For nearly three years, Cochav Elkayam-Levy has built a record of Hamas’s crimes on Oct. 7. As another anniversary of the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust approaches, many of the survivors and relatives of victims and survivors, whose experiences the legal scholar has documented, are struggling to get through the days leading up to it.
“It’s very hard for them. It’s very triggering,” Elkayam-Levy told JNS. “Some are still in the depth of the trauma, and some are already growing out of it and finding meaningful ways to commemorate their loved ones.”
“But especially those days, I think many of them are mourning,” she said.
The founder and chair of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children spoke with JNS a week before the anniversary of Oct. 7 about the status of efforts to document the crimes and pursue accountability and where, three years later, she thinks international responses fall short.
In June, Elkayam-Levy presented the commission’s latest report, “Silenced No More,” the product of a two-year investigation of sexual and gender-based violence during the Oct. 7 attacks and against hostages taken to Gaza, at the United Nations.
The 300-page report, published in May, draws on more than 430 testimonies and interviews and more than 10,000 photographs and video segments—all adding up to more than 1,800 hours of material.
The evidence showed “unequivocally, or in a way that is undeniable” that “the sexual atrocities were calculated,” Elkayam-Levy told JNS. “The sexual violence was a strategy that was meant to intensify victims’ suffering.”
Gathering the evidence for the report was “difficult” and “traumatizing” for her and colleagues.
“We weren’t sure whether we’ll be able to carry this huge mission of documenting the sexual atrocities,” she told JNS. “Thank God, we feel that we made one huge achievement and that is to move the conversation from whether these crimes happened to what are their consequences.”
As the commission enters its next phase, those consequences are increasingly where it is focusing its attention.
It aims to answer questions about legal accountability and victim compensation. Others, Elkayam-Levy said, have forced Israeli authorities to confront new forms of terrorism, including what she calls the “digital crimes” of Oct. 7.
“How do you deal with many questions of families, for instance, that witnessed the videos, that witnessed the crimes or that were targeted with those videos—that Hamas sent them intentionally videos and emails from Oct. 7 and from captivity?” she said.
Hamas and other terrorists sent footage to relatives and images of their loved ones being attacked. The traumatized relatives should also be recognized and compensated as victims of terrorism, she said.
“That was an independent act of terror in itself—to send them videos, horrifying videos and images of their loved ones while they were tortured and killed and taken hostage,” Elkayam-Levy said.
Israel has to learn to deal with “the digital dimension of the attack, the terror that was more psychological in nature,” she told JNS. “It’s also important internationally, globally. These are questions that are going to also influence how the world sees these crimes.”
The United Nations, which she addressed, poses another obstacle to pursuing justice, according to the scholar. The global body “is working against us as a people,” she said.
“From the very beginning, we decided, and we were determined, not to leave it, to continue to fight, to make sure we keep making the truth heard over there in the most difficult forums and speaking it loudly, as loudly as possible,” she said.
That criticism is complicated by her belief in global legal bodies.
“I teach of the importance of the international legal system. It was a system that was born from the ashes of our Holocaust and of the ashes of World War II,” she told JNS. “The world has done a lot to make sure we have a system that preserves human rights.”
“In many ways, it is failing now, and it is deeply failing,” she said. “I’m hoping we’ll see some kind of change in the future.”
It is a “consequential” time, as the United Nations seeks its next secretary-general, Elkayam-Levy said.
António Guterres, whose term as secretary-general expires at year’s end, has drawn frequent criticism from the Jewish state and its allies of anti-Israel bias. Israel has not endorsed a candidate, but it and the United States have said that the new U.N. chief must reform the global body.
“I’m hoping that the next secretary-general will be one that could face them—those forces from within that are weakening the system and weakening the belief in human rights or the opportunity to actually cooperate as democratic countries,” Elkayam-Levy told JNS.
“If we won’t see a change in a secretary-general that can face Muslim countries and the radicalization that we’re seeing in the inner institutes of the system, it’s going to get even worse,” she said.
Accountability does not depend solely on the United Nations, however.
The Civil Commission’s latest report and its December 2024 one on “kinocide,” a term Elkayam-Levy coined to describe deliberate destruction of family units to devastate a nation, can be used in courts worldwide, the scholar thinks.
“We know now that lawyers that represent French victims and British victims and U.S. victims are already taking the reports, submitting them as proof in those cases, as proof of the sort of crimes that have been committed, the dynamics, the sexual violence,” she told JNS.
“It’s already serving accountability,” Elkayam-Levy said. “It will serve the Israeli authorities once trials are going to begin here in Israel.”
