In the initial barrage of Israeli atrocity propaganda following Hamas’s October 7 operation Al-Aqsa Flood, sexual violence barely rated a mention. Only by November,1 when fabricated claims of babies beheaded and burned in ovens had been definitively disproven and the total death count significantly revised down, did a chorus of charges that Hamas had committed systematic sexual violence begin to circulate, in unison, throughout Israeli and Western media.
The past year has seen these claims rigorously debunked in publications such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Intercept, Yes Magazine, and the London Times. Yet no matter how outlandish, how factually inaccurate or how manufactured these claims are shown to be, they have continued to provide fodder for a Western colonial imaginary that seeks to frame Palestinian resistance groups as so monstrously evil that they cannot be seriously negotiated with; so monstrous, in fact, that any action – including genocide – is justified in seeking to annihilate them.
On June 12, 2024, the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) released its long-awaited report on the events of October 7. Touted as “the UN’s first in-depth investigation of the events that took place on and since October 7, 2023,” the report seeks to establish the responsibility of both Israel and Palestinian resistance groups for crimes under international law, whether on October 7 or thereafter.2 Despite the fact that the Commission did not find evidence of rape on October 7; despite its inability to attribute sexual violence to any Palestinian resistance group; and despite having been unable to investigate on the ground due to Israel’s refusal to cooperate with the Commission or allow them entry into the ‘occupied territories,’ this UN ‘investigation’ has already been pivotally cited in support of the claim that Palestinians committed sexual violence on October 7.3
Here, we show that the Commission’s report on October 7 relies on noncredible witnesses and previously debunked evidence, contains glaring errors in verification and sourcing, takes Israeli government ‘facts’ at face value, and twists definitions of sexual and gender-based violence so as to amplify Israeli rape hasbara. It does all of this in order to pander to Israeli claims of sexual violence and come away with a ‘both sides’ narrative, which, judging by the official UN headlines, was clearly intended as the takeaway of the report.4 As we pass one year of Israel’s livestreamed genocide, the report’s ‘both sides’ narrative provides seemingly objective evidence for the claim that Palestinians committed sexual violence on October 7, breathing new life into Israeli hasbara and solidifying colonial representations of Palestinian men as barbaric and hypersexual.
Despite the ‘both sides’ framing of the report, however, it is worth noting what the Commission did not find when it came to charges of sexual violence against the Palestinian resistance. The Commission did not find evidence of a single rape committed on October 7 (para 138). It explicitly did not find any evidence of planned or systematic rape committed by Hamas or any other Palestinian armed group (138). The Commission was unable to meet “any survivors of sexual violence committed on October 7, despite its attempts to do so” (para 19), and noted “the absence of forensic evidence of sexual crimes committed on October 7” (para 18). It was “unable to verify” Israeli reports that instructions had been found on Palestinian fighters ordering them to commit sexual violence (para 139), and was also “unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation” which had circulated widely in the months following October 7 (para 138). When it came to sexual violence on October 7, the Commission found “some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate or contradictory” (138). The report’s admission that it was unable to attribute any specific alleged act of sexual violence to Hamas has been widely ignored in media reporting.
Yet despite this startling absence of evidence, the COI concludes that “perpetrators committed sexual violence on 7 October” across various active locations of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation (para 291). In the following investigation, we explain how the definitions of sexual and gender-based violence employed in the report push incidents not of a sexual or gendered nature into these categories, while relying on previously discredited ‘evidence’ and first responder testimony to build a tenuous case for sexual violence out of incidents that were not witnessed and which the COI could not investigate. In its disturbing lack of rigor, the COI report repeats Israeli hasbara that has been instrumental in manufacturing consent for Israel’s total destruction of Gaza. Moreover, while the COI’s June report included cases of sexual violence against Palestinians, and while its recent October report documents the sexualized torture and rape to which Palestinians have been subjected in Israeli prisons5, both reports maintain a ‘both sides’ narrative that is temporally and structurally myopic. This false equivalence serves to normalize – and to obscure the severity and longue durée of – Israel’s own systemic and systematic sexual violence against Palestinians.
1. Sexual Violence: Shifting definitions and a flawed investigation
The Commission defines sexual violence (SV) as covering “a range of physical and non-physical acts of a sexual nature against a person or causing a person to engage in such an act, by force, or by threat of force or coercion” (para 134n). Where definitions this broad appear in international law, they are generally accompanied by the provision that such acts be “of a gravity comparable to a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions”; however this provision is absent in the COI report. What this means is that the Commission is able to list a disparate collection of ‘evidence’ under the category of sexual violence. At the same time, almost all acts directed at Israeli women on October 7 – even if they are IDF soldiers, as we will go on to show in the case of the Nahal Oz military base – are enumerated under the umbrella of gender-based violence (GBV) in the report, because the Commission specifies GBV to be “harms directed at those with an inferior place in the gender hierarchy, [that] as such reflect an abuse of power by the male perpetrator” (para 133). By linking GBV to a rigid and non-intersectional ‘gender hierarchy’ the Commission pulls an array of acts into the category of GBV while erasing colonial and racial power dynamics. While our intent is not to police the borders of what constitutes SV or GBV, it is imperative that we unpack the work the particular definitions chosen by the COI are doing in the report, and why.
