracy-minded attendees, Elkayam-Levy likely had an amenable audience for her urgent pleas. But that makes bearing witness no less important.

“We have to remember the urgency of these crimes that are continuing all around the world,” she said, “that it’s happening now also in Israel, with hostages still in captivity, and their families continue to suffer.”