The UN has failed the 7 October rape victims

Nearly two years on from the 7 October pogrom, the United Nations has finally acknowledged Hamas as perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence.

The UN’s belated acknowledgement of reality came in an annual report, published last month. It is both overdue and undersold. The UN has effectively failed Israeli women for the past 22 months. Its slow, mealy mouthed response captures the prevailing attitude among the world’s leaders towards these victims of terror, which ranges from indifference to disdain.

The sexual sadism of 7 October 2023 was one of the most horrific aspects of that terrible day. These were not acts born of the chaos of the battlefield. They were premeditated, designed to maximise the suffering of Israelis – and to revel in it.

Historically, sexual violence has been used during a conflict to humiliate and psychologically scar not only the victims, but also entire communities. It is a double weapon – wounding in the present and in perpetuity. In this case, the perpetrators compounded their cruelty by murdering most of their victims, thereby extinguishing any chance of justice. Worse still, they banked on the anti-Israel biases and moral evasions so evident in the West today to ensure that the crimes would never be taken seriously. The pain inflicted on Israel by Hamas’s savagery was compounded by the unforgivable global shrug that followed it.

There have been three main types of response to Hamas’s sexual violence. First, there has been the outright denial of those rejecting all the available evidence out of unshakeable bigotry. Worse still, some of these denialists accept the assaults took place, but deny that they were evil, insisting they were acts of ‘resistance’.

The second type of response has been equivocation. This has been the position taken by the morally superior fence-sitters, the ‘feminists’ who cannot condemn Hamas’s sexual violence without a prefacing ‘well…’. They cloak their evasions with talk of nuance, but a bigotry lurks not far beneath the surface.

The third type of response is active silence. This predominates among those paralysed by fear of offending political sensitivities. They opt not to condemn the sexual violence of 7 October so as not to provoke the wrath of anti-Israel ‘progressives’.

It seems that some victims of sexual violence are not deemed as worthy of support as others. Too many Western feminists allowed their loathing of Israel to trump their feminism. It was almost as if Jews were seen, at best, as slightly sub-human, and, at worst, as not human at all.

The UN – and especially UN Women – ignored the atrocities. Indeed, on 8 October 2023, UN Women was busy tweeting in celebration of men who declare themselves lesbians. It took a full two months before it issued even a half-hearted criticism of Hamas’s rape and slaughter. By March 2024, the UN could only manage the mealy mouthed phrase that there was ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ Hamas had committed sexual violence, despite the genocidal lunatics recording their crimes on their GoPros. Only now, as the massacre’s second anniversary approaches, has the UN decided to formally ‘blacklist’ Hamas for its sexual crimes.

It should never have taken nearly two years to establish the facts. Proof was overwhelming from the outset – there were multiple sources and multiple categories of evidence. What was in doubt was not the evidence, but the victims’ worth. Only relentless Jewish pressure forced the UN to accept what the evidence was telling it.

Even then, the UN refrained from offering anything approaching moral clarity. Instead it acknowledged Hamas’s proven atrocities at the same time as reiterating allegations – sourced from biased reports – about supposed Israeli abuse of Palestinian detainees. The UN could not resist diluting its condemnation of Hamas without taking another swipe at Israel.

It is shameful that the UN has forced a small community to bear the burden of proving, again and again, that its daughters, sisters and wives matter as much as anyone else’s. It is shameful that these women’s agony has been placed on the same moral plane as their rapists’ supposed grievances. The UN’s constant, reflexive ‘but’ speaks of its moral cowardice. There must always be an implied caveat, a suggestion that perhaps Israel had it coming.

The women raped and killed on 7 October deserved far better than the apathy and hypocrisy of the UN. To dehumanise these women is to degrade humanity itself.

Sarah Kendis is a US-based writer and a blogger for the Times of Israel.