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What We Know About the Weaponization of Sexual Violence on October 7th
Rape is a shocking and sadly predictable feature of war. But the nature of the crime makes it difficult to document and, consequently, to prosecute.
In early March, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a well-known Palestinian Israeli academic, appeared on “Makdisi Street,” a podcast hosted by Karim, Saree, and Ussama Makdisi, three Palestinian American academics who are also brothers. They had been speaking for more than an hour when Karim asked what he said would be the last question. He wanted Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s opinion of a report, recently published by the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, which concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, had been part of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
Few were more qualified to answer that question than Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a criminologist and a feminist scholar who has written several books on related topics, including one on wartime violence against women. Shalhoub-Kevorkian spoke with confidence and care. She put the sexual violence on October 7th in historical context. “Rapes, abuses, sexual abuses, gang rapes—it always happened in wartimes,” she said. “It always happened.” She had written about this wider history, she said, and she had written about the history of Jewish Israeli soldiers, back in 1948, using sexual violence against Palestinians. “Abuses and sexual abuses happen,” she said. “And they shouldn’t happen. And I will never approve [of] it, not to Israelis, not to Palestinians, not in my name.”
She was speaking as a Palestinian. Next, she spoke as a feminist: “I don’t go and interrogate the rape victims. If a woman said she was raped, I will believe her. I do not need evidence, and I don’t want to go check facts, to be honest. This is my opinion.”
But most of the women who had been subjected to sexual violence on October 7th were dead. They weren’t coming forward with evidence. It was the Israeli government that was amplifying stories of rape, which it claimed had been widespread, systematic, and particularly brutal on October 7th. “Women’s bodies are being used as political weapons,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian said. “If it happened, not in my name. If it didn’t happen, it’s shame on the state to use women’s bodies and sexuality to promote political agendas, to promote further disposession of land, to promote further killings, to promote abuse and rape.” Israel, she reminded listeners, was “a very dishonest state.” As though the real atrocities of October 7th—when almost twelve hundred people were killed—were not enough, Israeli propagandists had promoted terrifying fictions, like the claim that Hamas fighters had beheaded Israeli babies. Now they were promoting stories of sexual violence—horrific, crazed, grotesque sexual violence. And still, Shalhoub-Kevorkian reiterated, “If things like that happened, not in my name. I will never approve it.” (Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sexual violence.)
As a Palestinian and an outspoken opponent of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Shalhoub-Kevorkian knew she was at risk: in the wake of October 7th, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been subjected to extreme scrutiny. Many of those who have spoken out about the carnage in Gaza have been fired or suspended from their jobs; some have been arrested. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a tenured professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. Her work has won international awards. But she had been shunned by colleagues for using the word “genocide” to describe the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. On the podcast, she had bracketed her statement with disavowals of the assaults—“if it happened, not in my name”—but what seemed to come across to an Israeli audience was the “if.” Shalhoub-Kevorkian could be heard as doubting the reports. In Israel today, that is tantamount to treason. The podcast was released on a Saturday; the following Tuesday, the university suspended her.
Some faculty members at Hebrew University, including from the law department, where Shalhoub-Kevorkian teaches, spoke out against the suspension. Two days later, it was lifted. After two and a half weeks, Shalhoub-Kevorkian was summoned to a conversation with the university rector. She reiterated that she did not doubt that sexual violence had occurred as part of the Hamas attack on October 7th. Less than a month later, police arrived at Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s house in the Old City of Jerusalem, handcuffed her, and took her to jail. “Hebrew U. prof arrested after doubting Hamas rapes,” a Times of Israel headline read, in part. Shalhoub-Kevorkian was held overnight in a cold cell. For part of that time, she was denied access to medication that she takes for blood pressure. Police officers shouted offensive epithets at her.
