Massive Evidence Collection in Hamas Rapes Could Be a Turning Point
Mobile phone videos, metadata, eyewitnesses, security cams—all that evidence may be a historic first in the prosecution of rape as a weapon of war.
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In October, I—we—watched a video that showed a young Israeli woman being forced into a Jeep by a Hamas terrorist—her white pants darkened with what looked like blood around her crotch.
As a journalist specifically covering sexualized violence in conflict zones for more than a decade, and as the creator and former director of the online Women’s Media Center’s WMC Women Under Siege project, spearheaded by Gloria Steinem, I’ve seen and heard a lot of horrifying things done to women and girls in war. This video, however, shattered me. Beyond a visceral response to what the blood signified, I felt a sense of utter hopelessness witnessing Hamas gunmen manhandle this terrified woman, later identified as 19-year-old Naama Levy, as onlookers jeered her.
That such a video exists suggests that Hamas’s assault on Israeli women, combined with other open-source intelligence like geolocation, as well as witness accounts, has the potential to create a legal case like no other—a rare prosecution that could plausibly produce mass arrests for sexual assault during wartime. Pursuing such a case regarding Hamas’s October 7 attack and the widely reported abuse of Israeli hostages held in captivity in Gaza would offer an important step in the fight against impunity for the perpetrators of rape in war.
More than two months after it so publicly occurred, the sexualized violence wrought by Hamas is finally getting attention. Witnesses are speaking out about finding dead women and girls with everything from nails to knives to gunshot wounds in their vaginas, among other horrors. Groups that were slow to acknowledge that any of this even happened, such as UN Women—which had spoken out repeatedly about the impact on women and girls of the Israeli campaign in Gaza—have finally done so. And because of the extensive forensic work by the Israelis, witness statements, widespread video evidence disseminated by Hamas, and security camera footage of the butchery of October 7, there may be better and more thorough documentation of rape in the Israel-Gaza clash than in other conflicts where it has been used as a weapon of war, such as in Bosnia in the 1990s, in Syria by ISIS in the 2010s, and in Ukraine, where it is happening contemporaneously.
The question going forward is whether the evidence gathered will lead to legal prosecutions and, if so, whether that can deter future crimes against victims.
Rape is hard enough to document and prosecute in peacetime, let alone amid the chaos of war. Victims often refuse to speak to their friends and family, let alone criminal investigators, for fear of retribution or shame. My reporting on rape overseas began on a delegation of journalists and advocates with the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2012 in Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras, where we spoke to dozens of women who’d survived sexual assault—many of whom had never shared their experiences before. One older woman who’d been raped decades ago by a soldier in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which ran from 1960 to 1996, said that she had never spoken about it to anyone, including her husband. I was in the country when the former president who oversaw much of the carnage in the 1980s, General Efrain Ríos Montt, was placed under house arrest and charged with being complicit in the rape and torture of indigenous civilians—I wrote about it for The Atlantic.
In addition to the shame and fear of retribution many survivors experience, physical evidence is hard to gather in the war-torn hours, days, or weeks after trauma, and the attackers may not leave DNA evidence or even evidence of a physical assault at all. Sometimes, victims are murdered after being raped, as seems to have been the case during the Hamas attack. Also, trauma can affect the memories of women, making sexualized violence in war all the more difficult to prosecute.
Another barrier to prosecution is that societies refuse to believe the word of women who say they are victims of sexualized violence—whether in war or peacetime. While many are willing to accept that the non-sexualized torture of men is an atrocity intrinsic to conflict, in my experience, it’s much harder to get people to believe women’s accounts of rape. For those people, here are reports we created at WMC Women Under Siege on many conflicts. They’re full of information, such as the cultural attitudes of the community, legal precedents, and patterns of violence.
Back in 2011, as the Syrian civil war began, our WMC journalism project, alongside the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, created a live crowdmap to track rape there. It was the first attempt to live-track sexualized violence—and its mental and physical health consequences—in wartime in real-time. Following the Arab Spring, Syria, with its myriad factions and foreign fighters, proved inscrutable and excruciatingly difficult for journalists to cover, let alone for public health officials to collect data. The majority of the sexual abuse stories we gathered (of both men and women) were second or even thirdhand and challenging to confirm with anything like DNA-certainty. It’s not as though we expected women in the war zone to log on to our website and report their trauma. Still, we hoped that some of the thousands of fleeing refugees might be open to speaking out once they reached relative safety in Jordan and other nations in the region.
Clad in a hijab, I reported from the various dusty borders of Syria, looking for those willing to speak. Cultural constraints fostered a culture of shame and silence as well as a continued fear of persecution. If survivors talked to us, would their family members who remained in Syria be at risk? Might Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad have informers among the refugees? There were undoubtedly shabiha, oversized, bearded Syrian government-aligned thugs, along the Turkish border when I was there in 2013.
