Rape is a well-documented tool of war.
That's why I find it difficult to understand the raging controversy over whether the Hamas terrorists who killed more than 1,100 Israelis on October 7 also inflicted rape and other sexual crimes on their victims as a “practice.”
If soldiers are depraved enough to round up families and burn them, decapitate corpses, and kidnap defenseless civilians, why, despite Hamas's repeated denials, would anyone think they would refrain from sexual violence?
opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
There is a general consensus that the women were raped during the October 7 attacks by Hamas militants, although many have questioned whether the sexual violence was “systematic,” as an explosive New York Times investigation put it in December, and have accused Israel of “becoming a weapon.” ”rape accusations to justify their extreme response in Gaza.
An enormous amount of journalistic energy has been devoted to debunking stories about rape-related carnage from the October 7 attacks. The Intercept published a long, and in my opinion misguided, article that attempted to undermine the New York Times report, primarily by attacking one of the reporters, who had “liked” pro-Israel posts on social media.
In February, the United Nations intervened and found “reasonable grounds to believe that during the October 7 attacks, conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations on the Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three places”.
The UN report notes that two widely reported reports of rape and sexual violence were misinterpretations by untrained observers. In one case, a first responder said a pregnant woman had her baby removed from her womb. In the end it turned out that the woman was not pregnant but rather she had been disemboweled.
There is a feeling in pro-Palestinian quarters that Israel is using any explanation for Hamas' sexual atrocities to provoke outrage and justify the destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of so many thousands of civilians. And that the Israeli government orchestrated a wave of stories denouncing feminist groups for not condemning the sex crimes of October 7.
An open letter signed by more than 1,000 feminists accused Israel of “a cynical attempt to incite public fury and divert attention from the genocide it is perpetrating.”
On Tuesday in Santa Monica I had coffee with two women from the Association. of the Rape Crisis Centers in Israel: Orit Sulitzeanu, the group's executive director, and Tanya Gilboa, its community relations director. They were here to visit the pioneering Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center and meet with the center's founder, Gail Abarbanel. They wanted to know how she has helped change laws in California, including eliminating the statute of limitations on rape.
Inevitably, our conversation turned to their recent report, “Silent Scream: Crimes of Sexual Violence on October 7,” and its conclusion that “sexual abuse was not an isolated incident or a sporadic opportunistic case, but rather an operational strategy.” clear”.
Sulitzeanu vehemently rejected the idea that the report was part of a plot by the Israeli government to justify the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
“We see it as our mission to tell the story, to fight for this narrative, to explain the complexities and to tell the story of the victims who will never speak,” he said. “We do not represent the country. “We are in the business of human rights.”
As reports of sexual violence began to come in, she and her colleagues decided they had a responsibility to collect all the information they were getting: “What happened, how it happened, and where it happened?” Her sources included local and international news reports, interviews with first responders and other professionals, and, due to her unique position, much confidential information.
To be considered a “practice,” Sulitzeanu said, a particular behavior (gang rape, rape in the presence of family members, mutilation of sexual organs) had to have been reliably reported to have taken place on at least three different occasions. .
Forensic evidence of sexual violence on October 7 is missing, but that has been plausibly explained: in the chaos that followed the attacks, the imperative was to identify the murdered victims and bury them as soon as possible in accordance with Jewish tradition. Rape kits, which are typically effective only 72 hours after an assault, were never going to be a viable way to gather evidence.
But there are abundant reports of people witnessing sexual violence. And although Sulitzeanu said he believes there are dozens of actual rape survivors, he has not attempted to find them because doing so would violate his principles and the Murad Code, a voluntary global code of ethics and conduct for those he interviews and works with. with survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. It was developed by Nadia Murad, an Iraqi-born Yazidi human rights activist who was kept as a sex slave by the Islamic State for three months in 2014 and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.
“Horrible things happened, people are ashamed, people don't want to share,” said Sulitzeanu, who was inundated with requests from journalists around the world to submit victims for interviews.
“I'm usually very patient and understand what a journalist needs,” he said. “But sometimes I got very angry. I said, 'Why do you think a survivor should talk to you?' A survivor who has suffered the most terrible trauma ever has to heal. It will take weeks, months, years.”
So far, only one survivor of an alleged sexual assault, a freed hostage, has come forward to tell her story. Amit Soussana, a 40-year-old Israeli lawyer who was detained for 55 days, told the New York Times that she was beaten and sexually assaulted while she was in captivity. She was also interviewed by Sheryl Sandberg for the documentary “Screams Before Silence,” which focused on accounts of sexual assault by Hamas.
The world's attention right now is, rightly, on the horrific conditions in Gaza and the suffering of its civilian population and human rights abuses by Israel. But to minimize the trauma that Hamas inflicted on October 7, including reports of sexual violence, is to give up on one's own humanity.
As Sulitzeanu told me: “How can I be a human being if I only see one side?”
@robinkabcarian
