Report released two days after UN raised the alarm about ongoing human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls, including rape in prison

On 19 February 2024, the UN raised the alarm about widespread, ongoing human rights violations against Palestinian women & girls, including allegations of rape in detention.

Two days later, on 21 February 2024, the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) released a 39-page report titled, “Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War”, accusing HAMAS of a systematic rape plan during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood primarily relying on recycled, already-published and widely debunked propaganda.

The urgency of the UN press release to raise the alarm about violations of Palestinian women and girls—including credible extrajudicial killings—is that violations are ONGOING, not a historical event that took place 5 months ago. Israel’s distraction from ongoing human rights violations is dangerous to Palestinian women and girls.

Who released the report and what does it represent?

The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) was founded in 1990 as an umbrella organization, uniting nine rape crisis centers spread across the country that receive approximately 50,000 inquiries each year.

The abstract of the “Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War“ report describes it as “the result of an initial examination of all the public and classified information, interviews, and testimonies that can be revealed at this time, which will likely increase with time.”

The introduction continues, explaining that “we cannot present in this document all the information and accounts that have come to us confidentially. Nevertheless, we have made an effort to provide a picture of the situation that reflects information from open sources (primarily) as well as information that we cannot fully disclose at this stage.”

The Israeli government which announced the release of the report in a 21 November press release, wrote:

The report is the first official research since October 7, consolidating evidence and providing conclusions. The report clearly demonstrates that this is not a “malfunction” or isolated incident but a clear operational strategy involving systematic, targeted sexual abuse.

Source: https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/arcci-submits-first-report-to-un-21-feb-2024

Gang rape

In this brief introduction to the report, which merits a full deconstruction, I just want to focus on one allegation involving rape, “gang rape”, which the report presents as part of the evidence that:

Hamas’s attack on October 7 included brutal sexual assaults, carried out systematically and deliberately towards Israeli civilians. Numerous testimonies and pieces of disclosed and classified information present a clear picture of identical patterns of action repeated in each of the attack zones – the Nova Festival, private homes in the Gaza envelope kibbutzim, and IDF bases.

Both the Israeli government and ARCCI are determined to present rape as part of HAMAS’ military plan, and “gang rape” would obviously being the best evidence of that, hence my restricting this analysis to what evidence they have for that one claim.

Gang rape is discussed in general terms early on in the introductory “Background: Sexual Crimes in War” on page 9, “Estimates suggest that around 90% of wartime rapes are gang rapes committed in the presence and participation of multiple perpetrators.”

This statement is not in question. It is a 100% true. The question here is very simple: Did HAMAS commit gang rapes as either an intentionally planned or unintended part of its military operation on October 7?

The ARCCI report’s claim that “Several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape” is introduced on page 14 as follows:

In the ARCCI’s footnote to the claim Footnote 10, the specific term “gang rape” is sourced to three media reports listed.