Notably, the way sexual violence has been discussed in media reporting, in other UN reports, and even in Israeli hasbara since October 7 does not correspond to the COI’s definition of SV. In Pramila Patten’s earlier UN report on October 76, for instance, ‘conflict-related sexual violence’ is defined as “rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, enforced sterilization, forced marriage, and any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity perpetrated against women, men, girls, or boys that is directly or indirectly linked to a conflict.” (para 28) This accords with a standard established in other UN reports and follows Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute of the ICC. While the broader definition of SV used by the COI mirrors how SV is defined in Elements of Crimes of the Rome Statute of the ICC, the latter makes clear that to meet the threshold of sexual violence as a war crime an act must be of “gravity comparable to that of a grave breach of the Geneva conventions.” This distinction only emerges implicitly in the legal analysis at the end of the COI report, when the attentive reader will notice that only a fraction of the descriptions of alleged GBV and SV in the report are referenced as possible war crimes.
Having earlier established that it is unable to verify allegations of rape, sexualized torture, or genital mutilation (para 138), it is surprising to read in the legal analysis under “war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence” that: “the Commission concludes on reasonable grounds that perpetrators committed sexual violence on 7 October in southern Israel […]. This conclusion is based, among other factors, on the state and position in which many of the bodies of victims were found” (para 291, emphasis ours). In other words, acts of sexual violence that meet the threshold for war crimes in the report are inferred from postmortem ‘indicators.’ Such inferences are made without collecting forensic evidence or conducting an in-situ investigation – which Israel failed to do and actively blocked the COI from performing – and so rely exclusively on postmortem witness accounts and photographic/video evidence. When we turn our attention to this ‘evidence,’ we find egregious failures in verification and cross-referencing and in vetting the credibility of witnesses. This is manifest in the following key cases upon which the COI builds its argument. 7
1.1 The case of Gal Abdush
“The Commission reviewed and verified video footage of a corpse of a woman found outside Kfar Aza on road 232, displaying signs indicative of sexual violence. The woman’s clothing was pulled up, her legs were spread apart, her underwear was missing and her genitals were exposed. According to an independent evaluation carried out by a forensic pathologist, the woman had burns covering at least 45 percent of her total body surface, along with a fourth-degree burn on the left side of the head. The expert assessed that the burns were most likely due to a fire ignited by the perpetrators using an accelerant. The woman had a cut on the right mid-thigh, possibly occurring either shortly before or after death.” (Para 143)
We have been able to identify this description as the video of the body of Gal Abdush, taken by Eden Wessely when she came across Abdush’s body on road 232 on October 8, and posted online. Described as “the woman in the black dress,” Gal Abdush’s case was the focus of the New York Times’ now discredited story “Screams without Words.” The exact location of the cut “on the right mid-thigh” and severe burns to the head – in addition to the position of legs and clothing and the location of the body on road 232 heading north from the Nova site – clearly identify Gal Abdush. Oddly, the Commission does not appear to have cross-referenced the video or made any serious attempt to identify the woman filmed, despite their methodology for digital investigations requiring “collected open-source material [to be verified] through comprehensive cross-referencing with a broad and varied collection of reputable sources” (para 12). This is not an isolated error; our investigation shows how the COI systematically fails to apply its stated methodology at crucial junctures in the October 7 report when that failure favors the Israeli narrative.
Had the COI cross-checked the video, they would have found substantial research on this case, including crucial family testimonies that shed light on the timeline of Gal and her husband Nagi Abdush’s deaths on the morning of October 7 – a timeline that discredits the hypothesis of sexual violence. As reported in Mondoweiss, Gal texted her family on WhatsApp at 6:51 am saying: “we are at the border, and you can’t imagine sounds of explosions around us.” Nissim Abdush said in an interview on Israeli Channel 13 that his brother Nagi had called at 7:00 am to say that Gal was killed and he was next to her body. Nagi communicated with his family till 7:44 but never made any mention of sexual assault. This is confirmed by follow-up interviews with Nagi’s brother and sister, both of whom deny that their sister-in-law was sexually assaulted.
Gal’s family reported that the charring on her body came from a grenade that fighters had thrown into the car. While it is not surprising that fire forensics, especially based solely on postmortem visual evidence, can be unreliable, it is regrettable that the Commission affirms the hypothesis that Gal’s body was intentionally burnt with an accelerant, without considering alternative explanations. Zooming out, this should give us pause regarding the COI’s broader appeal to the state and position of bodies – e.g. legs spread apart – as ‘signs indicative of sexual violence.’ What other possibilities might the COI have overlooked? Even Patten’s UN report, which never claimed to be an investigation, was careful to warn against drawing hasty conclusions of sexual violence from the state of bodies, for example by “mistaking ‘postmortem pugilistic posturing’ (a ‘boxer-like’ body posture with flexed elbows, clenched fists, spread legs, and flexed knees) due to burn damage as indicative of sexual violence.” (para 47)
1.2 Uncritical reliance on ZAKA testimony and sources
“Witnesses described seeing corpses with signs of sexual violence in Kfar Aza. One witness described finding the bodies of two deceased women in a safe room in Kfar Aza. One of the women, who was in her early twenties, had suffered fatal gunshot wounds to her head. She was positioned lying face down on a bed, naked from the waist down, with her knees on the floor and her upper body bent over the bed. The witness described a lot of blood around the body and signs of a struggle.” (Para 141)
ZAKA deputy commander, Simcha Greiniman, gave just such testimony to The Guardian during a guided visit of Kibbutz Kfar Aza in November. Greiniman has repeated this story many times, sometimes attributing it to Kfar Aza, sometimes to Kibbutz Be’eri. Greiniman also repeated the story at the United Nations (min 58) during Israel’s ‘public diplomacy’ push to have its mass rape propaganda receive UN endorsement.
