Prominent human rights campaigners in Israel say the most important women’s organizations within the United Nations have failed to give proper recognition to the massacre and mass rape carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7.
The UN Women statement from Oct. 13, failed to mention any of the atrocities and the U.N.’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) talked amorphically about “the gendered dimensions of conflict” without laying out the brutality inflicted on women during the horrific attack.
“The silence of the international human rights and women’s rights community is deafening,” Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former vice president of CEDAW, told The Daily Beast. “For those of us who believe in the power of international human rights institutions and in solidarity between women, it is a particularly devastating blow. The betrayal is not only to the victims of sexual abuse, but to the very integrity of the institutions.”
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The reticence to comment on the specific atrocities in Israel and horrific gender-based violence in contrasts with UN Women and CEDAW’s history of speaking out in defense of women all over the rest of the world.
CEDAW demanded gender specialists be appointed “to identify violence against women in all its forms” in Syria in 2012. The committee decried “particularly the human rights of women and girls, which are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights” in Mali later the same year. In 2014, CEDAW issued a statement to ‘strongly condemn acts of violence against more than 200 girls who were kidnapped from a school… The committee is very concerned about the fate of these girls… and ‘believes that kidnapping on such a scale for the purposes of slavery is a direct violation of articles 5, 6 and 10 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and which can also be classified as a crime against humanity.”
The UN headquarters flies a UN flag at half mast.
Angela Weiss/Getty ImagesDescribing the ISIS reign of terror in 2014, the Committee said it was “gravely concerned about the fate of thousands of women and girls subject to serious violations of their human rights including killings, sexual violence, slavery, forced marriages, displacement, and abduction. Information received suggests that these violations may amount to crimes against humanity.”
Already twice this yeah, UN Women has called for an inquiry into gender-based crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine.
Now, campaigners are asking: Where is the concern for Israeli women?
In response to the silence, Israeli experts have established a new commission of their own, the Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children. In a statement, its members declare: “We, as a group of legal professional and academic researchers, experts in international law, humanitarian and human rights law, victimology, and gender-based violence, together with representatives of Israeli women and human rights organizations, come together with the purpose of gathering and distributing authentic information, providing expert advice, advocating for and initiating actions related to the collection of evidence and testimonies on sexual and other crimes committed during the Hamas attack on the 7th of October against women and children.”
Members of the commission say they have already received an enormous number of testimonies and evidence of rape and sexual violence. Tal Hochman, government relations officer at the Israel Women’s Network (IWN), says that the data bank “includes testimonies of ZAKA volunteers who collected and identified the bodies, testimonies from survivors of the Nova Music Festival, forensic findings from autopsies, videos from body cams carried by terrorists, IDF soldiers and rescue teams, and verified content from social media.”
The IWN sent The Daily Beast a sample of testimonies that were not released to the public because they were too graphic. In one video, a female volunteer says the base where she was working received the bodies of “children through elderly women… that have been raped so violently that their pelvises and legs were broken.” Another video shared by the IWN shows the half-burnt body of a girl or a young woman which can confirm this description.
Another testimony shows the interrogation of a terrorist, saying that the militants were raping dead bodies. In another video seen by The Daily Beast, a detainee says the terrorists were planning to “get dirty with the women,” and when asked what he means, he confirms that he is talking about rape.
Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crises Centers in Israel, says that her association collected testimonies from living women, mostly survivors of the Nova Festival massacre who arrived at the acute response room for rape victims at a hospital in the centre of Israel (location withheld by The Daily Beast). These young women gave their testimonies to the nurses and therapists on duty. Some of them were raped, and others witnessed rape while hiding. “Any event of sexual assault is horrifying,” says Sulitzeanu. “But in these instances, there is another dimension to it: your body symbolizes the nation they wish to punish, and so it is desecrated.”
A German woman lights a candle at a synagogue to support Israel and the hostages being held by Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Ina Fassbender/Getty ImagesIn the last few days, the evidence collected by the women’s organizations was bolstered by testimonies taken by the Israel Police and the IDF from Hamas militants taken prisoner on the day of the massacre. This Wednesday, police unit Lahav (sometimes dubbed “the Israeli FBI”) released a preliminary summary of Hamas terrorists’ interrogations and the accumulated testimonies of more than 700 survivors. The investigation reveals that Hamas militants committed dozens of acts constituting sexual violence, including rape. Sources in the police said that they have “more than 50 thousand videos from ‘Black Saturday,’” and that this is “the largest investigation since the country was founded.”
An Israeli army source told 7 Days magazine: “These commanders, known as sheikhs, have sanctioned the hell we saw. They had an actual extremist religious basis, like ISIS… The captured terrorists offer the same narrative in their interrogations: Hamas ordered us to murder, rape, behead and desecrate corpses.”
And yet, Israel women’s rights campaigners say the leading United Nations bodies, whose duty is to handle such cases, are refusing to describe the events as “crimes against humanity” or “gender crimes.” One of these groups is UN Women, the U.N. body in charge of promoting and empowering women worldwide. Another is CEDAW, an independent body, comprised of 23 global women’s rights experts.
“These are the two most important bodies for women’s rights in the international sphere,” says Halperin-Kaddari, academic director of the Rackman Centre at Bar Ilan University. “UN Women is the U.N.’s most important executive representative for women's affairs. CEDAW is the highest framework in the legislative field, in which legislation for women’s rights continues to take shape in international law. These types of declarations have mainly symbolic value but can affect policy. States can use them as a reference when determining whether an organization falls under the definition of terrorist activity, and as a result block access to the state-based bank accounts of the organization in question. The fact that both of them do not refer to gender crimes committed on the seventh of October is shocking—not only because of the lack of recognition, but because it will give ammunition to the deniers of the massacre now and in the future.”
