Editor’s note: The report includes details of sexual assault and violence.
During and after the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack in southern Israel, Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted and sexually tortured their victims “to maximize pain and suffering,” a landmark new report concludes.
The report, first shared with CNN, presents the most comprehensive set of evidence yet on sexual and gender-based violence against women, men, and children, calling it “systematic, pervasive, and integral to the attack.”
“The most important finding is the fact that the sexual violence against the captive hostages on October 7 was a calculated strategy by Hamas,” lead author and human rights expert Kochav Elkayam-Levy told CNN.
The report includes first-hand accounts from more than a dozen survivors who endured extreme sexual violence and abuse during attacks, abductions, or captivity in Gaza.
Some of them have spoken publicly about their ordeals, including former hostages Romi Gonen, Rom Braslavsky, Alber Yehud, Amit Susanna, and Ilana Griszewski. Other victims shared their experiences confidentially only with experts, investigators, and medical staff.
But the report also includes previously unknown allegations, including two minors who say they were sexually abused while held hostage in Gaza and that their captors forced them to perform sex acts on each other.
Some of these details only emerged after some of the earlier reports were released, including after the release of hostages from Gaza. Some came from testimony provided directly to researchers, while others were gathered in numerous meetings with medical professionals and lawyers representing some of the victims.
In one particularly harrowing example, the report details three separate rapes at the Nova music festival venue near the Gaza border, naming survivors who were hiding in the immediate vicinity of the attack sites.
“I was chasing her when I heard a rape voice. Judging by her screams, she was probably injured. It was a scream I had never heard anywhere,” the survivor said. The report said their accounts were corroborated by other survivors who described hearing the rape and who later witnessed the victim’s body with clothes torn, legs spread and intimate parts mutilated.
The report outlines at least six incidents in which people witnessed rape or gang rape first-hand, and all witnesses said the victims were shot to death. In one incident, a witness said he saw a young woman raped, mutilated, and shot to death by several men.
Elkayam Levy said the purpose of the digital archive, which includes the report and all the evidence collected by the team, is to ensure that the suffering endured by the victims is “not denied, erased or forgotten.” Like other archives of this kind, this material will be closed to the public for a period of time to protect the privacy of victims. CNN has not been able to review the entire contents of the archive, but has reviewed much of the video material contained within.
The report was publicly supported by a number of prominent experts and campaigners, including Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton.
The team has spent more than two years painstakingly collecting, reviewing, and cataloging evidence of the attack. They said they conducted hundreds of interviews and meetings with survivors, first responders, forensic examiners and medical experts, and spent about 1,800 hours analyzing more than 10,000 photos and videos from the attack, including hours of gruesome material recorded by the perpetrators.
A civilian commission, which describes itself as an independent non-governmental organization, was set up by El-Kayam-Levy to document and preserve evidence of the attack. The report identified what the authors said was “clear and convincing evidence” of a “pattern” of sexual and gender-based abuse that occurred multiple times at multiple sites.
They say the repeated nature of the violence, including sexual torture, post-sexual violence killings, forced nudity, restraint of victims, threats of forced marriage, and the filming and dissemination of images of sexual violence, shows that this was an integral part of the attacks and their aftermath, carried out against both women and men.
The report said many of the victims’ bodies were mutilated on October 7, with the attackers often targeting the women’s faces and intimate parts. Researchers reviewed photographs of many of the bodies and interviewed forensic experts and people involved in identification at the IDF Shura base, where most of the bodies were brought. Dozens of people were shot or burned in the chest or groin, they said, and many were mutilated after death.
Elkayam Levy said she believed this was an intentional part of the attack.
“Sexual violence is aimed at torture, humiliation. They cut off (victims’) intimate organs, burn genital areas and create pain and suffering that will be remembered for posterity,” she said.
“Victims are symbols of the nation: the collective impact they have, the collective trauma they create, the collective suffering.”
