2023-12-08 11:00:05
Despite the complaints with evidence against Hamas about sexual attacks against women in Israel, the United Nations did not comment on the matter.
Witnesses recounted gruesome details of the Oct. 7 attack during a meeting at the UN in which the body was accused of silencing violence against Jewish women. A woman’s body had “nails and different objects in the female organs.” In another house, a person’s genitals were so mutilated that “we couldn’t identify if she was a man or a woman.”
Simcha Greinman, a volunteer who helped collect the remains of victims of the Hamas-led October 7 assault on Israel, paused long as he spoke those words Monday at an event at the United Nations. “Horrible things I saw with my own eyes,” he said, “and felt with my own hands.”
Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli military reserve unit in charge of preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial, said her team saw several dead women on October 7 “who were shot in the crotch, in the private parts, in the vagina, or they were shot in the chest. Others had their faces mutilated or several shots in the head.
Since the October 7 attack, in which more than 1,200 people died and some 240 were kidnapped, Israeli authorities have accused terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence – rape and sexual mutilation – especially against women. However, these atrocities have received little attention from human rights groups or the media, amid the broader war between Israel and Hamas, and until a few days ago had not been specifically mentioned or condemned by the UN. Women, the United Nations women’s rights agency, which has regularly spoken out on the plight of Palestinian women and girls.
Israelis and many Jews around the world say they feel abandoned by an international social justice community – women’s groups, human rights groups, liberal figures, among others – whose causes they have supported in crises around the world.
“Silence is complicity”
On Monday, about 800 people, including women’s rights activists and diplomats representing some 40 countries, crowded into a room at UN headquarters in New York to attend a presentation laying out the evidence. of large-scale sexual violence, with testimonies from witnesses like Mendes and Greinman.
“Silence is complicity,” Sheryl Sandberg, a former Meta executive, told those gathered. She, along with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, was one of the main organizers of the event. “On October 7, Hamas brutally murdered 1,200 souls and, in some cases, raped its victims first,” Sandberg added. “We know it from eyewitnesses, we know it from combat paramedics, we would know it from some victims if more of them had been allowed to live.”
Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, which it has said would violate Islamic principles. But numerous pieces of evidence have been collected, such as the bodies of women found partially or completely naked, women with broken pelvic bones, the accounts of forensic doctors and rescuers, videos recorded by Hamas fighters themselves, and even some first-hand witnesses. hand, like a woman who said, in a video made public last month by police officers, that she watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilating her and then shooting her in the head.
Documented attacks
Meni Binyamin, head of the Israeli police’s International Crimes Investigation Unit, said in an interview that he had documented “violent incidents of rape, the most extreme sexual abuse we have seen,” on October 7, against women and some men. . “I’m talking dozens.”
Israeli officials have not estimated how many women were sexually assaulted or mutilated. They say overwhelmed coroners initially had to focus on identifying bodies, rather than collecting perishable rape evidence. Few victims or eyewitnesses survived, and fewer have spoken publicly.
One of the points of attack of the terrorist group that entered Israel was an electronic party, which was held near the border with Gaza.
During this week at the United Nations, Yael Richert, superintendent of the Israeli police, presented video of interviews with witnesses, including a paramedic who said: “The shots were aimed at the sexual organs, we saw it a lot.”
Outside, hundreds of protesters accused the UN of applying double standards when it comes to sexual violence; some chanted: “Me too, unless you’re Jewish”, alluding to the slogan “Me Too” or “Me Too” of feminism.
> Organisms that remain silent
The United Nations, and UN Women in particular, have become a primary – although not the only – focus of growing outrage over their silence. Secretary-General António Guterres immediately condemned the Hamas massacre, but it was not until late November that he issued a statement saying that sexual crimes specifically related to it should be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted.”
Cochav Elkayam Levy, an Israeli law professor and founder of a commission on the October 7 crimes against women and children, said that on November 1 she sent a letter to UN Women, signed by dozens of academics, calling for a ” urgent and unequivocal condemnation of the massacre committed by Hamas”, including the use of rape as an instrument of war. “They didn’t even respond,” she said.
Erdan, the Israeli ambassador, said he sent two letters about the use of rape by Hamas militants, accompanied by photographs of the victims’ bodies, to Sima Sami Bahous, executive director of UN Women. “I didn’t get any response,” Erdan said.
By K. Rosman and L. Lerer
The New York Times
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