The Israeli Association of Rape Crisis Centers published a report several months after Oct. 7, exhaustively cataloging the rape and sexual assaults to which many of the victims had been subjected.
Yet some people, even experts in the field of sexual violence, have demanded photographic evidence before they will believe that Oct. 7 victims were raped and sexually assaulted in other horrifying ways, and some have said that the sexual violence was a result of the Jewish state’s behavior, Israeli authorities say.
“Nobody expects that in any other case but Israel,” said Yuval Donio-Gideon, Israel’s consul for public diplomacy in New York, at a talk held on May 5 in Brooklyn.
In an interview, he told JNS that Cochav Elkayam Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, was in New Jersey later in 2023 to speak with experts on sexual violence.
Several of those experts, who said they would attend, did not show up, Donio-Gideon said.
Two wrote “not denying there was rape and other atrocities, but said they wouldn’t meet with her without discussing the root causes of the rape,” he told JNS.
“We understand what they were implying, which was repeated later by others,” he said. “It is the weaponization of these sexual atrocities as an instrument of war.”
“This takes us decades back to the period where if you were raped, you had to prove that you didn’t have it coming,” he said.
Photographic evidence of rape and other sexual assaults rarely exists, according to Orit Sulitzineau, CEO of the association, who spoke at the talk in an art gallery in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Rapists generally don’t film or photograph their attacks, she said, and on Oct. 7, the sexual assault victims were killed, at times shot while they were being raped or after the terrorists finished raping them, shot in their sexual organs.
“The bodies are shouting,” she told JNS. “In war, you don’t find naked people, people with only their bottoms torn off, people shot in their intimate organs.”
In the chaos of that morning, as people fled for their lives or hid and prayed they would not be discovered, no one took pictures, Sulitzineau said.
The organization ZAKA, which cleans up remains after terror attacks in Israel, also has a policy of not photographing victims, Sulitzineau said during her talk.
The talk in DUMBO was one of three that she gave, along with Israeli actress Mili Avital, who briefly spoke about being raped at age 17 and how long it took before she was ready to reach out for help and tell her parents.
They are speaking to raise awareness of the complex trauma faced by Oct. 7 survivors and those who are close to victims.
A few people, who survived the attack on the Nova festival site and area kibbutzim that day, recount the horrifying sights and sounds they witnessed in the association’s report.
Both women and men, who were held hostage by Hamas in Gaza but later released, have also spoken of being sexually assaulted by their captors.
Guy Gilboa-Dalal, one of the last hostages to be released alive, told The New York Times in February that one of his captors raped him repeatedly.
The evidence collected by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel found that men, women and children were all victims of gruesome sexual abuse on Oct. 7. The report outlines witness testimony of the brutality of the sexual crimes.
The report said that “several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape, where women were abused and handled between multiple terrorists who beat, injured, and ultimately killed them” at the Nova site.
Aviva Siegel, an American-born Israeli, was held captive in Gaza for 51 days. After her release, she told of seeing a young Israeli female captive being raped by the terrorists in a tunnel.
The Oct. 7 terror attack has created a generation of traumatized people, Sultzineau told JNS, saying “it will take at least a decade to begin to rehabilitate.”
A more recent report by the Dina Project was released in July 2025 and documents even more sexual assault and trauma experienced by those taken captive.
The information was shared by 15 survivors of Hamas captivity in Gaza, 13 women and two men.
‘Trauma on trauma’
The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel represents the country’s nine centers. One, in Jerusalem, is dedicated to the needs of Orthodox and Haredi survivors of sexual violence. One in Haifa is for the Arab community. The other seven are throughout the country.
It also runs several hotlines where survivors of sexual assault can reach out for help and information. Two hotlines are staffed by Orthodox volunteers sensitive to the cultural needs of those communities. One is answered by men, and the other by women.
The number of calls to the hotlines has skyrocketed in the past two years, Sulitzineau said in her talk.
Calls increased by 20% from 2024 to 2025—far more than ever before, she said. It is now receiving about 65,000 calls to the crisis hotlines each year, she said, adding that it is a huge number for a country of about 10 million people.
Before the Gaza war, 10% of the calls to the rape crisis hotlines came from men, she said during the talk. Since then, calls to the men’s hotlines have increased 60%, she said.
“There is trauma on trauma” in Israel as a result of Oct. 7, she told JNS.
The wait to see a publicly-funded mental health counselor or trauma therapist in Israel is more than two years, she said. Private therapists are unaffordable for many.
Her organization is in the process of creating a mental healthcare program for survivors of sexual violence who are in acute distress. The plan is to hire 10 case managers who will then create programming for traumatized survivors nationwide.
“This is to create a program from Beer Sheva to Kiryat Shemona for survivors in acute situations to get help,” she said. “You need a lot of energy to get help,” and those in that situation are often overwhelmed and unable to organize it themselves, she added.
Israel’s social security foundation has pledged half of the money needed to get the acute care program up and running, 16 million shekels, or about $5.5 million. The association is now working to raise the other half from private sources, Sulitzeanu said.
“We start this year. We want to help survivors pass this very difficult time,” Sulitzeanu told JNS. “There are so many needs.”
