That is what The New York Times called it after a two-month investigation in which they reviewed video and photographic evidence, and interviewed some 150 people: “weaponiz(ing) sexual violence.” Israelis have been talking about it for months, horrified at those who wouldn’t believe it. Hamas has denied it, but at this point, there is no denying it.
They behaved worse than animals.
They did it everywhere they struck. These were not isolated acts of a few outliers. What Israelis have been saying, and what The New York Times found, was a pattern of gender-based violence so horrific that the pictures and videos have largely been withheld.
What we are talking about is not simply rape, as if rape is ever simple. The first such story I heard, and one that the Times investigators corroborated, was about a woman who was gang-raped; then one of the attackers took out a box cutter and cut off her breast, and then they tossed it back and forth until it fell in the road.
I heard about it from a guest on my podcast, which is called “No Holding Back.” Rob Garson, the president of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers, had just returned from Israel and he didn’t hold back.
Tossing a woman’s breast back and forth while you gang-rape her and stab her to death. Cutting the heads off women after you repeatedly rape them. Leaving them lying in the road after you slice open their vaginas. A corpse with dozens of nails driven into the woman’s vagina and her thighs. Some 30 women and girls at the rave site and at two neighboring kibbutzim found with all their clothes torn off, legs spread and signs of abuse of their genitals. Soldiers found naked with gunshots in their vaginas. Terrorists carrying the heads of beheaded women.
A witness described seeing a woman being raped and stabbed every time she flinched and another being “shredded into pieces.” Two teenage sisters, sprawled on the ground, pajama pants pulled down, semen smeared on her back while her sister lay dead with her clothes cut off and bruises in her groin. Some 24 bodies of women and girls at another kibbutz, naked and half-naked, mutilated and tied up. Seven locations cited on a map where women and girls were raped and killed.
This is not the stuff of war. This is butchery, brutality, inhumanity that should shock the world. As one police superintendent put it, it was a combination of two “ferocious forces,” the hatred of Jews and the hatred of women.
The Israelis are still gathering more evidence of what happened, but there is no doubting the pattern.
This is why Hamas must be destroyed. This is why Hamas must be stopped. This is why a ceasefire is not the answer. How can these people be neighbors? Who are they to complain of innocent blood being shed? Who treats a teenage girl like this? How do you tell her parents that these were the last minutes of their daughters’ lives?
This is not what anyone expected to find, not what the rescuers were looking for when they arrived to cart away bodies for swift burials, consistent with Jewish law. No autopsies were performed in the chaos. This is only what we know about, for certain. Untold numbers of bodies were buried before they could even be examined to determine if they, too, were brutalized before being slaughtered. Witnesses and survivors too traumatized to speak. Horrors too awful to share. Screams without words.
And what does the world say to Israel?
Stop fighting? Let them get away with it?
Would you?
The world did not believe it, did not want to believe it, when the Israelis were the only ones saying it. Maybe they will believe it now.