Yet a simple exercise in cross-referencing Greiniman’s own testimonies reveals his penchant for lying and fabulation. In the Guardian story about Kfar Aza, Greiniman says he collected the remains of a six-year old child with “a knife plunged into his skull.” But Israel’s own social security records reveal that no six-year old died in Kfar Aza; the youngest was 14-year old Yiftach Kutz who died with his family (see the databases meticulously compiled by Oct7FactCheck and Haaretz). At the UN, Greiniman described finding a female body with nails inserted into the vagina – a story he has repeated many times, while tacking on further inserted objects. Yet Patten’s UN team found it impossible to verify such allegations (para 65). When asked to provide evidence for his claims, Greiniman repeatedly protests that he did not take photos of the scenes out of respect for the families of victims, stating “I don’t have one photo in my phone.” However, he is later filmed in Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary showing Sandberg multiple images of supposed atrocities captured on his phone. The audience is not privy to the images. Needless to say, these glaring discrepancies create significant concern around the credibility of Greiniman’s claims. The reappearance of Greiniman’s testimony in the COI report calls into question the sources upon which the report is relying.
The problem, however, goes beyond a single individual. The organization to which Greiniman belongs, and which is relied upon heavily throughout the COI report, ZAKA, is rife with controversy. ZAKA is an ultra-Orthodox Israeli search and rescue NGO with deep ties to the Israeli government and its ‘public diplomacy (hasbara)’ mission. ZAKA was controversially given responsibility for collecting bodies and remains from the ‘Gaza envelope’ after October 7. By the time the COI report was released in June 2024, a series of articles debunking ZAKA testimonies and criticizing the motivations and practices of the organization had already been published in both Israeli and international media, including by Associated Press, Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the Intercept, Mondoweiss and Libération.
Given this, it is reasonable to expect that ZAKA testimony be treated with a high degree of caution by the COI. ZAKA volunteers have no medical or forensic training that would enable them to reliably testify to age, cause of death, or signs of sexual violence. While the COI criticizes the practices of untrained ‘first responders’ on October 7 that led to contamination and tampering with evidence (a critique that echoes Patten’s UN report), the Commission minimizes the atrocity propaganda willfully spread by ZAKA members, attributing “inaccurate and exaggerated accounts” to only one ZAKA first responder (para 235). This ignores the fact that at least three senior ZAKA officials had been publicly discredited by the time the report was published: Yossi Landau, Haim Otmezgin, and Simcha Greiniman. More problematically, it sidesteps the systematic corruption, history of sexual abuse and financial scandal, political motivations of ZAKA – and its role in manufacturing and circulating Israeli atrocity propaganda. Haaretz has documented how, in the wake of October 7, ZAKA instrumentalized destroyed kibbutzim and used bodies (which they intentionally re-wrapped in highly visible ZAKA body bags) as props to fundraise. Haaretz showed that ZAKA’s unprofessional practices, such as mismatching body parts and omitting documentation, are due not to lack of training (as claimed by the COI, para 235) but to systematic corruption. In a meeting with ZAKA members in November, Netanyahu described ZAKA’s role as that of “buying time” by influencing international leaders and public opinion, in order to allow the genocide in Gaza to continue. ZAKA, it would seem, operates as an informal ‘public diplomacy’ arm of the Israeli government.
The Commission not only takes the testimony of individual ZAKA members to be reliable, but treats ZAKA itself as a credible source. Having been blocked by Israel from accessing the ‘Gaza envelope’ to carry out a real investigation, the COI relies on photos and videos originally posted to the ZAKA-run ‘South First Responders’ Telegram channel in the aftermath of October 7. ‘South First Responders’ Telegram channel was created on October 8 with the overt aim of pushing the Israeli narrative about October 7. Our investigation of hundreds of audiovisual items from this channel reveals that a substantial part of the COI report consists of verbatim descriptions of these videos and photos with no critical reflection on how they were acquired, cut, or framed. The organization in control of the channel was uploading exclusive original footage from the closed military zone of the Gaza envelope as events were unfolding on-the-ground in the immediate aftermath of October 7 (e.g. on October 8, it uploaded exclusive dashcam footage from an abandoned car at the Nova site). The channel reminds its viewers that: “All footage that we post here is sent by those operating in the field, unless we explicitly say it is not. If we post it, it means that one of our guys in our network has sent it to us from the ground in the south.” Our analysis of the entirety of posts in the channel confirms that the authors identify as ZAKA, describing men in clearly marked ZAKA uniforms as “our guys” and prominently featuring corpses in ZAKA body bags. ZAKA was given special access to the closed military zone and the job of collecting bodies there, not simply because they are considered ‘first responders,’ but, as Haaretz has pointed out, because of their privileged connections to the IDF and the Israeli government. Within the closed military zone of the Gaza envelope, ZAKA had access to footage from CCTV, dashcams of abandoned cars, and the bodycams of dead Palestinian fighters (whose bodies it was responsible for collecting). It framed, cut, and narrated these videos in highly selective ways so as to construct ‘evidence’ of Hamas ‘atrocities’ – using this Telegram channel to circulate them widely and to advance Israel’s ‘public diplomacy’ campaign.8 Not only does the COI rely on these videos, it misattributes their provenance: at times claiming they were “published by [Hamas] militants,” when it was ‘South First Responders’ that originally posted them online (e.g. the footage of the toilet stalls at the Nova festival, cited in para 78, and which ‘South First Responders’ had in fact published as an exclusive on October 13). Ultimately, the COI’s reliance on not only ZAKA testimony but ZAKA sources is a scathing indictment of the rigor sacrificed by the Commission in its attempt to accommodate an Israeli narrative without access to a proper investigation on the ground.