The following day, two Jerusalem judges denied a police request to keep Shalhoub-Kevorkian in custody. Still, two more gruelling interrogations followed. Two months after the arrest, no charges have officially been filed, but Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a marked person. Her face is all over the media, and another statement that she made on the podcast—“It’s time to abolish Zionism”—has been pasted on billboards in different parts of the country, a tactic the Israeli right has used to intimidate enemies. Although she was technically reinstated at Hebrew University, she has set foot on the campus only once since her arrest, because many of the students are carrying guns. To people concerned about the state of academic freedom—and freedom in general—in Israel, Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s case is perhaps the most extreme example of an ongoing crackdown on dissent. To many Israelis, expressions of support that she has received from abroad are examples of something else entirely: the world’s failure to acknowledge the horrors of October 7th, particularly the rapes. One slogan, which has shown up on protest placards, in press materials, and on the Web sites of Jewish organizations, sums up the sentiment: “#MeToo unless you are a Jew.”
For victims of war or terror, and for their families and loved ones, the violence of such conflicts is unlike anything they have ever experienced or imagined. But for many of those charged with documenting war—foreign correspondents, international human-rights organizations, agencies of the United Nations—conflicts, and the coverage and documentation of conflicts, follow familiar patterns. When it comes to sexual violence, the pattern that often emerges is this: shocking initial reports are followed by pushback that tends to be stronger and more impassioned than pushback against claims of almost any other war crime. A period of confusion, of murky awareness, usually follows. It stems from the nature of the crime, which makes it particularly difficult to document and, consequently, to prosecute.
The past several months have seen three major attempts to document sexual violence that occurred on October 7th. The first, compiled by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers of Israel and released in February, has been widely distributed by the Israeli government. The report states that acts of sexual violence against women, girls, and men were “systematic,” carried out in a similar manner in many different locations. “Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence,” the report states. “Many of the bodies of sexual crime victims were found bound and shackled. The genitals of both women and men were brutally mutilated, and in some cases weapons were inserted into them. The terrorists did not stop at shooting; they also cut and mutilated sexual organs and other body parts with knives.”
The report relied on media articles, television stories, and confidential information that had come through member organizations of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers. Its strength was in systematizing, comparing, and mapping the assaults—methods of analysis that allowed the authors to identify patterns. Its weakness was that much of the evidence was third- and fourth-hand, as in the case of media accounts that quoted other media accounts that quoted people who said they had witnessed attacks. Hila Tov, a prominent multimedia journalist and activist, did the research for the report (though she did not write it). She told me that most of the evidence, in the end, came from dead bodies, or, rather, from the recollections and interpretations of volunteers who had gathered the bodies, and from doctors who interviewed survivors.
In early March, Pramila Patten, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, released a twenty-three-page report based on a fact-finding mission to Israel. Patten’s group interviewed dozens of people and reviewed more than five thousand photographs and upward of fifty hours of video footage. Still, the authors of the report acknowledged that they had faced a number of challenges, some of which were typical for any attempt to document sexual violence: survivors and eyewitnesses were reticent. But others were specific to the events of October 7th: most of the victims were dead; their bodies were collected by volunteers untrained in forensics, who prioritized a proper and speedy burial (the Jewish tradition calls for interring the dead within twenty-four hours) over the collection of evidence; and many of the bodies were burned. The report concluded, nonetheless, that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations. Across the various locations of the 7 October attacks, the mission team found that several fully naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down were recovered—mostly women—with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head. Although circumstantial, such a pattern of undressing and restraining of victims may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.”
In April, Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli newspaper, which has been doing unparalleled reporting on the war, published an article that attempted to compile all available evidence of sexual violence that occurred on October 7th. The paper’s analysis contradicted some of the conclusions of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers report—namely, that the rapes occurred everywhere Hamas fighters were present and that the rapes were intended for an audience. Haaretz noted that there is little evidence of rapes occurring outside the Nova music festival. Attackers seemed to perpetrate sexual violence where they could not be seen, Haaretz found. It appears that none of the copious video recordings of the attacks, including from body cams worn by Hamas fighters, contains footage of rape. About a dozen survivors who were hiding from attackers, however, said that they saw sexual violence, and several more said that they had overheard but could not see it from their hiding places.
The Haaretz report threw doubt on the assertions of genital mutilation. Police, volunteers, and a small team of forensic specialists had examined hundreds of remains—and the forensic specialists paid particular attention to the bodies of people who were found undressed or half-undressed and may have therefore been subjected to sexual violence—and found no evidence of genital mutilation. Still, hundreds of victims were likely interred without a forensic examination. The Haaretz report also debunked two stories that had spread widely. Both involved dead bodies that those who first saw them thought had been subjected to sexual violence.