The Manichean war in Ukraine has offered a better—if that’s the right word—opportunity to gather stories of sexualized violence. There are two sides, not dozens. But of course, sexual assault survivors face stigma in the Orthodox Christian and Catholic nations of Eastern Europe just as they do in Sunni and Shia areas of the Middle East. And, as with all hot wars, reaching people near the frontlines is fraught with all kinds of danger.
Rape in war can either be a crime of opportunity or a strategy ordered from above. Yet that idea of a “crime of opportunity” has long prevented women and men from finding justice for having been violated.
In 1996, in the wake of a conviction of a Rwandan man for rape as a crime against humanity and a tool of genocide, by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Human Rights Watch wrote that rape “has long been mischaracterized and dismissed by military and political leaders as a private crime or the unfortunate behavior of a renegade soldier.” The group pointed out that it took many years for rape to be treated legally like other human rights abuses, even though it functions so similarly: an act of sexualized violence can instill fear in not just a single woman or man but in an entire community.
Post-genocide, researchers in Rwanda found evidence that the Hutus had run an organized campaign to infect Tutsi victims with HIV through rape and to mutilate them so they would be unable to bear children, adding to the already significant stigma and victim-blaming these women faced. Between 250,000 and half a million women were brutalized in just three months as madmen rampaged through villages with machetes—and that’s not accounting for the thousands who never came forward. Years ago, researchers and investigators made clear to me that for every one woman who says she was raped, there are likely at least eight more who don’t speak out.
The international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia created in the 1990s codified the use of rape as a weapon of war. In Bosnia, where Serbian forces are estimated to have raped between 20,000 and 60,000 women in the 1992-1995 war, justice came over many years at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which issued dozens of convictions for rape as a crime against humanity and as a war crime.
Crimes against humanity, according to the International Criminal Court, “include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.” Those acts include numerous crimes, such as rape and enslavement. War crimes, on the other hand, can be prosecuted even if there is a single victim. The underlying requirement is that a combatant committed the crime.
Both the ICTY and the ICTR had clear evidence pointing to a systematized plan by the Serbs and Hutus, respectively, to rape widely. In both cases, the patterns of abuse were similar across swaths of land, as were the words spoken by soldiers during the attacks. For instance, a witness for the ICTY told the court that when she was a prisoner at the Foča High School “rape camp” in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, the soldiers repeated the same things: “You Muslim women, you Bule [derogatory term], we’ll show you.” In Rwanda, women reported hearing their rapists degrade them as women “who needed to be made to suffer.”
Hadas Ziv, the policy and ethics director for the NGO Physicians for Human Rights - Israel, told the AP on Tuesday of the alleged rapes by Hamas: “What we know for sure is that it was more than just one case [of sexualized violence] and it was widespread, in that this happened in more than one location and more than a handful of times. What we don’t know and what the police are investigating is whether it was ordered to be done and whether it was systematic.”
Ziv’s language is precise for a reason. Right now, all investigators can say is that the sexualized violence carried out by Hamas is “widespread.” The question is whether it will be deemed “systematic” and, therefore, a crime against humanity, which is notoriously more challenging to prove. Few militaries leave behind written plans of their atrocities the way the Germans did in World War II.
So how do you prove it? You use witness testimony. You gather evidence of similar statements made by the perpetrators. You examine thousands of videos for helpful information. You’re using metadata, geolocation, and other data to track phones and vehicles. (Israel developed Pegasus, the intelligence spyware that can be targeted at phones without phishing attacks. Even if the IDF was caught flatfooted by the Hamas invasion, it’s entirely plausible that Israeli intelligence services Mossad and Shin Bet might be sitting on leads relating to rape that they have yet to recognize.) You gather forensic evidence from the survivors and from the victims who did not survive, although this is complicated in the case of the Hamas attack by the fact that Jews bury their dead as quickly as possible.
Those who investigate and prosecute wartime rape have a stoic determination worthy of the immense charge they’ve been given. Nearly a decade ago, I had a conversation with one of the world’s foremost authorities on rape in war, Patricia Viseur Sellers, the former legal adviser for gender at the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Despite the limitations in such evidence-gathering after the fact, she said plainly, “You start where you can.” In the case of Hamas, investigators of sexual crimes against Israeli women not only start where they can but have a grim head start over their predecessors.
This article was originally published in the Washington Monthly.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The reference to Physicians for Human Rights has been corrected to reflect that it is a separate organization from the New York-based NGO with the same name.
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As much as I am more well informed based on this essay, I really had a hard time pressing the heart to "like" it. For each rape victim who speaks up, there are eight that don't? How can that be?
The ceasefire in Gaza ended partly because the younger women were not released which was an Israeli condition. It was thought that they would tell of their sexual torture, therefore couldn't be let go alive. Unimaginable what they are going through.
Thank you for your continued work on this.
Thank you for your extensive and thoughtful reporting.