Why did the world look away when Israeli women were raped?

That Hamas terrorists raped and sexually assaulted women and girls in Israel on 7 October 2023 was plain for all to see. On the very day of the pogrom, images beamed around the world – filmed by those carrying out the abuse – showed young women being carted off as hostages, either stripped half-naked or with blood stains on the seat of their trousers. But many chose not to see.

Before 2023, feminists insisted that victims of rape and sexual assault never lie. We should #BelieveAllWomen, they told us. But the Israeli pogrom revealed a terrible truth. What many liberal campaigners and well-funded global organisations actually meant was believe all women, but not Jews. When Jewish women claimed that sex had been used as a form of torture, they were told: ‘Prove it.’ When they pointed to pictures of the lifeless bodies of bruised and bleeding women, they were told: ‘We need more evidence.’

And so, in a double insult, Israeli women were not only subjected to depraved sexual abuse, but they have subsequently had to campaign to be believed, too. When, in November 2023, the Israeli government released footage exposing the true horror of the 7 October pogrom, journalists like Owen Jones asked for ‘conclusive evidence’ that such atrocities had been committed ‘intentionally’. It wasn’t until March 2024 that the United Nations acknowledged that rape had been used as a weapon of war. Shockingly, it took more than two years for Amnesty International to reach the same conclusion. Even now, Jewish women have to fight to be taken seriously.

This week, a new report, Silenced No More, presents ‘the most comprehensive evidentiary record to date of the sexual atrocities committed on October 7 and during captivity’. It has been produced by the Civil Commission, an independent organisation established in the aftermath of the attack, to advocate for the victims of sexual and gender-based violence and atrocities, in an effort to prove to the world once and for all that women in Israel were raped and assaulted.

The report’s findings are stark: ‘sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath.’ Unlike the #MeToo movement, the commission’s researchers do not simply rely on believing women, they have systematically assembled, verified and analysed evidence. It includes over 10,000 photographs and video segments, and more than 430 testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members.

What emerges is ‘not a collection of isolated incidents, but a coherent and repeated pattern of violence, carried out across multiple locations and phases, from the initial attacks, through abduction and transfer, to prolonged captivity and the deliberate digital circulation of abuse.’ The Silenced No More report shows that sexual violence was not incidental to Hamas’s terror; ‘it was deliberate, coordinated, and embedded in the attack itself’.

​The Civil Commission researchers identified 13 recurring forms of sexual and gender-based violence across multiple sites, including rape and gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, executions linked to sexual violence, post-mortem sexual abuse and sexual assaults carried out in the presence of family members. As the report’s authors point out: ‘The repetition of these patterns demonstrates that the crimes were not isolated acts of brutality, but part of a broader operational method used during the attack and its aftermath.’

Significantly, the Civil Commission highlighted the way Hamas operatives deliberately filmed and photographed much of the abuse, even as it was being perpetrated. They livestreamed their depravity, sometimes through the victims’ own social-media accounts. In this way, not only were close friends and family members made to bear witness to the abuse being inflicted on their loved ones, but survivors will forever suspect the existence of a record of their torture. In this way, Hamas created a form of psychological horror that exists beyond the initial act of rape and afflicts whole communities. As Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the founder and chair of the Civil Commission, notes: ‘The perpetrators did not conceal these acts – they glorified them. They filmed and broadcast them in real time, transforming their violence into spectacle and human suffering into an instrument of terror.’

Based on these findings, the commission concludes that what happened on October 7 constituted war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal acts under international law. The revelation of such depravity should, by rights, put an end to the shameful displays of solidarity with Hamas that are still seen on the streets of Britain’s towns and cities. Those who insisted that more ‘conclusive’ evidence was needed before they could begin to acknowledge that Hamas terrorists systematically raped and abused women should apologise, or, at very least, fall silent.

Of course, this is not happening. No amount of evidence will ever convince Hamas fan-boys and Israelophobes that Jewish women were victims. The warped imagination of the anti-Semite is capable of conceiving of all manner of things that did not and could not happen – dogs trained to rape Palestinians being just the latest example – while casting aspersions on things that did actually happen, the rape and torture of women by Hamas.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.