Long before any of the three reports came out, the Israeli government claimed that the sexual violence had been systematic. In a controversial report published in the Times last December, unnamed officials said that “everywhere Hamas terrorists struck—the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim—they brutalized women.” (Full disclosure: I am now a columnist for the Times Opinion section.) Elsewhere, officials asserted that Hamas fighters were not going rogue: they were, on the orders of their commanders, using rape as a weapon of war. This sweeping claim raised the bar for any researcher who tried to document the crimes, changing the question from “Did it happen?” to “Was it systematic?” As a result, although every subsequent report has been better researched and more comprehensive—more harrowing in the inescapable certainty of the violence—it has also been met with disappointment by those who were expecting evidence of systematic crimes.
In March, after the United Nations released its findings, the Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, lashed out, criticizing the agency for what he contended was an attempt to silence claims of sexual violence. Orit Sulitzeanu, the C.E.O. of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers, told me that she was unhappy that the U.N.’s report said that its mission could not confirm that all sexual violence was committed by Hamas fighters rather than other men who poured in once the border was breached. “I understood it was almost impossible for her to get information,” Sulitzeanu said. But, she added, “if the Holocaust was today, they would ask for proof—and there was no way to prove what happened.” A hand-painted “#MeToo unless you are Jew” placard stood in the corner of her office in Tel Aviv.
Israeli authorities have strategic reasons for claiming that the sexual violence was systematic. They plan to prosecute Hamas fighters and commanders in the Israeli court system. They also hope to see Hamas leaders tried in the International Criminal Court. In May, the I.C.C. prosecutor, Karim A. A. Khan, requested arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders—Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh—alleging that they are responsible for a number of crimes against humanity, including “rape and other acts of sexual violence.” Khan also filed arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, both of whom he accuses of a number of war crimes, including inflicting starvation on civilians in Gaza. But Khan has not accused the Israelis of rape, perhaps creating even more motivation for them to amplify the accusations against Hamas: however inhumane the Israeli ways of waging war are, the message is, Hamas’s are even worse. This campaign of demonization has called forth an equal and opposite campaign of denialism: Palestinian activists and pro-Palestinian media, including several U.S.-based outlets, have endeavored to debunk claims that sexual violence occurred on October 7th.
Sexual violence is a category of crime that stands apart in peace and in war. It is shocking—–more shocking than killing, which is, after all, normal and often legal in war. At the same time, it is expected: it surprises no one that men high on adrenaline, men who are armed, men who are all but guaranteed impunity, will rape defenseless people. In a 1993 piece for The New York Review of Books on the weaponization of sexual violence during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Jeri Laber, one of the founders of Helsinki Watch, which is now known as Human Rights Watch, wrote, “When Bosnia proclaimed its independence in 1992, it was open, vulnerable, and unarmed, susceptible to attack from its warring and heavily armed neighbors.” In the Bosnian context, too, rape appeared to be part of a genocidal project: Serbian men allegedly set out to make Bosnian women have their babies, who would not, in their eyes, be Bosnian.
The stories of sexual violence on October 7th are unique to Israel. But the difficulties of documenting such crimes exist in every war. Some researchers have argued—or have viscerally understood—that any body found disrobed, or naked from the waist down, was the body of a victim of some sort of sexual violence. But sometimes such conclusions can’t be substantiated. Sulitzeanu told me of one such case: the bodies of a young woman and her mother were found in separate rooms of their house, and the daughter’s trousers were lowered. A volunteer for ZAKA, a religious organization that collects bodies and prepares them for funeral, reported the scene as one where a rape had clearly occurred. It later emerged that members of the Israel Defense Forces had suspected that the younger woman’s body was mined and had moved it to a separate room for examination.
