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A United Nations envoy studying sexual violence in conflict zones said Monday she had found “reasonable grounds” to substantiate claims of rape and “sexualized torture” among the victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel.
Hostages were — and still are — being subject to sexual assault, the envoy said.
While the allegations are not new, this was the most definitive finding by the U.N. to corroborate the claims, CNN noted. Special Representative of the Secretary-General Pramila Patten drew the conclusions after leading a team of technical experts on a fact-finding mission to Israel and the West Bank from Jan. 29 to Feb. 14. She and her team were tasked with gathering, analyzing and verifying allegations of sexual violence related to conflict zones for inclusion in U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ annual report on sexual violence in conflict.
The fact finders visited several sites related to the massacres in which Hamas slaughtered about 1,200 people and took roughly 250 others hostage. In at least three locations, the experts found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred,” Patten said in the 23-page report, “including rape and gang rape.”
Most of the incidents saw victims raped and then killed, and in at least two cases, women’s corpses were raped. They also found partially or completely nude, mostly female victims who had been bound and shot.
“Although circumstantial, such a pattern may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” Patten’s statement said.
They conducted 33 meetings with Israeli national institutions and visited the Israeli National Center of Forensic Medicine, the Shura military base, the morgue where victims’ bodies had been brought and four of the places where sexual violence reportedly took place. Combing through 5,000 photographs and nearly 50 hours of footage, the team also conducted confidential interviews with 34 survivors, witnesses, released hostages, first responders and health and service providers.
They were not able to speak with surviving victims of the violence, Patten said, but did meet with the families and relatives of hostages who were yet to be released.
Witnesses and survivors from the Nova festival site, where nearly 400 young people were killed or taken hostage, related seeing and hearing women being raped, gang raped, killed or all three. Along Road 232, the escape route away from the festival, witnesses detailed seeing two women being raped by “armed elements.”
Hamas, which the U.S. and other countries consider a terrorist group, has repeatedly denied that it committed sexual assault that day.
With News Wire Services
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