Expert team finds “reasonable grounds to believe” that sexual violence was committed on Oct. 7, but report stops short of an official investigation.
A team of United Nations experts tasked with gathering information on sexual violence linked to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel found “reasonable grounds to believe” that some victims were sexually assaulted, including rape and gang rape, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
“In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed,” a press release announcing the report’s findings said. “The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations.”
The 23-page report said the team also found “clear and convincing information” that some of the women and children taken back to Gaza that day by Hamas as hostages were subjected to “rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” There were “reasonable grounds to believe,” it said, “that this violence may be ongoing.”
If you mean the Palestinian deaths, I could've bought that argument when they were 2K, 5K maybe 10K. When there was some semblance of proportionality. When we are where we are, when hunger is used as a weapon for so long... I can't personally. At this point I don't think anything could wash the Israelis' hands. What's worse, the people who remain alive, the images of emaciated kids with missing limbs that will be broadcast worldwide once the media blockade loosens will keep reminding the whole world what went down. Parallels will be drawn to Nazi Germany, because it will look similar, even if the scale and details are different. I don't think any amount of human shields arguments can recover them from this. Personally I think this shit show is gonna break Israeli society long term.
Oh and the political blowback can't be contained to the region because there are Palestinian immigrants all over the world and many if not most have lost family and they won't stay silent, just like Jews didn't stay silent. You can't argue them into accepting that loss just like you can't argue Jews into accepting theirs. Except the numbers are way larger on one side. Expect Palestinian political activism across the West to continue and perhaps intensify as the full scale of death comes to light over the years.
This is a report from a UN team that flew to Israel and made a comprehensive assessment of all the evidence. I’ll also state the obvious, the UN team would can’t interview dead victims of rape.
If you’re going to post that kind of nonsensical statement, at least read the executive summary of the report.
Are you really pretending you don't see the bias in trying to use UN as a source of information that's actually just second hand zionist bullshit.
That is not to say Hamas is innocent of rape and torture,
The point being that this is clearly Israeli PR, so they can try loaning the UN's credibility and pretend like hostages getting raped excuses the genocide they're doing on Palestinians (Palestine=//=Hamas).
You can find accusations of rape on both sides, ofc.
And if we're going by what the UN says, the UN is also of the mind Israel is committing war crimes and is mandated by the ICJ to take actions against the genocide and to condemn and punish any genocidal rhetoric. (Such as“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” said by the Israeli "defense" minister.)
Initially they hostages said they were not raped. Then slowly they started saying they had to use psychological warfare to not be raped, and now they are raped. Very dynamic stories.
That clip is pure propaganda, deceptively edited, and completely out of context… The stories of Chen Almog-Goldstein and her 17 year old daughter Agam have not changed.
If you don’t believe me, try watching the full interview.
DER SPIEGEL: Your daughter Agam wrote in an article that she was afraid of being raped. How did you try to protect her?
Goldstein-Almog: Our guards were relatively respectful towards us, but I remember that once one of the men asked Agam to cook with him. I kept going into the kitchen to check on her to make sure nothing was happening.
After that the article derails into some hearsay about anonymous unconfirmed rumors. Strangely the people you are citing have certainly not experienced that.
I think it’s important to separate the narrative of the hostages themselves versus the scores of dead bodies left on October 7th, which were the focus of this report. I have been looking for evidence to confirm or refute these allegations for months, and the issues surrounding it can be summarized mainly as stemming from evidence collection.
Due to the active fighting in the area, forensics did not arrive to process the body until days later, leading to a significant loss of forensic evidence as the bodies decayed in the heat for days. Without that, there’s no evidence to indicate exactly what transpired in terms of sexual crimes and why the investigation has gone down its current path.
I don’t know how much of the evidence they’ve collected will be made public, but the descriptions in the linked report are very graphic and leave little doubt that sexual assaults took place.
Oh no, all those people who weren't subscribed to the NYT times but said,"That's it! I'm cancelling my subscription!" anyway are really going to have to rethink their imaginary subscription.