ZAKA volunteers have become unwitting characters in the stories of sexual violence of October 7th. They were perhaps the first to report what they saw as evidence of sexual violence, but, in the months since, they have been blamed for misinterpreting, misreporting, and even unintentionally tampering with evidence. In some cases, it appears, they covered up bodies or dressed them before taking photographs. At times, they were so shocked by what they saw that their interpretations gave rise to horrific rumors. One volunteer saw the body of a woman that appeared to have been eviscerated, and assumed that the victim had been pregnant and attackers had cut out the fetus. Later, a video shot in a different country in a different era spread widely. (I was sent a link before taking a reporting trip to Israel in the spring.) It appeared to show a pregnant woman’s stomach being opened up. ZAKA’s leaders later disavowed both the video and the original report. But, by then, the false story had been repeated by government officials and by human-rights activists such as Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a law professor at Hebrew University and a women’s-rights advocate who, this year, received the Israel Prize—the country’s highest civilian honor—for her role in spreading awareness about the sexual violence of October 7th. (Elkayam-Levy said that as soon as she learned that ZAKA refuted the video, she did as well.)
Back in 1993, Jeri Laber wrote that her fact-finding mission to Bosnia was complicated by the presence “of local and international women’s and human rights groups, as well as journalists and television crews—all looking for rape victims to interview.” Most victims didn’t want to talk; the ones who did were in extreme demand. On a later mission to Kosovo, Laber was put in a room with a young woman who, her friends and family said, had something to tell the human-rights researcher. Except the woman didn’t tell Laber anything. She talked about her latest manicure and then clammed up. Laber tried all the interviewing techniques she knew, to no avail. “I had a lot of experience interviewing victims of torture,” she told me, but she was often stumped interviewing victims of sexual violence. “There is so much baggage, so many reasons why someone wouldn’t tell the story of sexual violence straight out, or even remember it straight out.” In comparison, accounts of torture of a nonsexual nature were relatively easy to collect.
For every five or ten or twenty people who were unwilling or unable to tell their story, there was probably one victim of sexual violence who would talk. This person might become a celebrity of sorts; journalists would get in line for interviews. Their story, told again and again, would change over time, accruing more dramatic detail. Laber told me that she developed a gut instinct for embellishments. In Bosnia, for example, she kept hearing one story over and over: a male prisoner had been forced to bite off another male prisoner’s testicles. As it turned out, no one had actually witnessed, much less participated in, such an episode; everyone, however, seemed to have heard about it. Similarly, some of the most horrific stories of October 7th have not been corroborated: the eviscerated pregnant woman; the woman who supposedly had a number of nails driven into her vagina; the claims that eyewitnesses saw Hamas fighters cut off women’s breasts while raping them. I asked Laber why, in her opinion, people in war often seem prone to exaggerations, especially when it comes to sexual violence. She wasn’t sure; perhaps repeating their stories to reporters had compelled victims to supplement them with more detail. Perhaps the explanation is even simpler: rape is common in war and in peace; to convey the trauma of sexual violence, victims and witnesses may feel the need to embellish.
The war in Bosnia was possibly the first instance in which stories of sexual violence used as a weapon of war were told, preserved, and ultimately used to prosecute some of the perpetrators. The process began with some striking claims made to and by foreign reporters, particularly Roy Gutman, who was then writing for Newsday. Gutman reported on the systematic, arguably genocidal use of sexual violence. Soon Bosnian leaders were wielding statistics about women they claimed had been raped. Shortly after that, adversaries and critics cast doubt on these figures. Did the victims number in the tens of thousands or merely in the thousands? Laber decided that this didn’t matter—and that, even if it mattered, it was unknowable—and left the issue of numbers out of her report. What mattered was that the violence had happened.
Israel is a small country. Among Israeli Jews, it’s not uncommon to know someone who knows someone who was the victim of sexual violence on October 7th—a doctor who treated victims or tended to bodies, a therapist who has worked with eyewitnesses, a family member of someone who was raped or witnessed a rape. Publicly, some of these same family members may deny that the rape occurred. They don’t want their loved one to be remembered as the victim of a heinous crime. Also, as Sulitzeanu told me, for many people “in Israeli culture, to be raped by an Arab means you are contaminated.” But privately, within the interlocking circles of family and community, everyone knows.