1.3 Complacent acceptance of IDF sources: Shura Military Base
“[T]he Commission also received reports that many bodies taken to the Shura camp showed signs indicative of sexual violence. Some bodies were completely or partially undressed with signs of considerable violence and struggle. One witness described to the Commission receiving a body of a girl around 13 years old who was naked with signs of violence to the stomach and broken legs.” (Para 136)
Shura is the military camp where most bodies were sent for identification in the aftermath of October 7. Despite the COI’s claim that it verified “through several interviews” that all bodies were sent to Shura (para 234), unidentified bodies perceived to be Palestinian/Arab were in fact sent to Sde Teiman.
Above (para 136), the Commission references witnesses from Shura camp as if they are competent in determining “signs indicative of sexual violence.” Yet elsewhere in the report, the Commission stresses repeatedly the deficiencies in “the collection of forensic materials or forensic examination processes” at Shura (para 234) – deficiencies of which Israeli media also complain. According to the COI report “testimonies by first responders working in Shura collected by the Commission emphasized a focus on the identification process and religious rites and did not mention forensic evidence collection. One first responder working in Shura camp told the Commission that they spent approximately five to seven minutes on each body, taking photos, checking for identification marks and taking fingerprints.” (Para 234) The ‘first responders’ working at Shura and quoted extensively in the report were IDF personnel – including reservists from the Military Rabbinate (headquartered at Shura) whose work was to prepare bodies for burial according to religious rites and who lacked the forensic training that would allow them to determine indicators of sexual violence. Many of these same first responders have given testimonies that were proven to be not only exaggerations but outright falsehoods. Their designation as ‘first responders’ (para 80, 116, 234) gives them an aura of neutrality and medical credibility that obscures their military function.
Throughout, the COI omits – or is unaware of – the fact that five forensic pathologists were working at Shura camp. None appear to have given evidence to the COI (elsewhere in the report, whenever forensic pathologists are relied on, they are clearly cited). Indeed, their findings – reported in Haaretz in April 2024 – undermine the implication, in para 136 above, that reports of “signs indicative of sexual violence” abound from Shura. According to Haaretz, “in that capacity [as forensic pathologists], they also examined bodies that arrived completely or partially naked in order to examine the possibility of rape. According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia.”9
When we cross-reference the above witness testimony with Israeli social security records (through the databases of Oct7FactCheck and Haaretz), we find that there are only two 13-year old girls who died on October 7, neither of whose bodies showed signs of sexual violence. The first, May Zuheir Abu Sabaakh, was killed by rocket fire in Alba’at. The second is Yahel Sharabi who was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri along with her sister and mother. The teenage Sharabi sisters were presented as rape victims by an unnamed IDF paramedic from unit 669, who instrumentalized their deaths as atrocity propaganda fed to multiple media outlets, including the NYT. In March, the Intercept reported that a spokesperson for Kibbutz Be’eri, as well as the girls’ grandparents, explicitly rejected that they had been sexually assaulted. Indeed, Pramila Patten’s earlier UN report determined the allegation of sexual violence “to be unfounded.” Patten’s team explained, regarding one of the sisters, that “the crime scene had been altered by a bomb squad and the bodies moved, explaining the separation of the body of the girl from the rest of her family” (para 65). Haaretz noted that the girl’s clothes had been pulled down when she was dragged into the next room. Later in March, the NYT was forced to issue a correction after video evidence surfaced of the bodies of mother and daughters fully clothed and together when they were first found.
This is part of a broader trend in the COI report of uncritically accepting the conclusions of Israeli government and IDF sources, with seemingly no cross-checking or further research. For example, in its introduction the Commission writes that “according to Israeli sources, more than 1,200 persons were killed directly by members of the various Palestinian armed groups” (para 21). Yet we know this to be untrue, not only because Israeli social security records confirm a lower number killed (1,169)10, but also because it has been extensively documented that Israeli forces, operating under the ‘Hannibal Directive,’ exposed many of their own citizens to tank shelling and massive aerial attacks by Apache helicopters and assault drones (Zik) on October 7. While the COI itself cites the possibility that Israel killed its own citizens on October 7 (para 208, 209 and 223-233), this does not appear to produce any hesitation in replicating the official Israeli narrative.
1.4 Faults in methodology: Lack of verification and corroboration
To anyone who has followed the development of Israel’s October 7 mass rape propaganda, the uncritical rehearsal of these sources and stories will appear as a recapitulation of the usual discredited suspects – surprising from a UN Commission that is supposed to be investigative, and which lays claim to a rigorous methodology (para 10–19). Yet this startling lack of rigor defines the report. Not only is there a clear paucity of evidence of sexual violence (only a handful of cases), and not only is this evidence tenuous at best (based on inference from ‘signs indicative of SV’ that could have very different explanatory causes), but several of these cases rely on video evidence that the Commission itself admits it “could not verify” (para 142) and testimony it was “not able to corroborate” (para 154).
