Oct. 7 massacre: The fight for accurate testimonies of Hamas's atrocities

In February, the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) published a report analyzing numerous testimonies from the Oct. 7 massacre, specifically relating to Hamas’s sexual violence. The report revealed that Hamas terrorists threatened victims, often injuring them with weapons in order to rape them violently, often collectively with collaboration among multiple terrorists.

An argument constantly made by those that not only oppose Israel’s position in the war against Hamas but actively deny the atrocities that occurred on Oct. 7 is that there is no sufficient evidence. They do not just want to hear witness testimonies, they want to see proof.

Immediately, Israeli women’s organizations were outraged. Building an Alternative (Bonot Alternativa), one of Israel’s leading women’s rights and gender equality organizations, reached out to its activists worldwide to instigate immediate protests.

“The first thing we did was to activate the groups of Building an Alternative around the world and hold presentations and protests,” Moran Zer Katzenstein, an Israeli women’s rights activist and founder of Building an Alternative, told the Magazine. 

“Some demonstrations were more provocative, such as women with blood on their clothes, like what we did in New York, and some less provocative. We decided on a city-by-city basis what was best suited.”

The very notion that proof is being demanded worldwide is horrific, not to mention what it says about the special conditions that Israel needs to face – conditions no other country has to meet in order to prove that its people were raped and massacred.

Nevertheless, the question remains: How does one go about collecting evidence of mass sexual assault and rape when survivors are seriously traumatized, witnesses are considered only somewhat believable, and victims who were murdered after and during rape were then burned, therein destroying evidence?

How do you find evidence of mass sexual assault and rape on October 7?

ORIT SULITZEANU, executive director of ARCCI, told the Magazine that there are four main types of sources that the ARCCI uses as evidence of sexual violence by Hamas: “Overt sources such as journalistic investigations; first responder interviews; independently conducted interviews; and information that reached us via our rape crisis centers.”

Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy immediately recognized the challenge of proving the atrocities of Oct. 7 and sought to do whatever was necessary to preserve evidence and testimonies of the sexual violence used by Hamas as a weapon of war. 

Elkayam-Levy, a Sophie Davis post-doctoral fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute Program on Gender, Conflict Resolution and Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU), heads the Civil Commission on Crimes on Oct. 7 by Hamas Against Women and Children.

“I’m an international law scholar, and I teach about the global feminist movement,” she told the Magazine. 

“I teach about feminist thought, and my PhD was about the international mechanisms operating to protect women’s rights and human rights. I actually honestly didn’t think that we were going to see an issue in the response of the human rights organizations at the UN.”

Indeed, Elkayam-Levy – along with the rest of the country – was mortified to find women’s organizations turning a blind eye to what transpired on Simchat Torah.

“I thought, in light of the horrific scenes we’ve seen, that there was going to be a very clear response to those war crimes that we saw live, before our eyes,” she said.

“I realized that they were not responding not only to me but also to my colleagues. We were talking among ourselves, saying, ‘This is deeply wrong; what’s going on?’ I was very naive to think that perhaps they were lacking information. Perhaps we could give them information.”

And so, she began to collect all the information she could “from any sources that we had access to.”

She shuddered and winced as the memories of the footage she bore witness to flooded into her mind. “I sat with former police forensic experts, and I had to show them again some of the materials, and I couldn’t sleep,” she said quietly. “It’s really deeply traumatizing material.”

Elinor Kroitoru, director of the Archive and Documentation Division at the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, told the Magazine, “I think the first challenge is to organize the vast documentation that the commission has already collected. Then, we want to collect more materials of different types. We want to collect and record testimonies from victims and first responders on the scene. We have already begun, but there are a lot of challenges around building a methodology that will be very respectful of the person testifying without retraumatizing them, while being professional and to the point. We’re working on an ethical code for that and a methodology for collecting testimonies. 

“It sounds simple, but it’s not. There’s a lot to balance,” she said.

“Then, we have the question of how to authenticate the materials we collect,” continued Kroitoru, who was head of the research division at the government-run Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce. “There are so many videos and so many photos, which isn’t simple because sometimes you think that you see one thing but in effect, it was something else. So we have a big challenge of authenticating what we see in the videos and the photos we use.”

INDEED, THIS issue faced by the commission is the very reason it has come under fire in recent weeks. Quite quickly, most Israeli women’s organizations detached themselves from the commission out of “ethical and ideological disagreements” relating to the methodology of collecting evidence employed by Elkayam-Levy, an anonymous source told the Magazine. Another anonymous source said that the committee conducts itself in an “unprofessional manner.”

