Sexual violence was ‘widespread and systematic’ on October 7, according to new report based on previously unheard testimony

The project to collate all available evidence of sexual violence on the day and “ensure recognition and justice” for the victims and survivors, was led by academic Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, director of the Ruth and Emmanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University.

Halperin-Kaddari, who as a member of the committee for elimination of discrimination against women, worked for years on cases of sexual violence overseas – including Yazidi women being taken as sex slaves by Islamic State and girls taken by Boko Haram in Nigeria – said the Dinah Project report was compiled in response to anger at the inadequate response from international bodies, such as UN Women, about sexual violence on October 7.

“We feel let down by other women round the world,” she said. “If the standard is to believe survivors and witnesses, there is no excuse to keep quiet. Yet in this case a different standard was employed, and the victims were lost in politicisation. The fact so many kept silent or even denied what happened was devastating and a grave failure of international human rights.”

A protestor at a pro-Israel rally in Berlin marking the one-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre (Image: Getty Images)[Missing Credit]

Despite the fact that most victims were “permanently silenced” due to being murdered or left too traumatised to talk, Halperin-Haddari said what they’ve uncovered through the Dinah Project report “makes clear that sexual violence including rape and gang rape took place in multiple locations.”

Sexual violence also “continued in captivity, with many returnees reporting forced nudity, physical and verbal sexual harassment, sexual assaults and threats of forced marriage.”

Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, a former chief military prosecutor of the Israeli army who is involved with the project, said: “We found dead, naked and mutilated – with gunshots in their genitalia – and tied to trees. The fact that the same things happened in three to six locations can’t be coincidence but proof this was premeditated.” 

She added that “dozens” of bodies of young women were found stripped and abused, and “many of the witnesses spoke of the victims being shot and them [Hamas] still trying to rape a dead body.”

Last year, fact-finding reports conducted by the International Criminal Court and the United Nations special representative for preventing sexual violence, a UN independent commission of inquiry, found “reasonable grounds” to conclude that sexual violence occurred on October 7 in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including at the Nova music festival site and its surroundings.

The Dinah Project report – which is named after the first rape victim in the Torah, Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob, whose voice is never heard from – calls for the UN secretary-general to send a fact-finding mission in light of the testimonies and to include Hamas in the UN’s annual report of groups using sexual violence as a weapon of war.