For example, in a betrayal of its own methodological requirement that uncorroborated information be excluded (para 14), the statement of a witness claiming to have seen “the body of a man with […] a gun inserted into his anus” (para 154) is repeated twice in the report and cited as possible evidence of the “war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence” (para 292); this, despite the Commission explaining that it was “not able to corroborate the information” (para 154). This is the only allegation of rape contained in the report, yet it is unsubstantiated. Like the COI, we were unable to find a single corroboration of this incident. One may be forgiven for believing that the COI is searching for ways to confirm the Israeli narrative regarding sexual violence on October 7, at the cost of its own credibility.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the utter failure of the very verification process that the Commission relies on to authenticate the videos at the heart of its ‘investigation.’ Beyond the narrative about sexual violence, it is the framing Israeli narrative of October 7 that is given credence by the report. A glaring example of this failure can be found in a crucial piece of ‘evidence’ that the Commission cites to prove Hamas’ responsibility for war crimes:
“the Commission found statements of intent to target civilians in one bodycam video recovered from the body of a Hamas fighter. In the video, which was verified by the Commission, a group of militants is driving by the residential area of kibbutz Sufa on the morning of 7 October 2023. Recognizing the area as a kibbutz, one of the fighters starts screaming to the others: ‘Settlement, brothers! Cars, there’re people there! They look like civilians, it’s a settlement! Let’s go inside! … Settlers, brother, come on, enter!’” (para 271)
Our own digital investigation found that the video, where this quotation occurs, is an edited montage broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12 news on December 31, 2023. This is not “one bodycam video recovered from the body of a Hamas fighter” but a compilation of multiple bodycams from different fighters, vehicles, and locations, selectively cut and stitched together to give the illusion of an intentional arc. The fighter in the back of a Toyota pickup truck, wishing he could enter the kibbutz (and quoted in para 271 above), is not the one on the back of a motorcycle whom we see later in the montage scaling the yellow gate of Kibbutz Sufa. We were able to trace the prior movements of the second fighter by analyzing the full stream from his bodycam, which had been published earlier. Our analysis of the visual data reveals the two fighters are not at the same location; indeed, a visual comparison of the high-voltage electricity lines and the treeline shows it not to be the same stretch of road. The montage is constructed to make us think that the former fighter in the Toyota pickup made it to Kibbutz Sufa and stormed the gate.
Worse, the Commission claims to have “verified” the video they describe. Not only do they fail to mention the video’s publication by Channel 12 and its editing, but the possible motivations behind how it was edited are not questioned. This discredits the verification process upon which the Commission’s digital methodology relies, not least because rigorous cross-referencing (para 12) and geolocation (para 13) should have revealed the problems with taking this video as ‘evidence.’ Given how heavily the COI report relies on video evidence, the recurrence of such faults in methodology at crucial junctures – alleged war crimes, sexual violence, even torture11 – enables Israel’s narrative of October 7 to be adopted uncritically.
2. Twisting definitions of gender-based violence to substantiate the Israeli narrative of October 7
To supplement the dearth of evidence for sexual violence on October 7, the COI highlights supposed ‘gendered elements’ of other aspects of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation (e.g. hostage taking) to portray these incidents as examples of gender-based violence. This framing, which has the effect of propping up Israel’s narrative of sexual and gender-based violence, collects a range of acts into the category of GBV through placing a mantle of special victimhood upon Israeli women. The Commission achieves this by adopting a particular definition of GBV as: “acts of violence and harms directed at those with an inferior place in the gender hierarchy, (that) as such reflects an abuse of power by the male perpetrator and a disregard for the special considerations that woman have in international law.” (para 133)
The COI definition assumes GBV to be specially aimed at and impacting women, positioning males as perpetrators. As such, it employs a rigid and non-intersectional understanding of who occupies “an inferior place in the gender hierarchy” (para 133). This is not the definition found in international law, which typically refers to harmful acts perpetrated because of a person’s gender (irrespective of what that gender may be). For example, a 2023 ICC report defines GBV as “any harmful act that is perpetrated based on socially ascribed differences based on gender” (our emphasis). Yet, in the COI report, the lens of gender-based violence can be applied whenever acts affect women – even (as we will show) if those acts are based on their positionality as IDF soldiers operating on a military outpost, and not on their gender. This has the effect of pushing all kinds of acts into the category of gender-based violence. For example, while motorbikes were a common method of transporting hostages – male and female – across the border into Gaza (para 59), the COI report claims that when it comes to female hostages this method of transportation constitutes a gender-based crime due to “coerced intimacy” (para 160, 289).
Not only does the COI’s definition work to inflate evidence for GBV in the report, but it erases the intersectional nature of power in the colonial context – obscuring the particular power dynamics between settler women and colonized men, and glossing over Israel’s long and well-documented history of gender-based violence against Palestinian men and boys. Ultimately, this definition opens the door for the COI to regurgitate the assumptions of a colonial terrain in which Palestinian male fighters are portrayed as hypersexual aggressors, while Israeli women – including IDF soldiers – are invariably framed as innocent victims.
