The sexual crimes committed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Gaza “civilians” on October 7 have been well-documented and reported on by a range of media. Nonetheless, there is a concerted effort at rape denialism at websites like the “Electronic Intifada” and various social media accounts.
Yet of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of international journalists, diplomats, public officials, and others who have been privately shown the video and photo evidence, including a 45-minute compendium taken mostly from Hamas’ own body cams, not one has claimed Israeli is lying.
We have dozens of prior posts (see links at bottom) with photos, videos, and witness attestation to Hamas’ butchery and savagery, particularly towards women who were not only raped but also sexually mutilated.
Now you know why Israel is so determined to eliminate Hamas and the other Jihadist terror groups. This time it is different.
Israelis knew what happened early on, even if they didn’t know all the sordid details. I reminded of the statement on October 12, 2023, from law professor Eugene Kontorovich, that I’ve quoted before:
Perhaps the greatest mercy Israel is showing to Gaza is not releasing to the public the full details of what was done by the invaders to their victims. Ostensibly for the sensitivities of the families, but also I think because what populace would be able to restrain themselves?
Under these circumstances, Israel has exercised incredible restraint and military professionalism.
The New York Times now joins Chris Cuomo and others on the list of foreign (to Israel) journalists who have seen the evidence and attested to Hamas’ war crimes, ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7:
At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”
In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.
The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.
One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.
As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”
Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.
This appears to be the video the Times is talking about, which is hard to watch and which we posted on October 11, 2023.
The Times continued:
A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.
And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.
There are a lot more details in The Times’ story, here is just part of it:
Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.
The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas….
Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.
She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.
She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.
About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.
“It was like an assembly point,” she said.
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women….
That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.
Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.
He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.
“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”
“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”
Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”
Read the whole thing.
Also read this report from November 2023:
From prior reporting:
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