Thirteen women and two men who survived captivity by Hamas said they experienced or witnessed sexual violence while held hostage in Gaza, according to a new report by a group of Israeli researchers known as the Dinah Project.
The Dinah Project experts — all women — gathered first-hand testimonies from the 15 returned hostages, one survivor of an attempted rape during the October 7, 2023 terror attacks, 17 eye and ear witnesses and 27 first responders who attended the scenes of the attacks.
These testimonies, coupled with forensic reports and photographs and videos from the attacks, led them to conclude that Hamas used sexual violence in a widespread, systematic and “tactical” way as a “weapon of war.”
The report, published on Tuesday, describes some of the survivors’ experiences.
One female hostage was beaten and sexually assaulted at gunpoint while in captivity, according to the report. She said she was chained by an iron ankle chain for three weeks and was repeatedly asked about the timing of her menstrual cycle. The report details that many of the 15 former hostages were threatened with rape in the form of forced marriage. Almost all of them reported verbal sexual harassment and some physical sexual harassment, including unwanted touching of private parts, it said.
Israel has in the past accused international organizations, including the UN and its agencies, of ignoring widespread sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and other militant groups during the October 7 attacks.
The Dinah Project is an Israeli group established following the attacks to seek justice for victims of sexual violence. Made up of legal and gender experts, it is led by legal scholar Ruth Halperin-Kaddari and Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, who was the former chief military prosecutor of the Israel Defense Forces, and operates under the auspices of the Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women at Bar-Ilan University.
The first official acknowledgment by the UN of the use of sexual violence during the attacks came some five months after October 7. Then, following a mission to Israel, the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten published a report concluding there were reasonable grounds to believe conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, and that there was clear and convincing evidence that hostages in Gaza were subjected to sexual assaults.
Hamas has denied in the past that militants committed sexual violence, saying in a statement in December that these were “unfounded lies and allegations.”
The scale of the atrocities committed on the day of the attacks meant that first responders and investigators were overwhelmed. According to Jewish customs, bodies must be buried as soon as possible after death, so the focus of the first responders, many of whom were Orthodox Jewish volunteers, was on recovering remains rather than investigation.
In many instances, authorities did not have a chance to collect sufficient forensic evidence because they were attending scenes while the attacks were still ongoing. This meant that there were often no detailed records or photographs of the crime scenes in the immediate aftermath. Many of the victims of sexual violence were murdered by their attackers, which meant there were almost no first-hand testimonies, according to the report.
As some of the hostages were released and more time passed, allowing victims to process their experiences, researchers were able to collect more comprehensive first-hand evidence.
The Dinah Project researchers called for the sexual violence perpetrated during the attacks to be recognized as crimes against humanity, and said the perpetrators must be held accountable and receive international condemnation.