A group of eminent Israeli legal experts has released a landmark report on sexual crimes committed by Hamas during the October 7 massacre based on eyewitness accounts and evidence collected on the ground. The Gaza-based terrorist group used sexual violence as “part of a deliberate genocidal strategy” on October 7, 2023, the report finds.
The objective of the 84-page report is to record Hamas’s crimes against women on October 7, 2023, and hold perpetrators accountable. The report also lays down a legal groundwork for the prosecution of terrorists who carried out these atrocities.
“Legally, [the report] aids in shaping frameworks for prosecuting perpetrators when identifying specific culprits among detained terrorists is challenging and evidence evaluation is complex,” the Israeli news website Ynetnews reported Wednesday.
The report was compiled by the Dinah Project, an Israel-based initiative created in response to the sexual violence and war crimes committed on October 7, 2023. The all-women initiative has since been locating witnesses and collecting evidence in an effort “to support prosecution in various tribunals and shaping the narrative on national and international levels,” the initiative says on its website. (Click here to view the complete report on Dinah Project’s website.)
The report titled “A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond” seeks to create legal grounds for bringing perpetrators and their accomplices to justice. “Central to its mission is ensuring accountability for terrorists involved in CRSV [Conflict-related sexual violence] by researching and establishing legal doctrinal grounds for prosecution under joint responsibility laws,” the Dinah Project said in a recent statement.
“The report documented eyewitness accounts of multiple cases of rape, gang rapes, sexual assault, mutilations and torture of people on October 7, 2023 and in Hamas captivity in Gaza,” the statement added.
The authors of the report are aware that we may never know the true depth of Hamas’s depravity, which was on display on October 7, 2023. “In most of cases, the rape victims were murdered during or immediatly following the assault,” the document states (Page 37).
The report notes that “the vast majority of those sexually assaulted were among the 1,166 victims who were silenced forever.” It added that “many survivors may be too traumatized to recount their experiences.”
The Times of Israel noted the methodology and approach used by the authors of the report:
The Dinah Project, an initiative formed following October 7 that works to achieve recognition and justice for survivors of sexual violence in conflict zones, spent a year and a half consolidating all available evidence and reports on sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during the attack and subsequently against hostages. (…)The report consolidated data on sexual violence on October 7 and grouped it methodologically based on testimony from first-hand survivors, eyewitnesses, first responders, workers at the Shura military base, which served as a morgue, healthcare workers, and therapists, as well as captured photos and video footage. (…)Based on existing doctrine in international and Israeli law, the authors call for the promotion of a key legal principle: the imposition of collective criminal responsibility on all participants in the attack — even if they did not personally commit rape — on the grounds that they knew, should have known, or took part in enabling sexual violence during the attack.
The reports showed how Hamas terrorists were trained and indoctrinated ahead of the October 7 attack to commit heinous crimes.
It noted (on page 53) that Hamas-affiliated “Nukhba terrorists who participated in the assault on Israeli communities and military bases had previously undergone brutal mental conditioning and indoctrination explicitly aimed at brutal acts of terror and genocide.”
The sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas was part of its planned genocidal attack on Israel. “The attack was intended to annihilate, slaughter, and wreak destruction,” the legal experts concluded in the report. “The acts of sexual violence perpetrated within this framework, as part of the broader campaign to destroy and annihilate the Israeli and Jewish population, constitute crimes of genocide.”
Through this report, the Dinah Project seeks to create a legal framework for future conflicts involving sexual crimes. The authors of the report described their findings as the “first global legal blueprint explaining how to prosecute sexual violence as a weapon of war – even when evidence is messy, survivors are gone, and individual perpetrators can’t be tied to individual acts.”
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