The sexual violence committed during the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, and later against hostages in captivity, was not a series of isolated incidents. It was systematically planned and formed an integral part of the war strategy of the terrorist organization from Gaza. On 12 May 2026, the independent Israeli Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children published its final report, Silenced No More.
The findings are clear, horrific in their detail and almost impossible to comprehend.
For two years, the commission, led by international law and human rights expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy, systematically recorded and verified testimony from massacre survivors and freed hostages. It reviewed 10,000-plus photographs and video segments, examined over 1,800 hours of visual material and collected more than 430 testimonies and interviews from survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members. The victims included not only Israelis, but also women and men of 52 nationalities. The commission says the material was systematically logged, coded and cross-referenced across time and location.
The investigation identified 13 recurring forms of sexual and gender-based violence. They included rape and gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, forced nudity, executions linked to sexual violence, postmortem sexual abuse and sexual assaults carried out in the presence of family members.
The commission found that the repetition of such patterns showed the crimes were not isolated acts of brutality, but part of a broader operational method used during the attack and its aftermath.
Preserving the Evidence
The purpose of the investigation was not only to preserve the victims’ experiences in a historical and legal archive, but also to counter denial of the crimes. The commission said the report was intended to ensure that the crimes are “neither denied, minimized, nor forgotten”. Elkayam-Levy said the investigation established that sexual violence “was not incidental”, but “systematic, deliberate, and embedded in the attack itself”.
As a consequence, the commission recommended specialized prosecution mechanisms for sexual violence crimes, also to support international cooperation in criminal proceedings. The documented acts are classified by the authors as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal acts under international law.
Denial of Sexual Violence at the UN
To this day, rapes of women and atrocities committed during the Hamas attack are denied even by senior political actors around the world, despite countless eyewitness accounts, photographs and videos, some of which the perpetrators themselves proudly shared on social media. Israel and Jews as victims do not fit the worldview of those who prefer to describe the Jewish people as aggressors and occupiers. Not even the largest massacre of Jews since the end of World War II makes any difference in such circles, or leads to even minimal criticism of terrorist groups such as Hamas.
The remarks of the Italian lawyer Francesca Albanese remain an unforgettable example of this refusal to face reality. Since 2022, she has held the title of UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Since 7 October 2023, she has worked tirelessly in public not only to relativize the atrocities Hamas committed against members of her own sex, but also repeatedly to deny them.
There were “different views on what happened on October 7” and “fabrications attached to it, like the mass rape and other horror stories”, Albanese said in an interview with CNN, according to footage of the exchange circulated by Hillel Neuer. Western media had repeated and spread such lies, she argued, adding that there was no need to discuss mass rape because there was no evidence for it.
Even after the UN itself published a 2024 report finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that conflict-related sexual violence had occurred during the 7 October attacks in several locations, including rape and gang rape, she could not bring herself to acknowledge the factual record on American television in Piers Morgan’s program.
In May 2026, Albanese received Spain’s Order of Civil Merit from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for what the Spanish government described as her “extensive work documenting and denouncing violations of international law in Gaza”. At the ceremony in Madrid, Sánchez called her “a voice that upholds the conscience of the world”.
The Politics of Erasure
The denial of atrocities committed against a political opponent because they do not fit one’s own ideological or political framework is, historically, nothing new. It has always been an instrument of political propaganda. Since almost everyone has owned a smartphone, however, it has become harder for regimes to retain control over images.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin systematically had people who had fallen from favor under the regime, or had been murdered, retouched out of historical photographs as if they had never existed. In doing so, he helped inspire George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in the classic novel 1984, which rewrote the country’s history in books and newspapers every day, depending on what was politically convenient at the time.
Germany has even passed a specific law making Holocaust denial a criminal offense, in order to prevent those who seek to cast doubt on the systematic extermination of millions of Jews by the Germans from revising historical events with impunity.
The fight against forgetting, retrospective whitewashing or the suppression of the factual record therefore remains an important task, not only for political actors, but also for historians, the media and educational institutions.
The commission’s report should provide more than enough material for that purpose.
A Record Built to Withstand Denial
Since the commission itself appears to assume that the credibility of its work will again be called into question, Elkayam-Levy stressed that every case listed in the report had been carefully examined and corroborated by several sources. The commission deliberately conducted its own investigations and refrained from using information from state interrogations in order to preserve the independence of its work.
Some of the victims have described their experiences on video. It is almost impossible to imagine what they endured.
Darin Komarov is one of them. She survived the Nova festival by hiding in the caravan in which she had arrived. From there, she heard three rapes from three separate locations nearby. “I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams – screams you have never heard anywhere. It’s between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die”, she said. “And after they finished, they shot her.”
She continued: “You hear the screams, and then you hear silence. You hear a bang – and silence.”
Later, after she had been rescued, she saw the women’s bodies. “There wasn’t a single body that just ‘died normally’. Every single one had gone through torture”, she recalled.
Bodies Turned Into Messages
One does not even need to view the available images and videos oneself. The descriptions of the crimes alone are enough to evoke the horror.
The mutilation and dehumanization of the victims followed recurring patterns. Women were shot in the eyes, the face, the breasts and even in their most intimate body parts. Women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. Some were executed after being raped or even during the rape. Heads were severed and pelvic bones shattered.
The perpetrators wanted to disfigure them so that the horror of the crimes would be visible to those who later found them. Accordingly, women were often further mutilated after death.
In Kibbutz Be’eri, for example, nails, sharp objects and pieces of metal and plastic were driven into the body of a woman whose naked and bound corpse was discovered. In another case, grenades were used to mutilate a victim’s body.
First responders have described what they found in the kibbutzim. Everything is documented in images. One of them described how nails had been inserted into parts of a body, including the genital area.
A second body was found headless and naked, and so badly mutilated that at first glance it was impossible to determine whether the victim was a man or a woman.
In another house, the body of a woman was discovered next to knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers and other tools. All of those objects had penetrated the body. The corpse, the first responder said, was completely mutilated.
In some houses, entire families were found tied together and burned.
No Illusion of Peace
What was documented of the cruelty of that day goes far beyond rape. It is as if a pack had hunted and killed in a sadistic blood frenzy.
Those who mutilate corpses and use severed body parts to stage scenes do not merely want to kill. They also want to send a message to posterity. Look, we are coming. We will violate and murder your women, and then we will throw them on the rubbish heap.
That message should be taken seriously. These men do not come to negotiate. They come to torture, rape and kill until no one is left alive. No one should indulge the illusion that any peaceful solution for coexistence in the region is possible in the foreseeable future as long as terrorist groups like Hamas retain any power in Gaza.