2.1 Nahal Oz military base
A prime instance of the warped reading produced by this approach is the COI’s depiction of military violence against female IDF spotters stationed at the Nahal Oz military outpost as gender-based violence. The soldiers are infantilized in the report as “young women” (para 113), who “appear to be frightened” (para 108), and are inexperienced and “unarmed” (para 106). The COI adopts the IDF narrative whereby the spotters (‘Tazpitanyot’), who are “surveillance troops from Unit 414 of the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps,” have a “non-combat role” (para 106). Yet we also learn that in addition to “observing a portion of the fence and reporting on any security concerns,” they “operat[e] a remote shooting system called ‘See-Shoot’ (‘Roeh, Yoreh’ in Hebrew)” (para 106). In a footnote in the report linking to the IDF website, we are able to view video of the spotters operating this remote shooting technology on the morning of October 7. While the spotters were not equipped with personal side-arms, they had basic military training and were trained in surveillance and killing technologies: they directed fire from machine-guns, mounted on turrets and remote-controlled, towards Palestinians inside the Gaza strip. These ‘young’ ‘frightened’ women – who, despite Israel’s obfuscation, count as combatants under current international law12 – were trained and equipped to kill.
The Commission focuses on the gender and age of these soldiers, portraying them as passive victims, to the exclusion of their active military roles. While some of the spotters were killed in their quarters, the majority died of smoke inhalation in the Nahal Oz command centre while on active duty, having been abandoned by their commanding officers. In assessing whether the spotters were victims of gender-based violence at the hands of Palestinian fighters, the Commission implicitly adopts the Israeli narrative to the point of mis-transcribing what one of the fighters says to the captured female POWs, inverting his words from “No, no, you are no beautiful” to “You are beautiful” (para 163). This frames the Palestinian fighter as sexualizing the women soldiers, and reinforces an Israeli narrative of Palestinian men as libidinous threats.
2.2 Trophies
“In one case, the body of a mutilated and undressed civilian woman in her twenties was paraded in the back of a truck in Gaza through a cheering crowd…In the video three militants are seen sitting with the body, one cradling the body while another is holding her by the hair in a gesture of triumph.” (para 157)
The case of female Israeli bodies allegedly displayed as ‘trophies’ is a recurring example of gender-based violence in the report. However, here again, we see actions baselessly attributed a sexual motive and misrepresented as gender-based crimes.
The woman described in the excerpt above is 22 year old tattoo artist Shani Louk. Louk was shot in the head at the Nova Festival and her body appeared in a video being taken into Gaza on the back of a pickup truck. While the Commission claims that Louk’s body had been “undressed,” a video taken of Louk the day before Al-Aqsa Flood, as well as photographs of Louk at other similar festivals, suggest that what she is wearing in the videos is likely to be exactly what she was wearing at the Nova Festival: there is no evidence that any piece of clothing had been removed. Such visual evidence would have been easily accessible to the Commission had they chosen to cross-check their sources. Echoing the Israeli narrative that Israeli women’s bodies were “systematically mutilated” in acts of sexual violence by Palestinian fighters on October 7, the report claims that Louk’s corpse was “mutilated”; however, the only injuries visible in the video are a gunshot wound to the head, which ended her life and resulted in the loss of a portion of her skull, and possible fractures to her right leg and arm. The inference that Louk’s body was mutilated in an act of gender-based violence misrepresents the injuries that appeared on her body, which do not show any particular signs of being of a gendered or sexual nature. The COI’s classification of her body as “mutilated” in this context further contributes to the narrative of gender-based violence. Moreover, while the video of Louk’s body does indeed show civilians cheering the vehicle as it passes by (as was the common reception of vehicles returning into Gaza on that day), there is nothing to prove that this is related to her gender. This is entirely imputed by the COI.
While the report takes this as an example of gender-based violence, of the bodies and hostages filmed being taken back into Gaza on October 7, the large majority were male. It is reasonable to assume that they were taken, not for gratuitous display, but to be used in negotiations for the release of Palestinian prisoners and corpses held by Israel. This strategy has a long history, with Israel in particular using “bodies as bargaining chips” to extract concessions from Palestinians.13 By assuming that Louk’s body was “paraded” for the purposes of sexualized display, the Commission once again unquestioningly accepts a narrative of Palestinians as hypersexual monsters, rather than as strategic actors operating within a circumscribed (and profoundly violent) field. At the same time, the Commission chooses to view Louk’s gender in isolation from her position within the colonial order, making a claim of gender-based violence stripped of all context. This is a move we see throughout the report.
2.3 Sheets
“The Commission documented that the perpetrators used white sheets and blankets to wrap or cover female victims […] during the process of abduction in four cases […] The Commission notes that these sheets were used to help facilitate the abduction of women. In one case a woman was wrapped tightly in a white sheet from head to toe by her abductors, not being able to see or move, and placed in a cart with three male abductors to be taken to Gaza.” (para 161)
We were able to identify the four cases of hostage-taking mentioned in this paragraph. They are: Nili Margalit, Yaffa Adar, and Shiri Bibas from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and Amit Soussana from Kfar Aza – of which only the last involved overt physical violence. The images of female hostages being “wrapped” in sheets are evoked in the report as instances of gender-based violence. In several cases, sheets and blankets were taken from houses in the kibbutzim and used to cover women as they were taken from their homes, often in sleepwear. Hostage Yaffa Adar had a pink blanket draped over her lap in the golf cart she was taken in. Nili Margalit, also in a golf cart, had a bedsheet covering her body (para 257). In interviews she gave after returning from Gaza she describes being taken from her home but makes no mention of being “wrapped tightly […] from head to toe” as the COI report, para 161, claims. Rather she explains: “I was in my pajamas so they covered me with the bedsheet; they took the sheet that was on the bed, I was covered.”
