When I read that Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, had liked an Instagram post calling an investigation into sexual violence against women in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a “mass rape hoax,” I, as co-founder of The Dinah Project, a group dedicated to securing justice for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, felt a visceral revulsion watching the erasure of documented atrocities in real time.
That this news about Duwaji’s social-media support of Hamas broke just as the United Nations began its 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women—the largest annual convening by the United Nations on gender equality, and whose main theme this year was ensuring access to justice for all women and girls—underscores how grotesque the act is.
What kind of justice is available to women whose rapes are denied not by their attackers, but by public figures who dismiss the evidence with a casual tap on a screen? What kind of justice exists when survivors summon extraordinary courage to tell the world what happened to them, only to have their suffering dismissed as a hoax?
Ask Amit Soussana, the first freed hostage to speak publicly, who described being sexually assaulted at gunpoint by her Hamas captor so the world would know the kinds of horrors hostages in Gaza endured.
Ask Romi Gonen, held for 471 days, who spoke of repeated sexual assault and her terror of becoming a “sex slave.”
Ask Ilana Gritzewsky, kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, who testified before the U.N. Security Council that she was sexually assaulted during her abduction and had to beg her captors not to rape her. “I came back to be the voice for those still in hell,” she said.
These are not anonymous claims. These women relived their trauma by telling the world at great personal cost about what happened to them in the Gaza Strip.
Their accounts are corroborated by investigations at the highest levels. In March 2024, the U.N.’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict found “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape and gang rape occurred on Oct. 7 and that hostages were sexually abused.
The Dinah Project documented accounts from hostages who experienced or witnessed sexual violence. In August 2025, the U.N. Secretary-General placed Hamas on the global blacklist of organizations that weaponize sexual violence, a landmark recognition. The facts are not in dispute.
When someone endorses a post calling this evidence “fabricated,” they are not just exercising harmless free expression. They are gaslighting survivors like Amit, Romi and Ilana. They are telling the world that Jewish women cannot be trusted. And they are sending a message to every perpetrator of sexual violence: If the victims are the right kind of victims, you will face no moral reckoning.
The core issue isn’t a single Instagram post. It’s the troubling pattern of Mamdani surrounding himself with people who harbor intense hatred of Jews. His wife liked posts glorifying the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust—not in response to a military operation, but as a massacre of 1,200 people happened. This was a celebration of terror against civilians; Jews, Arabs, Thai workers and people of other nationalities and all ages were murdered that day.
In today’s political culture, guilt by association is instinctively applied when someone is perceived as too close to pro-Israel voices. Clearly, the same standard is not being applied when the association in question involves people who dismiss the rape of Jewish women as fiction.
The Commission on the Status of Women has concluded. What continues to happen outside the walls of the United Nations cannot be ignored: the systematic denial of wartime sexual violence against Jewish women, enabled by people in positions of influence.
Under international law, rape in armed conflict is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Denying it allows its recurrence. Every survivor of sexual violence deserves better.
A like is not nothing. It is a choice. And choices have moral weight.
