UN to study reports of sexual violence in Israel during October 7 attack

A United Nations team has arrived in Israel to investigate reports of sexual violence during the October 7 Hamas-led attack, as Hamas and some of Israel's critics continue to reject evidence that such attacks took place.

Israeli officials have said Hamas terrorists assaulted women during their incursion into southern Israel and have complained that U.N. leaders and others have been slow to condemn sexual violence.

The UN visit comes after several news organizations reported accusations of sexual assault during the October 7 attack. In a December 28 article, The New York Times documented a pattern of gender-based violence in the attack and identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appeared to have been sexually abused or mutilated.

The UN team “aims to give a voice to survivors, witnesses, recently released hostages and those affected; identify opportunities for support, including justice and accountability; and to collect, analyze and verify information,” said a statement issued Wednesday by the office of Pramila Patten, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, who is leading the visit.

While the Israeli government welcomed Ms. Patten's team, which arrived Sunday evening, it did so refused to cooperate of another UN body investigates the October 7 atrocities and accuses the country of anti-Israel bias.

Hamas, which the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist groupdenies that Palestinian fighters sexually assaulted women during the attack.

It has described the accusations as “war propaganda” intended to “justify the very real crimes of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that Israel is carrying out against our people,” referring to the Israeli military campaign that local officials say has killed more than 26,000 people. in Gaza since October 7.

Hamas said in a statement from Basem Naim, a member of the group's political bureau, that the October 7 operation was “very short” and that the fighters only had time for their mission “to destroy the enemy's military sites .” But extensive video footage shows uniformed Hamas gunmen killing unarmed civilians in a daylong attack, with Israeli officials saying around 1,400 people were killed or taken hostage.

Hamas has also said that its fighters, as Muslims, “have the honor to respect and protect all women,” and demanded an apology from The Times.

The Times report has been challenged on social media by critics who question the reliability of witnesses mentioned in the article. Some also say it has not been proven that Hamas planned and directed the sexual violence, or that any of the attackers were members of the group, noting that other militants and ordinary Gaza residents also entered Israel that day.

The Times quoted four people who described seeing sexual violence while hiding during the Hamas-led attack, two of whom have since come under intense scrutiny.

One of them, a 26-year-old accountant who asked to be identified only by her first name, Sapir, has been presented as a key witness by Israeli police. At a press conference on November 14, officials showed a three-minute clip from a video interview in which she described how a woman was raped, mutilated and murdered.

Some critics have said her comments in the police video were inconsistent with what she told The Times.

The Times found Sapir and spoke to her several times before the article's publication, including for two hours outside a cafe. In these interviews, she recounted an ordeal that began at the rave in southern Israel where terrorists killed more than 360 people.

She was shot in the back during the attack, she said, and while she sometimes felt faint and hid under the branches of a tree, she saw groups of armed men, many dressed in military fatigues, rape and kill at least five women. She also told The Times she saw attackers carrying the heads of three women.

Israeli police have refused to release more of what Sapir told them, saying more details could hamper their investigation. But police showed The Times portions of another video in which Sapir told investigators much of what she told The Times, describing multiple sexual assaults.

Police also said they found Sapir's purse where she said she was hiding and women's clothing near where she said the rapes occurred. And three severed heads were found further away, near the bodies of attackers in military gear, Israeli officials said, without giving more details.

In a separate interview, Yura Karol, 22, who hid next to Sapir, told The Times that he barely raised his head but also saw a woman being raped and killed while surrounded by armed men, some wearing military uniforms . Reached again last week, he repeated the story.

When asked why the Israeli police released only part of Sapir's testimony, Mirit Ben Mayor, police chief inspector and spokeswoman, said: “We had to show the world, which incredibly disbelieved us about sexual violence, and to the other side: we had to protect the research.”

The other witness under scrutiny is Raz Cohen, a security consultant who has described seeing a rape at a different location to several news media. Critics have questioned his credibility because he did not say he had witnessed such an attack during his very first interviews with reporters on October 9.

Mr. Cohen began talking about his rape witness in interviews the next day. He spoke to The Times in November and said he saw five men in plain clothes rape and kill a woman while he hid in a dried up streambed.

Critics have pointed out that in other interviews he went further than he did with The Times to describe the terrorists as civilians.

A friend who was in hiding with him, Shoam Gueta, also told The Times that he saw a group of men sexually assault and kill a woman. Reached again last week, he repeated the story.

In his very first interviews with the media, Mr. Cohen described the fear of watching those around him being slaughtered and hiding from his life. Asked this month why he had not initially spoken about rape, Mr. Cohen cited the stress of his experience and said in a text message that he had not realized at the time that he was one of the few surviving witnesses. He declined to be interviewed again, saying he was in the process of recovering from the trauma he suffered.

Kateryna Busol, a Ukrainian lawyer specializing in international law, including crimes against women, said a slight variation in eyewitness testimony “does not necessarily invalidate the experience of the witness.”

“It's normal to have certain blind spots and fluctuations in the way certain aspects of the event are remembered after such a traumatic experience,” she said.

The Times article also described visual evidence and interviews with witnesses, soldiers and volunteer medics who together said they had found more than 30 bodies of women and girls with signs of sexual violence or mutilation, including on affected kibbutzim and military bases by heavily armed gunmen in combat fatigues. fatigues.

Israeli police have acknowledged that they did not conduct autopsies or collect other forensic evidence during the October 7 shock and confusion. Experts say it is not unusual for such evidence to be minimal in wartime sexual violence cases.

The Times article described the case of Gal Abdush, a mother of two who was murdered with her husband after fleeing the rave, and her family's fear over the uncertainty. Based on a video of how her body was found, Israeli police officials said they believed she had been raped, and some members of the Abdush family said they feared the same.

“It seems to me, and I really hope I'm wrong,” said Zvika Alter, a brother-in-law, in early December, “that she was raped.”

Since the Times article was published, some family members have denied or questioned this possibility, including another brother-in-law who said he had spoken to Ms. Abdush's husband before he was killed. Critics have also seized on an Instagram comment from Miral Alter, Zvika's wife and one of Ms Abdush's sisters, suggesting that The Times misled the family about the focus of the article.

Ms Alter, who had not interviewed The Times before the article was published, deleted the comment shortly after it was posted. But critics circulated images of it to falsely claim the family had relinquished the item.

Last week, Ms. Alter told the Times that she was angry that her message had been used to question whether Hamas had sexually assaulted women and that when she did so, she was “confused about what had happened” and tried “to protect my sister”. ”

'Did she suffer? Did she die right away?” she said. “I hope she didn't suffer, but we'll never know.”

In addition to the work of the UN team now in Israel, several investigations into the allegations of sexual violence are underway. The Israeli police have gathered information. This also applies to a civilian commission led by Israeli academics. And a separate one UN Commission has called on the public to provide information.

Israeli activists and their allies abroad have expressed anger at what they see as the UN's slow response. “Me too, unless you're a Jew!” demonstrators have shouted at demonstrations in Tel Aviv.

The UN team led by Ms Patten plans to spend about two weeks in Israel and the occupied West Bank interviewing witnesses and analyzing medical and forensic information. Ms. Patten's office said she will share some initial findings after the mission ends in mid-February. Additional information is expected to be included in her office's annual reporting. report on sexual violence in conflict.

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.