Accounts of sexual violence in Hamas attack mount but justice is remote
for Israel's victims
Send a link to a friend
[December 05, 2023]
(Contains graphic descriptions that readers may find
disturbing)
By Maayan Lubell and Emily Rose
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - On Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked, the Israeli
military set up an impromptu morgue of refrigerated shipping containers
at the Shura defense base in central Israel to identify and prepare the
dead for burial. Of the 1,200 people killed that day, authorities said
at least 300 were women.
"Often women came in in just their underwear," said Shari Mendes, a
reservist who worked for two weeks at the base helping medics with
fingerprinting and cleaning female soldiers' bodies.
"Sometimes we had people who – we just had a torso, okay – or they were
very decomposed or they were mutilated," Mendes said. "I saw very bloody
genitals on women."
Israeli police are investigating possible sexual crimes by some of the
few hundred people that they arrested after the Oct. 7 attack. Their
goal is to try every suspect they have in custody.
But at the morgue where Mendes worked, the women's clothes were buried
with them before police investigators could examine them. In Jewish
burial law, the dead must be treated with dignity and laid to rest as
soon as possible. Everything that is a part of the body is buried
together, so some women were buried with their bloodstained clothes.
"We wiped everything clean of blood," Mendes told Reuters.
It's just one of the challenges facing the investigation into the
alleged sexual crimes committed during the attack, the bloodiest in
Israel's 75-year history.
At some sites battles raged for days, making it impossible to enter.
Some evidence was gathered, but police say they face a challenge after
opportunities were lost to gather perishable evidence to link atrocities
to specific suspects.
An Israeli military spokesperson told Reuters the first priority in the
mass casualty event was to identify corpses so families could be
informed as soon as possible. In the first days, many did not know if
their relatives were dead, wounded or taken to Gaza.
Israel's justice ministry has said "victims were tortured, physically
abused, raped, burned alive, and dismembered." Hamas vigorously denies
the allegations of sexual assault or mutilation by members of its armed
wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, on Oct. 7 or after that.
Mendes' account is one of seven given to Reuters by first responders or
others dealing with the dead that attest to alleged sexual violence.
Those people said they found women semi-naked, bound, eviscerated,
stripped, bruised, shot in the head or torched, at two communities
including Kibbutz Beeri, and at an open-air music festival near the Gaza
border fence.
Reuters reviewed images matching some of the descriptions or attesting
to other possible atrocities. However, it could not independently verify
all the accounts.
Taher al-Nono, the media adviser to the head of political bureau of
Hamas, denied Hamas fighters were responsible for any sexual assaults in
the attack and called for "a serious and impartial international
investigation into the matter".
A U.N. commission of inquiry investigating war crimes on both sides of
the Israel-Hamas conflict will probe the allegations of sexual violence
by Hamas, amid Israeli criticism the U.N. had remained silent. Israel
accuses the commission of bias and has said it will not cooperate with
the investigation.
VICTIMS DEAD, TRAUMATIZED
In Israeli criminal law, sexual violence includes rape, but also
indecent acts, harrassment and sexually demeaning a person – including
forced nudity – among other offences. A conviction can be based on
testimonies and circumstantial evidence even without forensic evidence,
three legal experts told Reuters.
But among the obstacles facing police investigators, they have said, is
the fact many victims are dead or traumatised.
An estimated "few dozen" surviving victims and witnesses have already
sought help, said Orit Soliciano, head of Israel's Association of Rape
Crisis Centres, declining to name any to protect their privacy. It can
take years before a victim or witness comes forward, she said.
Many purported victims have no voice.
"All the women who were murdered and may have suffered sexual violence
cannot tell us," Hila Neubach, director of legal affairs at the
Association for Rape Crisis Centres in Israel, told Reuters. "Witnesses
perhaps too did not survive."
Authorities have placed a gag order on the investigation but commander
Shelly Harush told parliament on Nov. 27 they have 1,500 testimonies on
atrocities including sexual violence, rape and genital mutilation from
survivors, security forces, first responders and families of victims. At
least a dozen graphic testimonies have been shared by government
agencies and first responders.
DECOMPOSITION
Sometimes it took days after the Oct. 7 attack to reach the bodies. Chen
Kugel, Head of the Israel National Center of Forensic Medicine, said
ordinary protocols for forensically proving rape are nearly impossible
when bodies arrive in such a stage of decomposition. "Maybe if we had
checked them in the first 24 hours (that would be possible)," Kugel
said.
Even in normal times, roughly 80% of sexual offence cases in Israel are
closed every year because prosecutors see insufficient evidence, justice
ministry data show. Prosecuting the Oct. 7 cases will require a
different approach.