The issue of sexual and gender violence on October 7 has become highly politicized in the aftermath, with some accounts of horrific violence shared by officials in the immediate aftermath of the incident later proving to be false.
To counter potential naysayers, Elkayam Levy said all evidence included in the report was carefully cross-referenced and fact-checked.
Each incident cited is corroborated by witnesses, including first responders who were present at the scene. She said the team behind the report, made up of about 25 experts and contributors, also worked with a group of researchers who geolocated photographs and videos from the scene, locating each victim and cross-referencing them with other evidence.
The authors say that in order to preserve the independence of their research, they decided not to rely on any information obtained through state inquiries, which is standard practice in compiling such reports. Hamas has repeatedly denied sexual and gender-based violence occurred during the attacks or against prisoners.
The denials continued despite Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, concluding after a fact-finding mission that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, has occurred.” Ms Patten said she did not meet any survivors during her visit, but her team visited the scene of the attack and interviewed dozens of witnesses and officials.
The Israeli Association of Rape Crisis Centers, a group of independent Israeli researchers known as the Dyna Project, and various national and international media investigations have all concluded that rape and sexual abuse were part of the attack. The new report goes further, calling the violence systematic and calculated.
Hamas has previously denied that its militants committed rape during the October 7 attack.
The International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, saying they are responsible for war crimes, including rape and other forms of sexual violence. However, the tribunal closed its hearing after all three were killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza.
Some Israeli officials criticized international organizations for not paying enough attention to the issue of sexual and gender-based violence, which they attributed to anti-Semitism.
Some critics of Israel, on the other hand, denied that fact and accused Israel of using the allegations as an excuse for its brutal war in Gaza. More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began two and a half years ago, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Those who questioned this claim focused on the lack of direct testimony from the victims in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Israeli authorities say many of the deaths occurred on October 7.
Only after forensic experts examined their bodies and examined photos and videos of the attacks for telltale signs of sexual assault could researchers piece together what happened.
Another factor was that in the immediate aftermath of the initial attack, while fighting was still ongoing in the area, some emergency services violated law enforcement protocols and failed to collect forensic evidence and examine victims at the scene. At the time of the discovery, there were few records or photographs of the crime scene.
Within days of the attack, Israeli authorities took journalists including CNN to parts of the scene while emergency workers were still recovering bodies. Access was almost unrestricted, with dozens of people allowed to walk through the crime scene in a private home.
When asked earlier by CNN about evidence collection, Israeli officials and emergency responders pointed out that there are safety constraints to working inside a combat zone and the need to identify and bury victims.
Elkayam-Levy said this is not unusual in cases of sexual violence. What was unusual was the weaponization of the lack of forensic evidence to discredit the allegations.
“Anyone who has ever represented a victim of sexual assault knows that questioning and denial can come almost immediately. But what hurts me the most is not actually the public’s hesitation, but the experts who say, ‘Show me the evidence,'” Elkayam-Levy said.
“In my 20 years of experience, I have never heard a feminist scholar come and tell victims of sexual violence to show us the evidence,” she added.
Some first responders were volunteers with no formal training in how to handle evidence. Many were devastated and traumatized, some telling stories of what they had seen that later turned out to be false, but not before it was widely disseminated by the media, Israeli officials, and in one case El-Kayam Levy himself.
She was publicly criticized by some colleagues and anonymous government officials, and was quoted in Israeli and international media questioning her motives.
These incidents were later used by some critics to discredit other claims, even when the evidence was clear and supported by multiple sources.
Elkayam-Levy quickly became one of the victims’ most vocal advocates. She received the 2024 Israel Prize, widely considered the highest civilian honor.
Like many activists who advocate for victims of sexual violence, Elkayam-Levy has received threats, including death threats, related to her work, work she believes to be valuable.
“These men and women who are victims of sexual violence have been silenced in the worst and cruelest way possible. We hope that what we have done will put an end to this.”