1. The first Footnote 10 source of “eyewitness testimony of gang rape” is a 2 December 2023 Sunday Times (UK) article, “First Hamas fighters raped her. Then they shot her in the head“, by Christina Lamb, that cites just one actual eyewitness to “gang rape“:
   • Yoni Saadon, a 39-year-old father of four, who attended the Supernova music festival who claimed to have seen “eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping [a woman]” and another attempted rape that ended in the alleged victim’s murder by two other men.
   • The only others interviewed in the article, ZAKA’s Haim Outmezgine and the Israeli police commander leading the investigation, Shelly Harush—neither of whom were eyewitnesses to the attack—do not explicitly mention “gang rape” in their interviews with the Sunday Times.
2. The second Footnote 10 source of “eyewitness testimony of gang rape” cited by ARCCI is the following day’s 3 December 2023 Jewish Chronicle article, “Hamas gang raped and beheaded women at rave massacre, fresh testimony reveals“, which itself simply requotes the Sunday Times‘ interviews with Yoni Saadon, Haim Outmezgine, and Shelly Harush.
3. The third Footnote 10 source of “eyewitness testimony of gang rape” cited by ARCCI is the infamous 28 December 2023 New York Times article, How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7“, by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella (definitely read the Twitter threads linked from both names). It’s eyewitness include:
   • Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, who gave a two-hour interview to the NYT, “recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women” and specifically reported seeing “about 100 men… most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots,” according to the NYT’s report, “congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.” Her description of the “gang rape” she claimed to have witnessed is graphic and can be read in the full article linked above. She is the source of the viral claim that attackers cut off a woman’s breast with a box cutter and played with it. “’One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,’ Sapir said. She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.” Read this thread about Sapir‘s credibility here.
   • Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, was hiding in the same spot as Sapir. “In an interview,” wrote the NYT, “Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.” That this was a “gang rape” or a description of the same group of men is not clear from the NYT’ text.
   • Raz Cohen, “a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers” claimed to be an eyewitness to “gang rape” from another location on the same highway. From a hiding place, he reported that a white van pulled up, five men got out, who proceeded to rape a woman, ultimately killing her with a knife. Read this Twitter thread (or read it as a single page on ThreadReader) showing how Cohen’s story progressively changes—from smiling selfies posted while hiding during the rave attack through a variety of increasingly graphic media testimonies.
   • Shoam Gueta, “one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer,” hiding with Cohen reported the same scene, saying it was “four men”. Both reported that the men were wearing civilian clothes.
   • It should be remembered that while the NYT went out of its way to present the article as definitive evidence, its article leads with the case of “The Woman in the Black Dress,” Gal Abdush, the deceased subject of a viral video whose family, since the NYT published it’s article, have insisted that Gal wasn’t “raped” and that the NYT reporters had manipulated them, not even mentioning rape was the focus of their article.

The only other reference to “gang rape” in ARCCI’s report is again when repeating testimony from Sapir, Raz Cohen, and Shoam Gueta, and cites the NYT article in Footnotes 33 and 34:

The other article cited in Footnote 33 is an even older, 9 November 2023 Ha’aretz article, “Israeli Police Collect Eyewitness Testimony of Gang Rape During Hamas Attack“, which quotes police sources and from their descriptions is clearly referring to the two accounts of Sapir and Raz Cohen, without naming them directly.

Ha’aretz‘s article is also notable because it talks about another man “who was hiding behind the eyewitness [Sapir] and didn’t see the rape. He said she told him at the time what she saw.” This would obviously be Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, was hiding in the same spot as Sapir, according to the NYT.

Between talking to Ha’aretz for its 9 November article and the NYT, which published almost two months later on 28 December, Yura Karol decided he had indeed seen a rape. “In an interview,” wrote the NYT, “Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.”

So, that’s the extent of ARCCI’s evidence for the claim of “gang rape”, which it led with in its Abstract, the 3-paragraph introduction to the report:

There is much more to be analysed about ARCCI’s report but the simple fact that it replies on recycling already-published “gang rape” atrocity propaganda, citing sources that feed off each other’s “eyewitnesses” who sometimes contradict themselves, is a giant red flag.

This is apparent in the case of Sapir‘s companion, Yura Karol, who reported not seeing anything to the police until November but then remembered he saw a rape later for the New York Times.

That ARCCI is releasing this as a national rape crisis center network—and you would assume this organization would have no shortage of first person testimony—is a giant red flag. This is how atrocity propaganda is laundered, through respectable organizations. This is why the evidence is important.

Despite the presence of multiple CCTV, phone cameras, and the body cams recovered from dead HAMAS fighters, at both the festival and in the various kibbutzes, the Israeli government has released nothing that shows a rape situation. Of course, if it had footage, it would do so. Obviously, you would not need to screen the entire footage, just enough to show unambiguous rape scenarios unfolding.

Most significantly is the timing of the Israeli government’s release of the report—again noting it contains previously-published information—on 21 February 2024, just 2 days after the 19 February UN press release about widespread, ongoing human rights violations against Palestinian women & girls. This timing should be the biggest red flag of them all.

Read the UN press release below.

Related research on this site

Israeli Propaganda: HAMAS ‘Mass Rapes’ on Oct 7