"In a criminal case, a specific defendant is convicted of harming a
specific victim," said Dana Pugach, law professor at Ono Academic
College. "They will have to look at an entirely different legal
construct in this case."
[to top of second column]
|
Signs against what protesters describe as international silence over
sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women during the attack
by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas on southern Israel on October 7,
are displayed on a bench at a protest in Jerusalem, November 27,
2023 REUTERS/Dedi Hayun
Prosecutors could rely on a legal doctrine of shared responsibility,
she said – one used in Israel earlier this year to convict 11 people
of sexual violence for gang rape.
For that, proof of intent and co-conspiracy will be needed.
TESTIMONY
The testimonies are mounting. At the Shura base, Rabbi Israel Weiss
told reporters some bodies were naked and "torn apart."
Nachman Dyksztejn, a volunteer for Zaka Search and Rescue who was at
the festival, wrote in testimony shared by Zaka with Reuters that he
saw dozens of dead women in shelters: "Their clothing was torn on
the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked."
Concert producer Rami Shmuel, who helped in the festival searches
for casualties, said he saw the bodies of three women, one naked and
the other two stripped from the waist down. One was clearly shot in
the back of the head, he said, and torched.
Police say they have over 60,000 "visual documents" including videos
from Go-Pro cameras worn by attackers, CCTV footage and images from
drones.
Online video clips amplify the allegations. Some of those purporting
to show sexual violence could not be authenticated – one seen by
Reuters appeared to date to 2021.
The news agency verified the locations of two other videos that
suggest sexual violence, shared on social media within a day of the
attack. Reuters could not confirm who first posted them.
Of these, one showed the half-naked body of a woman from the
festival, later publicly identified by her mother as tattoo artist
Shani Louk, slung across the back of a pickup truck and paraded
through Gaza.
The other showed a young barefoot woman, also identified to Reuters
by her mother, being pulled by the hair from the trunk of a van in
Gaza and shoved into its back seat by an armed man amid shouts of
"God is great." Her hands are tied. The seat of her trousers appears
bloodied as do her ankles and arm. The image does not show what
happened to her.
Israeli authorities have confirmed Louk is dead. They believe the
other woman is alive in captivity in Gaza.
On Nov. 14, police showed reporters footage of an unnamed witness of
the festival attack. In it, she said she saw gunmen gang rape one
woman and cut off the breast of another and throw it on the street.
Later, she said, a gunman shot the woman in the head while raping
her. Police declined to name the witness or make her available to
Reuters.
Witness accounts alone cannot always secure an indictment or
conviction, said legal expert Neubach. But overall, she said, the
information already accumulated is reliable enough to determine that
sexual and gender-based violence has likely been perpetrated.
COURT
If prosecutions in Israel prove challenging, the International
Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague was set up to prosecute those
responsible for war crimes. It has already said it has jurisdiction
over atrocity crimes committed by Palestinians on Israeli territory
that day.
The tribunal can step in if states are unwilling or unable to
prosecute war crimes committed by nationals of its members, or on
the territory of its members. The ICC says its prosecutor has
collected a significant volume of information and evidence.
Israeli lawyers say its evidentiary requirements on sexual violence
are less challenging than Israel's. For example, it does not need
victim testimony. The non-consent of victims mostly does not need to
be separately established if the acts take place during mass
atrocities.
Two lawyers told Reuters they are preparing evidence to present
there. Tel Aviv-based Yael Vias Gvirsman is gathering evidence for
families of 54 victims which will include victims of sexual and
gender-based violence, she said. She declined to provide details but
said there are a few key witnesses.
But for the Israeli state, the ICC is problematic: Israel does not
recognise its jurisdiction – although Israeli individuals and the
state itself are free to submit evidence.
"That brings us to sort of, I'll call it the Israeli dilemma," Vias
Gvirsman said, referring to where such cases could be judged. Israel
may hold some perpetrators but does not have reach of the
instigators, commanders or aiders and abetters that the ICC could
bring to trial, she said.
She and another attorney expect the Israeli government eventually to
turn to the ICC. Israel's Justice Ministry declined to comment on
whether it would turn to the tribunal but said it would pursue legal
proceedings against those responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks,
wherever they are.
"Normally the Israeli Defence Force, the Israel government, would
say 'we have no dealings with the ICC,'" Geert-Jan Knoops, lead
defence counsel at the tribunal, told Reuters.
"But this is going beyond any imagination. I think Israel has the
interest to provide the evidence to the ICC prosecutor and for the
Oct. 7 events."
(Additional reporting by Peter Hirschberg in Shura, Anthony Deutsch
and Stephanie Van Den Berg in Amsterdam and Edmund Blair in London;
Edited by Sara Ledwith and Daniel Flynn)
[© 2023 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|