CHICAGO (WLS) -- Chicago advocates for survivors of sexual assault say they are outraged more attention hasn't focused on the extent that Hamas allegedly used rape as a weapon of war in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Before their houses were torched by Hamas on Oct. 7, hundreds of Israeli women were "murdered twice," according to a United Nations presentation on Monday. The startling turn of phrase refers to Israeli women who were raped and left for dead, then finally killed with rounds of gunfire by Hamas militants.
"Some of these women were murdered twice: The first time when blood-thirsty Hamas terrorists committed shocking acts of sexual violence against them," said Tal Heinrich, a veteran Israeli Journalist who was emcee for the United Nations presentation. "The second time these women were murdered was when terrorists put a bullet in them. In at least one case, this happened simultaneously. Let that sink in."
[i.e rape and murder and then rape of a corpse committed at the same instant]
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"This was part of their orders: To rape and torture as many people as they could," [Julie] Smolansky, Chicago advocate for survivors of sexual assault said.
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“Often women came in [to the morgue] in just their underwear," said Shari Mendes, a reservist who worked for two weeks at the base helping medics with fingerprinting and cleaning female soldiers' bodies.
"Sometimes we had people who – we just had a torso, okay – or they were very decomposed or they were mutilated," Mendes said. "I saw very bloody genitals on women."
…commander Shelly Harush told parliament on Nov."Often women came in in just their underwear," said Shari Mendes, a reservist who worked for two weeks at the base helping medics with fingerprinting and cleaning female soldiers' bodies. 27 they have 1,500 testimonies on atrocities including sexual violence, rape and genital mutilation from survivors, security forces, first responders and families of victims. At least a dozen graphic testimonies have been shared by government agencies and first responders.
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Mendes' account is one of seven given to Reuters by first responders or others dealing with the dead that attest to alleged sexual violence. Those people said they found women semi-naked, bound, eviscerated, stripped, bruised, shot in the head or torched, at two communities including Kibbutz Beeri, and at an open-air music festival near the Gaza border fence.
Reuters reviewed images matching some of the descriptions or attesting to other possible atrocities. …
TESTIMONY
The testimonies are mounting. At the Shura base, Rabbi Israel Weiss told reporters some bodies were naked and "torn apart."
Nachman Dyksztejn, a volunteer for Zaka Search and Rescue who was at the festival, wrote in testimony shared by Zaka with Reuters that he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: "Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked."
Concert producer Rami Shmuel, who helped in the festival searches for casualties, said he saw the bodies of three women, one naked and the other two stripped from the waist down. One was clearly shot in the back of the head, he said, and torched.
Police say they have over 60,000 "visual documents" including videos from Go-Pro cameras worn by attackers, CCTV footage and images from drones.
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…verified the locations of two other videos that suggest sexual violence, shared on social media within a day of the attack.
Of these, one showed the half-naked body of a woman from the festival, later publicly identified by her mother as tattoo artist Shani Louk, slung across the back of a pickup truck and paraded through Gaza.
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The other showed a young barefoot woman, also identified to Reuters by her mother, being pulled by the hair from the trunk of a van in Gaza and shoved into its back seat by an armed man amid shouts of "God is great." Her hands are tied. The seat of her trousers appears bloodied as do her ankles and arm. The image does not show what happened to her.
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On Nov. 14, police showed reporters footage of an unnamed witness of the festival attack. In it, she said she saw gunmen gang rape one woman and cut off the breast of another and throw it on the street. Later, she said, a gunman shot the woman in the head while raping her. …
[rape, murder, rape of a corpse]
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The body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” In another house, a person’s genitals were so mutilated that “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.”
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Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli military reserve unit tasked with preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial, said her team saw several who were killed on Oct. 7 “who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others had mutilated faces, or multiple gunshots to their heads.
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Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny from human rights groups, or the news media, amid the larger war between Israel and Hamas — and until a few days ago, they had not been specifically mentioned or condemned by UN Women, the United Nations’ women’s rights agency, which has regularly spoken out about the plight of Palestinian women and girls.
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…ample evidence has been collected, like the bodies of women found partially or fully naked, women with their pelvic bones broken, the accounts of medical examiners and first responders, videos taken by Hamas fighters themselves, and even a few firsthand witnesses like a woman, in a video made public last month by police officials, who said she had watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilate her and then shoot her in the head.
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At the United Nations on Monday, Yael Richert, a superintendent with the Israeli police, presented video of witness interviews, including with a paramedic who said, “Shooting was targeted at sexual organs, we saw that a lot.”
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Hamas may not want to release women to keep them from talking, U.S. official says
- Miller suggested that Hamas' reluctance to release the women in exchange for a continued pause in Israel's counter-attack on the terror group was a reason negotiations for more hostage releases broke down.
- "It seems that one of the reasons they don't want to turn women over that they've been holding hostage — and the reason this pause fell apart — is that they don't want these women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody," Miller said in the daily State Department press briefing.
Miller's comments are in line with what two senior Israeli defense and intelligence officials have told Axios about Israel's assessment of Hamas' reluctance to release the women.
- Israeli officials believe there are about 18 women who are still in Hamas' custody, most of them taken captive when Hamas militants raided a music festival
- Hamas refused to release the rest of the Israeli women it is holding and asked to discuss releasing elderly men instead.
