Why Do We Doubt That Hamas Raped Israeli Women?
The standard of evidence appears to be higher in this war than in others.
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During President Biden’s State of the Union address last night, I was startled when he mentioned the sexualized violence Hamas committed against Israeli women and girls on October 7.
In case you missed it, there’s been a big kerfuffle over a New York Times story that laid out evidence that this occurred.
Beyond the internal politics within the world’s most tightly wound newsroom, the very issue of the existence of sexualized violence on October 7 is something that politicians, human rights advocates and others I know have denied. Which is simply baffling to me. As someone who has studied and reported on this exact topic for at least 13 years in various countries around the world, I’ve learned a few things. Today, on International Women’s Day, let me tell you why I’m so bewildered.
Under a sweltering sun, I wandered from tent to tent, covered in sand, looking for women to speak to about rape. It was 2013, and I was at the Zaatari refugee camp, where a couple hundred thousand Syrians were trying to survive in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s rampaging conflict. It was a delicate thing, asking about sexualized violence in a conservative Muslim community. Women were reluctant to speak, and men were sometimes barriers to even accessing women.
Before this, in countries like Mexico or Honduras, I’d learned how insanely difficult it is to find women willing to talk about being sexually assaulted. Fear of retribution, of being divorced or shunned, along with the usual shame and victim-blaming that comes with rape, keeps women from speaking out.
By the time I reached the Jordanian desert, I’d already been reporting on sexualized violence in the Syrian conflict for two years using a live crowd-sourced map that was a collaboration between the Women’s Media Center and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health — it was an innovation and an experiment, tracking rape in a live war.
We found enough evidence to support the fact that there was widespread and possibly systematic sexualized violence against women in Syria, a fact I was willing to state publicly when others were not. I knew a few things they didn’t.
NB: The existence of sexualized violence by a warring party does not necessarily equal systematic or widespread rape, two base criteria to prove crimes against humanity. War crimes, however, constitute “any serious violation of international humanitarian law,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
When I wrote this article for The Atlantic, Erin Gallagher, a former investigator of sexualized and gender-based violence for the U.N.’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria (and before that on Libya), had spent months speaking with Syrian women and men in camps in Jordan and Turkey. She said then that it had been very difficult to get an accurate idea of the scope of sexualized crimes in Syria, and that “there are more victims out there than what we are finding.” Getting a true idea of the scope, she said, “is going to take time, trust building, and a broader, holistic approach.”
It’s been more than a decade since my trips to the borders of Syria and speaking to Gallagher, and the fundamental challenges of determining rape in war remain the same.
Now, we’re faced with the reckoning of what happened to Israeli women on October 7. Were they raped? But perhaps equally as important, do we believe they were raped?
I wrote on Dec. 15, 2023, that the extant evidence that Hamas members had raped Israeli women on October 7 was potentially a turning point for proving rape in war. There were videos, eyewitness accounts and more. Some of this evidence has since been recanted or revised, but there’s still what I’d call a shit-ton of it, as these things go.
So why has it taken five months for the United Nations to come out with a report that says that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas or other Palestinians raped Israeli women that day and committed other acts of horrific sexualized violence?
Back in December, I spoke with an expert who studies rape in war. She was exasperated by the nonaction of the world on what was perpetrated upon women and girls in Israel. She asserted that people like the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls at the U.N., Reem Alsalem, and others — including some prominent human rights groups — were using a higher standard of evidence collection than in other conflicts, that they were only interested in eyewitness testimony, which is difficult to make sense of when the witnessing occurs under severe stress in the middle of an assault or its aftermath.
Why was there was this bizarrely high level of required evidence and why was it was preventing people from making any kind of statements?
The time delay and extreme caution (which is, of course, good, to a degree) fed and continues to feed doubters, like a large part of the New York Times newsroom. So, the big question is: Why is the threshold for proving that rape occurred in this war so high?
My source thinks it’s because people have been afraid of looking like they are on Israel’s side. Aka it’s as politicized as the entire Middle East conflict. This makes the standard of belief all that much higher.
There are, however, some obvious details that have impeded investigations of what happened on October 7.
The Israeli government is known to be a harsh gatekeeper, which may have hampered the work of human rights workers. Also, the first people on the sites of the massacres were not trained investigators but soldiers, some of whom felt the need to cover up naked women, some of whom accidentally contaminated crime scenes. Nobody collected forensic evidence during these horrors. The Israeli Defense Forces’ immediate goal was to identify the dead and clear the areas in turmoil. The U.N. report explains that its investigators were not able to interview any survivors because of their extreme trauma and/or fear that their identification could further harm Israeli women held captive in Gaza. And Hamas may have taken some of the survivors into Palestinian territory.
Also, many of the bodies were burned in the attacks. Then there’s the fact that Jewish law requires burial within 48 hours.
As my source put it in December, “It’s kind of hard to talk to a dead person.”
Even if we take away the decades of circumstances that has made the situation in Israel/Gaza so volatile, I can’t help but ask a question I’ve asked many times over the years: Why are we so able to accept readily that men are tortured in war, but when it comes to sexualized violence against women and girls, people are so willing to deny it?
And, critically, why, when decades of scholarship has explained that such a personalized, dehumanizing conflict like that between Israel and Hamas leads to degrading and brutal acts like rape, why — why — is it so hard to believe that this happened on October 7?
Even as Israel hatefully destroys Gaza and its citizens, committing what may be ruled war crimes one day, that does not take away from the hatred that caused members of Hamas to attack Israeli women and girls. If there were ever a conflict in which I’m sure that one side or both would commit sexualized violence, it’s this one. The years of pain and loathing…that’s what led to the Rwandan genocide, which was replete with rape. Tens of thousands of children have been born from the sexualized violence carried out in the three months of the Rwandan genocide. My point is that such ethnic hatred leads to the violation of women.
Regardless of whether every piece of evidence from October 7 turns out to be correct or not, I have no doubt in my mind that Hamas raped Israeli women. You shouldn’t either.
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There is no doubt that Israeli women and girls were, and are still being raped. Even corpses of Israeli women were brutalized. The world just doesn't want to hear it or believe that it happened and if it happened, Jews deserved it somehow. I believe it is time to release the videos that Hamas took of themselves committing the atrocities . I understand the families didn't want these images released because of privacy, but this narrative needs to be reset.
I believe that Hamas raped Israeli women and I also believe that Israeli soldiers are doing similar acts to Palestinian women. However I’ve not seen as much attention being given to the suffering of the latter.
I do agree that the level of scrutiny put on brutalized women is being showcased on a global scale here in the case of raped Israeli women but on the other hand we have those who are being completely overlooked which is an inhumanity as well. It’s all horrible.