Because sheets were not used in the taking of any hostages from the Nova Festival and only in select instances from the kibbutzim, they appear to have been an improvised attempt to cover up women who were not dressed, and/or to hide them from view. A video of Shiri Bibas and her children being taken hostage supports this conclusion, as one Palestinian tells the others that they need to cover her to protect her decency (“istirouha أستروها”) as they leave the property, and that they must demonstrate “humanity” (“insaniyah أنسانية”) towards her. This video is described in para 259 of the report, yet the COI omits to translate the ideas of protection or treating with respect (implied in the Arabic “sitr”), or any mention of “humanity.” Haaretz provides another possible interpretation, but also does not see the blanket as a form of aggression or restraint, noting that Bibas “attempts to shield her children and wraps them up in a blanket.” Only in the case of Amit Soussana (para 146) was there an attempt to use a sheet to restrain a hostage who was fighting back, although the CCTV footage released by Israel and subsequent reporting seem to indicate that this was an improvised and ineffective means of restraint.
3. Conclusion: Turning Hasbara into Historical Fact
What we find is not only that the COI fails to adequately investigate a range of possible explanations and to methodically cross-reference and verify the cases of sexual violence it cites, but that it attempts to construct a systematic pattern of gender-based violence out of disparate incidents that could be explained in other ways. This could be understood as a symptom of the desire to appear to take GBV and SV against Israeli women seriously, after a concerted propaganda campaign by Israel that accused the UN of ignoring sexual violence on October 7. That campaign began in earnest in November 2023, prior to which Israel’s atrocity propaganda had included sexual violence only under a long list of other crimes. It is curious, given this timing, that the COI felt the need to issue a separate call for submissions on December 1 focused on gender-based crimes (para 16), after their initial call for submissions on October 20 (para 5) had only included sexual violence as one item on a long list.
When Israel intentionally blocked the ability of the COI to conduct an investigation (by, for example, not allowing the COI into Israel and forbidding medical staff who had treated October 7 victims from cooperating with the Commission, para 9), the desire to still appear to be conducting a legitimate investigation that accommodated Israel led the COI to accept at face value – with little to no critical scrutiny – much of Israel’s narrative about October 7. The COI not only ignored published analyses disproving Israel’s narrative, but relied heavily on precisely those Israeli sources (including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the IDF, Shura camp, and ZAKA) whose credibility had been widely questioned. In light of this and our previous work, we urge those critically engaging with Israeli hasbara to approach UN sources with the same level of caution and discernment with which they would approach the former.
At the same time as the COI report was circulating as validation of Israel’s October 7 sexual violence narrative, Israel was celebrating its own sexual violence against Palestinians. On July 29, 2024, ten IDF soldiers were arrested for gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman camp in the Negev desert, a place that one lawyer described as “brutal and beyond imagination.” The prisoner was later transferred to hospital unable to walk and with “gruesome injuries that required surgery.”14 This act of sexual violence is not unique, but part of an enduring pattern of sexualized torture of Palestinian prisoners, one that has become profoundly normalized within Israeli society. In the aftermath of these revelations, a chorus of support for the right of Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian prisoners (including from prominent religious figures and members of the ruling coalition) was echoed across Israel’s political spectrum, with even centrist news Channel 12 framing the legitimacy of the rapes as dependent on whether or not the victim was affiliated with Hamas.15 In a popular morning show on Channel 12, a journalist claimed that rape is “very appropriate revenge” for “thirty of our daughters [tied] on trees” and sexually abused in “incomparably” severe ways. ‘Naked women tied to trees’ on October 7 is a story fabricated (with zero photographic or forensic evidence) by Simcha Greiniman, the same discredited ZAKA official to whose testimony the COI lends credibility in their report.16 Some Israeli feminists have added their voices to this chorus, warning against drawing a “false symmetry” between Hamas’s alleged ‘sexual atrocities’ on October 7 and what is being done to Palestinians in Israeli prison camps17 – Hamas’s ‘sexual crimes’ being incomparably monstrous.
The idea that the Palestinian resistance are so monstrous as to justify literally any form of abuse and any level of suffering – including genocide – is exactly what Israel’s mass rape narrative exists to justify. By giving credence to this narrative despite a glaring lack of evidence and Israel blocking the investigation on the ground, the COI contributes to justifying Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including its use of systematic sexual violence against Palestinian men, women and children. Already, we can see the COI report solidifying in the historical record as a supposedly neutral validation of Israeli hasbara, despite the fact that the report relies on precisely this hasbara to make its case. We work in the interests of correcting this record before it can sediment into historical ‘fact.’
