On Saturday, October 7, Hamas members who attacked Israel attacked many women. Testimonies from rescuers and survivors emerge as Israeli authorities investigate.
Rape as a weapon of war. Two months after the October 7 attacks, evidence of violence and sexual crimes perpetrated by Hamas in Israel is accumulating. Investigators have so far collected “more than 1,500 shocking and distressing testimonies,” a police officer said last week in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset.
BFMTV was able to speak with Haim Otmazgin, one of the first Zaka rescuers to intervene at the scene of the massacres. At the Supernova festival and in the kibbutzs attacked by Hamas, he discovered hundreds of bodies, lifeless, mutilated and sometimes abused.
This Saturday, October 7, faced with the horror, he took out his phone and mechanically began to take photos of these abuses. To identify bodies and document crimes he witnesses.
“We see a woman undressed, slashed with a knife,” says Haim Otmazgin on BFMTV. “There, another one with scissors stuck in the vagina.”
“Cut breast”, “a bullet in the head and another in the vagina”
From the first hours, the rescuer understood that dozens of women had been sexually abused before being shot dead by Hamas fighters. “We found a woman with her shirt and bra torn off, she is almost naked, her underwear pulled up very high. She has a bullet in the head and another in the vagina.”
Speaking to BFMTV, Haim Otmazgin explains that he has nearly 3,000 photographs documenting these rapes and feminicides. “I was there, I saw it with my eyes, I collected these bodies with my hands, I took these photos with my phone,” he assures.
In front of the Israeli Parliament on Monday, November 27, Shelly Harush, superintendent in charge of investigations into the sexual atrocities committed by Hamas on Saturday, October 7, cited the testimony of a survivor of the Supernova festival.
“I remember a terrorist who pulled a girl by the hair, the woman was completely naked, he cut off her breast and threw her breast to the ground. They started playing with it,” says the police officer who quotes this survivor, whose name has not been communicated. “He continues to pull her by the hair, then another enters her and shoots her in the head.”
A testimony which seems to have been shared with several media, including the British BBC, who published a long investigation on the subject. Hamas itself documented the abuses committed by its soldiers on October 7. In videos published on social networks by the Islamist group, we can see a German festival-goer, naked and unconscious, loaded onto a pick-up. In another document, we see a young woman handcuffed, traces of blood on her crotch.
“They stopped when they thought I was dead”
In the columns of Le Parisien at the end of November, a survivor of October 7 testified about the rape of which she was a victim. Esther (an assumed first name) explains that she “was raped and at the same time beaten up in front of her boyfriend, forced to watch with a knife to her throat”.
“It was so painful that I lost consciousness, they stopped when they thought I was dead,” she told the daily. Mutilated, she now suffers from paralysis “which may never disappear”, indicates Le Parisien.
“And even if I walk again, I will limp. I will always be the living image of the pogrom,” summarizes Esther.
Cochav Elkayam Levy, president of the parliamentary commission on crimes committed against women on October 7, indicated in November that “the vast majority of victims of the rapes and other sexual assaults of October 7 were murdered and will never be able to testify.”
Others are still hostages. According to Washington, the Islamist movement is refusing to release the last women held in the Gaza Strip because it does not want them to “tell what happened to them during their detention.”
“Mass rapes”
This Tuesday, US President Joe Biden called for “unambiguously and forcefully condemning the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists”.
“We must all (governments, international organizations, civil society and the economic world) unambiguously and forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists,” he demanded.
In France, the Minister responsible for Equality between women and men, Bérangère Couillard, called this Wednesday for “recognition of mass rapes”. The United Nations, criticized and accused of “pro-Palestinian bias” by Israel, was “alarmed by the devastating impact” of Hamas’ actions “on civilians, including women and young girls.”
“Since the Hamas attack, we have condemned and will continue to unequivocally condemn any act of violence against women and girls in Israel and Palestine, including sexual violence, considered an unacceptable violation of human rights, anywhere. whether in the world”, hammered out on November 30 in a UN Women press release, branch of the United Nations for gender equality.
Hamas denies, speaks of “lies”
For its part, Hamas said Monday that it “rejects” accusations that the Palestinian Islamist movement committed “rape” and sexual violence during its October 7 attack, calling them “lies.”
In its statement, the Islamist movement castigates “Zionist campaigns that promote lies and baseless allegations to demonize the Palestinian resistance.”
These “lies”, he continues, are the latest in “a series”, citing in particular “the lie according to which the al-Chifa hospital was used for military purposes”, which the Israeli army assures but which Hamas denies.
On October 7, 1,200 people died in Hamas attacks in Israel. The Palestinian group also took 240 people hostage, some of whom were released at the end of November during a truce of a few days.
In retaliation, for months now, Israel has been carrying out major military operations inside the Gaza Strip. According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, 16,248 people, more than 70% women, children and adolescents, were killed in the Palestinian enclave by Israeli bombings.