“We were aware of the denial since the first days after the massacre,” Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an expert on international and human rights law, told The Daily Beast. “Those were the same days when the bodies of babies, children and women were still strewn around the scene of the massacre, and rape and murder videos by Hamas militants were still being uploaded to social media.”
Elkayam-Levi explains that after an event like Oct. 7, international organizations dealing with mass violence and rape usually operate in three stages. The first is the recognition stage, the second is condemnation, and the third is action, where they provide help to the victims. “So far, we have yet to complete the recognition stage, which is the spark that jump-starts the whole operation,” she said. “In order for those bodies to reach the third operative stage—help—the spark of recognition must first be ignited.”
The team of experts and women’s organizations drafted several letters and a video message to the U.N. bodies and distributed them in the community of women’s organizations worldwide. So far, 700 Israeli and international jurists have signed one letter.
About 160 Israeli and international women’s organizations have so far signed another letter, addressed to UN Women: “The terrorists documented their atrocious actions with their phones, and these films show how the terrorists who attacked the music festival raped women whose bodies are covered in blood,” the letter says. “The films taken by the terrorists who attacked the villages near the border show terrorists ripping the clothes off the women hostages, spitting on them, and sexually abusing them. Some of the women who were physically and sexually abused were kidnapped and are now prisoners of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, with no medical treatment or hygiene. The full scope of the sexual abuse of the hostages is not yet fully known and should be fully investigated according to international law.”
As of today, UN Women have issued no condemnation of such gender-based crimes. Hochman says, “We decided to write a fake post signed by UN Women, to show them how we expect their response to look. The post received a lot of attention. Two days after we posted it, the organization did some course correction and posted a call to free the hostages.”
Rape first became recognized as a crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued arrest warrants in 1993, based on the Geneva Conventions and Violations of the Laws or Customs of War. In 2008, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1820, which noted that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.” The U.N. stresses that “Resolution 1820 calls on parties to armed conflict, including non-State actors, to protect civilians from sexual violence, enforce military discipline, uphold command responsibility, and prosecute perpetrators.”
“UN Women is an important body for raising awareness,” Elkayam-Levy explains. “But CEDAW is the one that broke my heart. Many U.N. agencies are compromised by political interests—for example, Iran, who brutally suppressed women’s rights protests just a year ago and oppresses minority groups within its borders, was just appointed chair of the social forum of the UN Human Rights Council. But CEDAW is an independent, professional body, which has become over the last decade the bread and butter of protecting women’s rights and created the International Standard of Human Rights. Their silence amazed me. This is a massive betrayal.”
The silence of the U.N. bodies becomes even more concerning considering increasing attempts to deny the massacre, especially on social media platforms. The most recent celebrity to jump on this disreputable bandwagon was Pink Floyd veteran Roger Waters, who claimed that “the thing was blown all out of proportion by Israelis making up stories about beheading babies.”
In the era of #MeToo movement, when women who have turned the words “I believe you” into a political statement, people are now demanding to be shown proof of this attack.
In an article published in Haaretz, it was noted “There is a widespread attempt to refute any claim about the atrocities committed by Hamas. One of the unexpected ‘weapons’ in the deniers’ arsenal is AI, which is not used to produce fake images, but to cast doubt about the authenticity of very real ones.”
Asa Shapiro, head of Advertising & Marketing Studies at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Communication, warns in the article: “In the past, we could trust the evidence of our eyes, but today—due to manipulation, selective editing, or use of various technologies—we are in a world that no matter what you see, it doesn’t settle the debate.”
That’s why bodies like the U.N. must examine what has happened and recognize the scale of the abuse of women.
CEDAW did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. A spokesperson for UN Women said: “UN Women is gravely concerned about all the hostages, many of whom are women, held by Hamas and continues to call for their immediate and unconditional release across all of our channels and platforms.
“From the onset of the current conflict, we have been clear that ‘it is imperative that all civilians, including women and girls, are protected’, as also called for in UN Women Executive Director’s post on X from October 7th. Speaking to the Security Council at the Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security on 25 October, she said: ‘Every act of violence against women and girls, including sexual violence, is unequivocally condemned, irrespective of the nationality, identity, race or religion of the victims.’”
Elkayam-Levy and her colleagues are very familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have campaigned for the rights of women and children in Gaza. Elkayam-Levy has also protested against what she called “Israel’s rightwing-messianic government.”
“The ruin we now feel is twofold: the ruin of this massacre, and the ruin of the struggle that was going on prior to Oct. 7, which facilitated a lot of cooperation between Jewish women and Palestinian women who are Israeli citizens. The silence of the international women’s bodies also ignores the pre-Oct. 7 struggles, and the complexity of our lives here. I would expect women’s agencies worldwide to understand and express this complexity,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy warns that the silence from the U.N. will result in a profound moral and ideological crisis, whose repercussions will reverberate throughout the West. “The global status of human rights has deteriorated over the last decade,” she says. “LGBT people are persecuted in Eastern and Western Europe. Anti-abortion laws are being passed in the U.S. International law is already in chaos now. But this time, following the 7/10 massacre, the devaluation comes from the inside, from the U.N. itself.”
