Friday briefing

‘Screams without words’

A two-month investigation by The Times, including interviews with more than 150 people, uncovered painful new details about the October 7 Hamas attacks, established a pattern of gender-based sexual violence and identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appeared to have been sexually abused or mutilated.

Israeli officials say they brutalized women wherever Hamas terrorists struck — a rave, military bases along the border and kibbutzim. Witnesses described cases of rape and murder in graphic detail. And soldiers and volunteer medics recalled finding more than 30 contaminated bodies of women and girls. Many of the stories are difficult to hear and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

Hamas has denied Israeli allegations of sexual violence. Israeli activists are outraged that the UN Secretary General António Guterres and the UN Women organization did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.

Research: Top police investigators in Israel have collected evidence where possible, but they have not provided figures on the number of women raped. They say most are dead – and quickly buried, according to Jewish religious custom – and they will never know. Not a single survivor has spoken publicly.

Witness report: Raz Cohen, a security consultant, saw a young woman, naked and screaming, being dragged by five armed men. He described how she was raped and then murdered. “I still remember her voice, screaming without words.”

In other news:

Russia retakes land from Ukraine

Russia is making progress around the southern village of Robotyne, recapturing land that Ukrainian forces seized at the height of their summer counter-offensive in the south.

With their counter-offensive stalled, Ukrainian forces are on the back foot in many places, and Kiev is increasingly concerned that the army will not have the resources to continue the fight.

Scandal: A celebrity party in Moscow with a “nearly naked” dress code has resulted in tearful apologies, withdrawn sponsorship, canceled performances and, for one rapper, a two-week prison sentence.

Crackdown on critics in Burkina Faso

The military junta in Burkina Faso, a West African nation struggling to defeat extremist groups, has forcibly summoned those who have criticized the leadership for its inability to defeat insurgents and abuses against the population it is charged with protecting .

According to diplomats, aid workers and analysts, violence has increased under the military government. Burkina Faso has become the focal point of the crisis in the Sahel region, a vast swath of land south of the Sahara that has been rocked by uprisings and coups.

Repair tennis: We asked players, executives and other influential people people in sports.

ARTS AND IDEAS

A warning to our imagination

The explosive growth of AI technologies, including text-to-image generators, is not a threat to the culture of our species, writes Jason Farago, a critic for The Times. Instead, it’s a warning: we cannot allow our imaginations to shrink to machine size, nor can we allow the world of arts and entertainment to become further resigned to recommendation engines and rating structures.

“To make anything count,” Jason writes, “you’re going to have to do more than just rearrange precedent images and words, like any old robot. You will have to put your back into it, your back and maybe your soul too.” Read his column.