According to them, the concern is that the materials gathered are inaccurate due to bad methodology. Because of this, the women’s groups retreated, and Sarai Aharoni, head of the Gender Studies program at Ben-Gurion University, left the project.

“For example, the story about the pregnant woman who had her stomach cut – a story that was proven to be untrue, and [Elkayam-Levy] spread it in the international press,” an Israeli official told Yediot Aharonot. 

Israel’s Channel 13 claimed that Elkayam-Levy received the Israel Prize for an official report on sexual violence on Oct. 7 – a report that was not published publicly and that allegedly was not presented to the committee prior to her having been announced as the recipient of the award.

Nevertheless, Elkayam-Levy has remained steadfast in her mission to make the international public as informed as possible about the true horrors that impacted Israelis on Oct. 7.

“I thought they [the UN] would be able to try to do three simple things,” Elkayam-Levy said. 

“One: initially report on Oct. 7. We wanted them to report on the atrocities, report the human suffering that we’ve seen here. 

“Secondly, to condemn the crimes. And thirdly, express solidarity with us. 

“We wanted them to condemn the crimes and, of course, take action to release the hostages. This is why they were established; the UN system was established to offer help in humanitarian crises as in such instances. We didn’t get any response. For four weeks, we didn’t get a word.”

A FEW weeks after Oct. 7, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) met, and Elkayam-Levy was invited to speak. Word got around in Israel, and a flood of evidence was sent to her. Israelis from across the country began to message her, “Have you seen this video?” “Do you have this photo?” She was overwhelmed.

Katzenstein of Building an Alternative said that during the entire discussion at the United Nations, they made sure to protest outside, on top of Elkayam-Levy’s participation in the meeting itself. “We made sure to hold a demonstration in front of the UN alongside other organizations,” she said. “We also went to the White House, to the Senate, to Congress.” 

WHILE KATZENSTEIN, Elkayam-Levy, and, presumably, all Israeli women felt the sting of betrayal by the UN’s silence regarding Oct. 7, Elkayam-Levy says she still believes in the organization.

“I do believe in a system that was established from the ashes of World War II, from the ashes of the Holocaust,” she explained. “I have a deeper understanding of its importance, and that we can’t give up on this. We need it to be able to secure human rights, and its failure is deeply concerning.”

Speaking to Deborah Lipstadt, the US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, Elkayam-Levy told her that two processes were occurring simultaneously: the dehumanization of Israelis and their demonization.

“The fact that they are not able to express empathy, care, and solidarity with us as victims, especially [toward] women and children, and [for] the suffering of women and children is dehumanizing,” she said, adding that the United Nations’ response on social media toward Israel has been demonizing the state as a whole and must therefore be investigated.

“We are seeing the same denial mechanisms that are usually inflicted on individual victims of sexual abuse,” Elkayam-Levy explained. “Usually when women are raped, most of the time they’re not reporting and are not believed. 

“I think it was this realization that [the UN is] not going to respond, or if they do, it will be an inadequate response in light of what we’ve seen, that brought me to the understanding that we have to stop this attempt [at denial].

“I told the women in this group I initiated that we have a historical mission,” she continued. “We have to document every piece of information. We have to establish an archive according to the most compelling international norms. Because these crimes are going to be forgotten, are going to be denied, are already denied. And those who are supposed to be with us at this moment are turning their backs, so we have to be the voices for those victims. I started collecting all the information. This is how we decided on the establishment of the Civil Commission on Crimes on Oct. 7 by Hamas Against Women and Children.” 

Sulitzeanu from the ARCCI told the Magazine that they took a more passive approach in their research in an attempt to respect the privacy of the survivors of Oct. 7.

“We decided ideologically that it is not right and it is unethical to chase after interviewees like the media did for those first few months [after Oct. 7],” she explained. “We did receive information, and we used it. We do not investigate, and we do not ask because part of our approach is that it is an incredibly sensitive subject, and there are a lot of feelings of shame and blame, and all the victims are under the covers. We do not do anything they do not want; we wait to receive information when they want to speak up.

“We were there [with the Civil Commission on Crimes on Oct. 7 by Hamas Against Women and Children] at the beginning,” she added. “Following some inaccuracies I witnessed, we pulled out of the commission. To my knowledge, no organizations are there anymore.” 

The commission continues to collect data and evidence, and the women’s organizations continue with their support systems for women and children survivors of Oct. 7 and their advocacy on the international stage.

While the methodology might be conflicting, the goal is clear: to unequivocally counter the world’s denial of the horrors suffered by Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. 

The writer is deputy editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.