Femicide and the effects of the Israel-Hamas war - opinion

One-third of all femicides (gender-based murder of a woman or girl by a man) in 2023 perpetrated in Israel occurred after October 7. Authorities and NGOs are reporting that they are getting more calls about domestic violence than before the war began.

As three months have passed since that dark day that changed our lives in Israel forever and the war in Gaza began, soldiers are returning home, some of them traumatized, while others have become accustomed to seeing and experiencing violence on a daily basis. 

Some 360,000 Israelis were called up for emergency reserve duty in the wake of October 7, service that is now being scaled back. As the soldiers come home, some are returning to a new situation without employment, while others have lost their small businesses or gone bankrupt. It could be that 2024 will see a rise in femicides as men take it out on women after their harrowing experiences. There have already been two cases of femicide in the first nine days of January 2024.

Every year, the Israel Observatory on Femicide (IOF) publishes a report on the last day of December indicating the number of femicides that occurred during that year. The IOF, established in 2020 in compliance with the request of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, endeavors to provide the most reliable source of quantitative and qualitative data on femicide in Israel. 

In 2023, over 30 women were murdered by men in Israel, and of those, 22 women were killed because they were women. The other women were murdered by accident, in a burglary, or in some other criminal act. In 2022, there were 24 femicides; in 2021, there were 16, and in 2020, there were 22 cases, like last year.

The dilemma for the Israel Observatory on Femicide is how to determine how many femicides really took place in 2023, not just those that are usually perpetrated by intimate partners or family members, but also by terrorists on October 7. While the IOF does not normally include cases of women murdered as a result of terrorist acts, some of the killings that took place that day can be considered to be femicide, in that women were targeted as women and endured sexual violence prior to their murder.

IN AN OP-ED for The Jerusalem Post published on October 17, I was among the first in Israel to realize that the war with Hamas was different from all other previous wars that Israel had known due to the salience and torture of women. In the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, to which this war has been compared, women largely served on the home front; 2,600 soldiers died and hundreds became war widows. In this war, which began on October 7, women were at the center of the action.

It has been reported in the media that Hamas terrorists, who infiltrated the Israeli settlements near the Gaza Strip, had received orders from their superiors to kill women and permission to rape them. Many women were sexually assaulted, and in some cases, their intimate parts were dismembered. 

Women suffered other atrocities too, including mothers being forced to see their children beheaded before they themselves were killed. Evidence of these crimes was gathered from a variety of sources, including videos and photographs, eyewitnesses, forensic evidence, reports from first responders, and testimonies from captured Hamas terrorists (but beyond the scope of the IOF). 

It is encouraging to know that while feminist organizations have been slow to condemn the Hamas massacre on October 7, I was honored to be approached by the feminist platform The Subject To Power for a podcast interview, in which I aired condemnation of the Hamas massacre of Israeli women and talked about femicide in Israel. Others interviewed in this series include Dr. Valerie Hudson about the connection between the status of women and national security; US political and gender analyst Cynthia Enloe about militarization of women’s lives; Swedish culture critic Kajsa Ekis Ekmanon about the parallels between prostitution and surrogacy; New Zealand author Renee Gerlichon on male identification and patriarchal conditioning; Australian journalist Grant Wyeth about parallels between domestic abuse and state abuse; legal scholar Deborah Tuerkheimer about why the justice system protects abusers; Heide Goettner-Abendroth on matriarchal studies; and developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan about the moral development of girls. 

According to a Ynet report published at the end of 2023, based on civilian reports, approximately 300 women were murdered in communities along the Gaza border in Israel. It should be pointed out that hundreds of men were also murdered, and some raped. Details of these violent deaths and sexual assaults have been unfolding painfully slowly. The ability of the security forces and emergency services to collect reliable evidence about the atrocities has been made more difficult due to defacement of the victims after rape, including the burning of bodies, and the length of time it takes to admit to rape. Most of those sexually assaulted were probably also killed. Those few who have survived the sexual assaults may take a long time, even years, to speak openly about the abuse and torture they experienced.

SO, IN addition to the 22 victims of femicide in Israel, how many of the approximately 300 women who were killed on October 7 were specifically targeted for murder because they were women? I shudder to think, but there is one thing that is sure: because of these brutal attacks, there has been an exponential rise in femicide in 2023, the highest rate since the establishment of the State of Israel, even if it is not listed in the official count for the year.

In 2023, according to IOF data on femicide unrelated to the barbaric October 7 events, exactly half, or 50%, of all femicide victims were Jewish, two victims were foreign nationals, and 41% were Arab citizens (including one Druze woman, five Bedouin women, and three Muslim women). In nearly all of these cases, the femicides in the Arab sector were attributed to the so-called “lifestyle” of the victim, in that she was considered immodest by community standards, and was perceived as harming family honor.

In an unprecedented case, a woman from the Druze community was killed because she was lesbian. The IOF gathered data on nine of the 16 women recorded by the Abraham Initiatives, who were murdered in the Arab sector in 2023 and were killed because they were women; the remaining seven cases were criminal. 

Twenty-two women are 22 women too many. Femicides of this kind can be predicted and prevented. Interestingly, out of the 22 cases, neighbors and family members knew of previous violence by the murderer in nine cases, but maintained a blanket of silence and did not report the violent situation to the authorities. If they had done so, lives could have been saved, and there might have been fewer cases of femicide this year. In two cases, the murderer had a criminal record, and in another case, the police had received a complaint from an ex-partner, but not from the victim herself. In only three cases did the threatened woman actually complain to the police about domestic violence prior to her murder.

How were these women killed? It turns out that the most dangerous weapon is a kitchen knife, and to date, the war has not changed this. Over half of all the women were stabbed by their partners or family members, in a country in which gun licenses are increasingly available. Eighteen percent of all victims were killed by gunshots. This percentage, which is lower than in most Western countries, contradicts what one reads in the media and what one would surmise given the alarming ease with which Israeli civilians are being armed after October 7.

This does not mean that women are out of danger, nor does it guarantee that more women will not be shot in 2024. However, so far, the war and the increase in gun licenses do not appear to have affected the rate of femicide.

More must be done to prevent domestic violence

SO MUCH more must be done to prevent domestic violence and the extreme form of that violence, which ends in femicide. The Israeli government has not made violence against women a priority, and to date, despite the avowed allocation of funds several years back, sufficient funding has not been paid to ministries to combat violence against women and femicide. All that work is being done by NGOs or volunteers. The Israel Observatory on Femicide itself receives no governmental funds and relies on philanthropy to continue its work.

Raising awareness of the phenomenon is insufficient. We need workshops with communities at risk: for example, to explain to Russian-speaking immigrants that overdoses of alcohol could lead to femicide; to inform new immigrants from Ethiopia that hitting women in Israel is unacceptable; to provide seminars for the police to give priority to calls about domestic violence; to cooperate with religious authorities in the Arab sector to condemn so-called “honor killing;” and more.

In the wake of recent events, including the ongoing conflict and its aftermath, femicide in Israel has become a pressing concern. As we move forward, it is imperative that we prioritize the safety of women by implementing practical measures to prevent violence. By acknowledging the challenges we face and taking concrete steps, we can start working toward a future where femicide is not just a statistic, but a preventable tragedy.

The writer is senior researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University. She is director of the Israel Observatory on Femicide (www.israelfemicide.org), and author of Femicide and War and Peace (routledge.com/Femicide-in-War-and-Peace/Weil/p/book/9781032482774) published in May 2023.