Notes
- We date the beginning of the mass rape hasbara to November 8, 2023, when a journalist from Haaretz reported attending a press briefing in which the video of an anonymous witness ‘S’ (or ‘Sapir’ whose testimony has since been debunked – see our report in the New York War Crimes, p. 2) was shown to Israeli and Western journalists by Israeli officials. On November 18, CNN aired a report that referenced this same testimony and that boosted the hasbara campaign in the United States. ↩︎
- The June 2024 COI report has three parts: a summary and two detailed reports, one on Israel on October 7 and the other on Gaza and the West Bank after October 7. We will focus on the detailed report regarding October 7, with all citations referencing paragraph numbers in that report. ↩︎
- Notably, when their research into sexual violence on October 7 comes up against a wall – finding at most “forced nudity and the posting without consent of sexualized images on social media” (and this only if other interpretations are set aside) – organizations like Human Rights Watch resort to citing the UN reports by Pramila Patten and the COI to give the impression of a consensus that sexual violence had taken place. ↩︎
- It is possible that pressure on the COI, which was accused of antisemitism and vigorously defunded after an earlier 2022 report found Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to be unlawful, resulted in the desire to present an ‘impartial’ approach.
↩︎ - On October 10, 2024, the COI released a report examining the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, as well as attacks on medical facilities and personnel. While the June COI report was largely concerned with the events of October 7 in Israel (and October-December in Gaza), the more recent report covers events after October 7, 2023 (until August 2024). This report, which, as far as Palestinian resistance groups are concerned, focuses on the conditions of captivity of Israeli hostages, accuses both sides of war crimes and crimes against humanity. We focus on the portrayal of the events of October 7 by the COI and hence limit our discussion to the June COI report on October 7. ↩︎
- On October 10, 2024, the COI released a report examining the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, as well as attacks on medical facilities and personnel. While the June COI report was largely concerned with the events of October 7 in Israel (and October-December in Gaza), the more recent report covers events after October 7, 2023 (until August 2024). This report, which, as far as Palestinian resistance groups are concerned, focuses on the conditions of captivity of Israeli hostages, accuses both sides of war crimes and crimes against humanity. We focus on the portrayal of the events of October 7 by the COI and hence limit our discussion to the June COI report on October 7. ↩︎
- Our investigation included identifying many of the videos and sources in the COI report, which anonymizes most of its descriptions with few citations. Even though it claims that “for protection concerns, the Commission has only included the names of deceased victims and witnesses in this report” (para 7), few deceased victims are in fact identified. This leaves to the reader the critical work of tracing and cross-referencing videos, despite such work being cited as part of the COI’s digital methodology (para 12).
↩︎ - Of the hasbara included on the ‘South First Responders’ Telegram channel are: photos of faked Hamas documents; a photo claimed to be of “a young child burned alive in a home” in Kfar Aza, when no such child exists; and video of a Palestinian bus driver whom they claim was executed by Hamas, when we know he died in Pessi Cohen’s house at Kibbutz Be’eri when it was shelled by an IDF tank. ↩︎
- The absence of evidence of genital mutilation, despite postmortem interpretations by first responders, was also noted in Patten’s UN report (para 16, 47, 53, 60, 70). To wit, “no discernible pattern of genital mutilation could be established” (para 76). But whereas Patten’s team had to mostly rely on “the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos” (para 76), Haaretz had direct access to the findings of forensic pathologists who examined bodies suspected of rape at Shura and who confirmed that there were no signs of genital mutilation.
↩︎ - The COI relies for total numbers on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rather than the more reliable social security records.
↩︎ - The section on torture in the COI report centres on the assumption that victims were ‘burnt alive.’ This claim is made despite the report’s own admission that “in most instances, the Commission could not conclusively determine whether the victims were subjected to mistreatment before or after death” (para 117), despite the lack forensic evidence (117), and despite the report’s reliance on compromised Israeli sources (e.g. at Shura). The Commission does not address the question of intentionality which is central to how torture is defined (Article 1 of the Convention against Torture) – a critical question since the report itself contains alternative explanations: that fighters “used hand-grenades and other means to set houses on fire, all in an attempt to force people to leave their safe rooms” (para 37); or that burning was a result of IDF shelling and the use of the Hannibal directive (para 230). ↩︎
- See Article 43.2 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions: “Members of the armed forces of a Party to a conflict (other than medical personnel and chaplains covered by Article 33 of the Third Convention) are combatants, that is to say, they have the right to participate directly in hostilities.” The only circumstance in which a member an armed force is not considered to be a combatant is if they qualify as hors de combat due to being wounded, sick, shipwrecked or captured by enemy forces (see para 1677 in the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977).
↩︎ - According to a report released by the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, Israel is currently the “only country in the world, besides Russia, whose primary legislation explicitly permits the withholding of bodies as part of its wider counterinsurgency program.” ↩︎
- The rape was shown in video footage released by Israeli Channel 12 on July 30th.
↩︎ - Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich lauded the soldiers who had committed the rape as “heroic warriors”; Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called them “our best heroes”; and Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky responded in parliament to the question of whether it was legitimate to rape Palestinian prisoners by declaring that “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas special forces], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!” ↩︎
- This story was repeated by Rami Davidian, a farmer who claimed to have saved hundreds from the Nova festival over four hours using his car. Despite filming himself on October 7, he claims to have covered up the women’s bodies that were on trees and to have avoided taking photographs, “so no one else would see what [he] saw.” He also made discredited claims of genital mutilation regarding the women he claimed were tied to trees: “wooden boards and iron rods” inserted into genitalia, which are contradicted by forensic pathologists at Shura.
↩︎ - Ostensibly because there are legal mechanisms in Israel to investigate and sanction the latter.
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Source: mondoweiss
