Hamas’s sexual terrorism is laid bare and still the world chooses to look the other way
There are many ways evil people attack those they hate. First and foremost, they physically harm them. They burn, rape and kill.
Then they shame and terrorise them: celebrating massacres, live-streaming murders. But there is one weapon far more devastating than all of this. It’s cheap and widely available. That weapon is, of course, silence.
To read any one of the 298 pages of the Civil Commission’s report, published last week, on the rapes carried out by Hamas on October 7 is to be plunged back into hell. There is not only the graphic horror of it — the maimings, the torture, the shocking sexual violence — but the knowledge that, in the days, months and years after it happened, many people pretended it hadn’t.
There were no outcries, no populist movements. Few feminists spoke about what had happened to Jewish women, even though sexual terrorism was, as the report now shows, central to Hamas’s plan.
UN Women waited months to concede, in a tweet, there may have been some “gender-based violence”. In this country feminists warned against being “Islamophobic” and “racist”. In 2024 the Jewish-American writer Phyllis Chesler was amazed to note a “shameful, even unbearable, silence” among her feminist colleagues, while watching feminists, lesbians, queers and gays flocking to the streets and “marching for Hamas”.
Reading the report now, I share her horror: how was this even possible? In every paragraph there are descriptions of women being stripped, raped and then killed. Sometimes, after they are killed, they are raped again.
They are mutilated: one witness at the Nova music festival said she saw Hamas fighters cut off a woman’s breast while they molested her. They threw it in the dirt and then played with it. She was then shot in the head while still being gang-raped.
Kibbutz Be’eri, three miles from the border, was found littered with dead women, often tied up, often naked. One victim had “knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers, tools, tools from the household” embedded in her body.
“The body was completely mutilated.”
Then there were the women who lay dead, blood surrounding their genitals.
At a military base female soldiers were “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina”. And when all that was over, and these criminals still hadn’t had enough, they would destroy the women’s faces.
“Many times these beautiful young women were shot in the eyes,” said one woman, Sharon Laufer, who helped prepare the bodies for burial.
Noa Lewis, another mortuary witness, said the reason for doing this was simple: “It crushes their beauty.”
What is most significant about the report, though, isn’t even the staggering testimony. It is its brutalised, anxious, painstaking tone. It is as if, at every turn, its writers — mostly independent Israeli lawyers and human rights workers — are still anticipating denial, silence or even scorn, even though the report is attested by 430 witnesses and backed up by ten thousand photos and bits of footage.
Pics, or it didn’t happen — that is what they are expecting.
And, in a way, last week, that is what happened.
I hadn’t planned to write on this topic — I mean, why bother? Every time it’s the same: some atrocity, some horror, then denial. Hamas fighters raped you? No, they didn’t — no one saw anything; there aren’t any survivors; no one said so; it didn’t happen; that person is lying. And even if Hamas did do it, don’t people who have lived under unspeakable oppression have a right to fight back? Rape as “resistance” — it is exhausting.
And if it isn’t denial — as it now, really, can’t be — there is another form of silence: distraction. If Jews are talking too loudly, or won’t shut up, people will always somehow discover something else, somewhere, to listen to.
And so, a day before the report came out, The New York Times ran a long article claiming that Palestinian prisoners had also been systematically raped, by settlers, soldiers and prison guards. The scale of the crimes was different: 14 mostly anonymous people gave their stories. One woman said she’d been shackled to a table by soldiers, who raped her while filming it. One man was repeatedly brutalised with a “metal baton”. An astonishing claim I didn’t believe was that after another man had been stripped, held down, tied and blindfolded, “a dog was summoned.
With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.”
But whether it’s true or not — whether I believe it or not — that isn’t the point.
The point is that in the very week Jews published extensive, conclusive evidence of “weaponised” sexual assault — a war crime — the only thing everyone ended up discussing was whether an alsatian can be taught to “penetrate” human beings.
The mockery of it.
Just as the Hamas fighters laughed at girls while they raped and murdered them, just as people bait Jews on marches and taunt them or are thrilled that they cower in their homes, last week people found, yet again, a way to trivialise their pain. And The New York Times, often described (by itself ) as themost important paper in the world, happily went along as part of it.
The piece, by the way, was framed, with typical pomposity, as a muchneeded corrective. Its tone was: too many stories about the rape of Jews!
(Even though the October 7 report didn’t come out until a day later.) It sought, repeatedly, to minimise Hamas atrocities, telling us they were nowhere near as bad as what’s happening in, say, Sudan (not many pieces on that either).
The cheapest and most widely available weapon? Silence
But mostly it insinuated that the rape of Palestinians was somehow more important; that it needed to be reported more urgently than the rape of the rich, entitled, colonialist Jews; and that the rape of Palestinian men was especially shameful: it’s not only horrific, it said, but it “harms the ability of [their] sisters and daughters to find husbands”.
Women as dependent vassals: is this the kind of emotional appeal The New York Times wants us all to unthinkingly jog along with? And they think Donald Trump hates women.
In the past few months I have been staggered by the number of teachers, intellectuals, artists and other middleclass people who strive to obscure, deny or ignore Hamas’s crimes. Even on Friday our prime minister chose to condemn “far right” agitators like Tommy Robinson rather than the regular pro-Palestinian hate march that also went ahead. But if The New York Times, if the BBC, if our politicians aren’t telling them to stop it, why should these people even pause? To those of you who ask, “Well, what can be done about it?”, the answer is simple. Show what they are doing. Show how every denial, every feint, every act of cowardice or avoidance, every conspiracy theory and outright lie is helping people who support a regime that not only wants to kill Jews but to rape and kill women too.
As for the report, at the start Sheryl Sandberg provides a quote. The point of the report, she says, is to “ensure” the world cannot ignore this. It cannot be “silent”. Her wish didn’t even last a day.
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