This sense of shared knowledge may be why Israeli Jews are particularly sensitive to any statement that seems to question the fact that sexual violence occurred. When I was in Israel this spring, several left-wing activists and academics talked to me about recent comments made by the philosopher Judith Butler, who, during a talk in Paris, had said that documentation of sexual violence should be made public, and that “if there is documentation, then we deplore that, we absolutely deplore that, there is no question.” To them, it sounded like Butler was casting doubt on something they knew for certain. “It plays into the Israeli perception that the whole world is against us,” Michael Sfard, a human-rights attorney who defends Palestinians and Jewish dissidents, told me. “I hear Judith Butler and I think about what it will do to the Israeli left.” When it comes to the fact that there was extensive sexual violence on October 7th, Israel’s left seems aligned with the right, against everyone else.
If rape, in the context of war, is interpreted as a humiliation of a nation rather than an attack on an individual’s body, then those who are seen as doubting claims of rape are easy to cast as enemies of the people. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, in her 2009 book, “Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study,” called this the “mystic unity of women and the country identified through her body.” In this particular passage, Shalhoub-Kevorkian was discussing the example of the former Yugoslavia. “The consequence of equating the raped woman with the ‘dishonoured’ country,” she wrote, “is that all members of the ‘enemy’ army are viewed as rapists—not just those who started the war, the politicians, the generals, and the exponents of systematic rape in aid of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ ” Conversely, all members of the dishonored nation are cast as victims. And, just as in an attack of one human by another, where only one can be the rapist while the other is raped, so, too, can a nation be either the raped or the rapist. To counter Bosnian claims in the nineteen-nineties, Serbs presented the international media with their own victims: Serbian women who had been raped by Bosnian or Croatian soldiers. In the current conflict, both sides maintain that their own fighters do not rape. In Israel, this is one of the few beliefs that seem to be firmly held across the political spectrum.
Sulitzeanu, the head of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers, used to run the public-relations office of Hebrew University. While serving in this capacity a decade ago, she helped publicize a student’s thesis that claimed that rapes of Palestinian women by I.D.F. soldiers are rare because of racism—because the soldiers would consider it somehow beneath them to rape an Arab woman. The argument appears to run counter to the world’s experience of war and rape, but the idea got traction. Sulitzeanu said that she was still overwhelmed by the “deep impact the thesis had on Israeli culture.”
The belief that Israeli soldiers do not engage in sexual violence has persisted even as I.D.F. soldiers have filmed themselves playing with women’s lingerie found in homes in Gaza, and even as evidence of sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli facilities has mounted. Josh Paul, a State Department official who resigned last year in protest over U.S. military aid to Israel’s campaign in Gaza, has said that his office had verified allegations that a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy was raped in an Israeli prison. A recent Times report on the Israeli military base where Palestinian detainees are held included testimony of what appears to be repeated sexual torture.
Still, even well-informed, lefty Israeli Jews hold to the idea that Israeli soldiers do not perpetuate a policy of sexual violence. “They are our children,” one person explained to me. “They are us.” This was a journalist who had worked on reports of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas. Like most middle-aged Israeli Jews, she had children who were either in the I.D.F. or about to be drafted. That they may be implicated in sexual violence was unthinkable. “It’s an impossible situation,” a Jewish-Israeli opponent of the occupation told me. People from both sides of the conflict have been writing to her on social media. “I got rape testimony in my D.M.s, from a follower who was at the Nova party,” she said. “At the same time, Palestinian friends are D.M.’ing me that there were no rapes.”
It took several years for the claims of sexual violence in Bosnia to reach the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (to which the International Criminal Court, which may take up the issue of sexual violence on October 7th, is a successor). Survivors and witnesses, including many who had been reluctant to talk in the immediate aftermath of the crimes, testified to what they had experienced or seen: systematic rape, public rape, gang rape, and camps established for the purpose of raping women. Several dozen people were convicted. The former leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, died in custody in The Hague in 2006, before a verdict was issued in his case. Behind the scenes, prosecutors had worried that there may not have been sufficient evidence to connect him to some of the worst atrocities committed by his forces, including sexual violence.
(c) 2024, New Yorker
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