When, immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, several journalists and I entered the devastated kibbutzim in southern Israel, the first thing—the most unmistakable thing—we encountered was the evidence of sexual mutilation intertwined with massacre.
Anyone who walked through the homes of Kfar Aza, listened firsthand to accounts of how bodies had been discovered—violated, broken, stripped, men, women and children alike—immediately understood what had happened.
Doctors, nurses and forensic experts working lovingly and desperately to organize the mountain of bodies and human remains at the Shura military base confirmed the horror. We moved among tents and containers filled with the remains of victims from the Nova music festival and the kibbutzim.
They had been beautiful young human beings upon whom death had been inflicted in the most barbaric ways imaginable: limbs spread apart, faces mutilated, sexual organs desecrated.
Everything was already tragically clear because the Hamas terrorists had taken care to film their atrocities themselves. Beyond eyewitness testimony of mass rape, there was direct documentation proving that sexual violence formed part of Yahya Sinwar’s strategy of extermination and terror carried out by the Nukhba terrorists.
At first, the denial of this evidence seemed pathetic and marginal. Instead, it became central to a broader antisemitic strategy of inversion and denial.
International institutions such as the United Nations, even while their own experts acknowledged there were “reasonable grounds” to believe mass rape had occurred, refused meaningful condemnation. Feminist organizations effectively declared the death of their own moral authority, as Lucetta Scaraffia observed so clearly, by denying the greatest assault on women since World War II.
Only because the victims were Jewish.
Now, finally, after two and a half years, comes the monumental report of the Civil Commission on Hamas Crimes against Women and Children: 300 pages documenting mass rape, tortured families, forced humiliation and acts of cruelty almost beyond language.
Under the leadership of legal expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the commission compiled 1,800 hours of work and reviewed some 10,000 photographs and videos, cross-referencing testimony and evidence through forensic analysis conducted by 25 experts and numerous volunteers, among them former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The report includes precise forensic mapping, verified testimonies and detailed identification procedures.
Elkayam-Levy seeks not only to preserve the historical record, but also to establish new international legal standards recognizing rape as a weapon of war and extermination—not only in Israel, but also in places such as Nigeria and among the Yazidis, where sexual violence has similarly been used to humiliate, destroy and leave permanent scars upon entire peoples.
There are testimonies from witnesses who, while hiding, heard the screams of victims and the laughter of rapists before later discovering mutilated and bloodied bodies.
Hostages describe what was done to them in captivity. Children recount horrors beyond imagination.
Among the most unbearable testimonies is what the report identifies as “kinocide”—the systematic destruction of the family unit through sexual violence, in which children are assaulted and murdered in front of parents, or parents before children, while victims are forced into monstrous acts against one another.
Today, anyone with courage can finally confront the full evidence—and with it, the endless shame of the lies spread about Israel. Yet even now, some continue trying to invert reality.
The New York Times, in what has become an almost predictable pattern of accusations against Israel, recently published a column by Nicholas Kristof accusing Israel of sexual abuse in prisons, including grotesque allegations involving the use of dogs.
Kristof relies heavily on testimony from Sami al-Sai, imprisoned for terrorism between 2016 and 2024 and identified as a founder of the Tulkarem Battalion, a group linked to numerous terrorist attacks. On Oct. 8, he reportedly posted celebratory messages praising the “green flag” of Hamas.
Such witnesses, alongside organizations presenting themselves as defenders of human rights, may soon have to confront an obvious question: What credibility remains in their claimed opposition to sexual violence after ignoring, minimizing or denying the findings now laid bare in the Civil Commission’s report?
Beyond sexual violence, what credibility on human rights remains at all for those who ignored, excused or denied crimes of such magnitude simply because the victims were Israelis and Jews?
