(JNS) Founding members of the Dinah Project—an independent organization seeking recognition and justice for victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7 sexual violence, as well as those who suffered sexual abuse in Hamas captivity in Gaza—last week attended a breakfast organized by the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Tel Aviv to draw attention to the issue.
Col. (res.) Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, former Israel Defense Forces Chief Military Prosecutor, and Judge (ret.) Nava Ben-Or attended the event with Czech Ambassador to Israel Veronika Kuchynova Smigolova and Deputy Ambassador Cyril Bumbalek.
“These breakfasts are organized around Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, in memory of a breakfast hosted by former French President François Mitterrand with Czech dissidents,” Smigolova told JNS at the embassy.
“They have two objectives. In countries that are not free or democratic, the purpose is to meet with and strengthen members of the opposition, to give them courage and hope that things can improve. In democratic countries like Israel, we seek to highlight important human-rights causes,” she said.
“This year’s breakfast is dedicated to one of the most important causes—the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attacks and against hostages in captivity. The goal is to raise awareness domestically in Israel and internationally, and to support the Dinah Project in advancing its work and fulfilling its objectives,” she added.
Zagagi-Pinhas and Ben-Or presented the evidence they collected and described the challenges they faced in drawing international attention to Hamas’s systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
“It’s always important to understand the impact of the conflict on Israeli society as a whole, how we can help in the future and what we can learn from this experience,” Bumbalek told JNS.
“While providing assistance in Ukraine and dealing with Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic, we encounter people who were exposed to similar crimes and situations. It is important to understand how we can support such people,” he added.
Following the Hamas terror attacks, Zagagi-Pinhas said there was widespread fear and suspicion that sexual violence had been used as a weapon of war during the attacks and in their aftermath, including in captivity. Those fears, she said, were tragically confirmed.
Sexual violence as a weapon of war, Zagagi-Pinhas said, differs significantly from regular or domestic violence, because it targets not only the individual victim, but the community as a whole. To instill fear and terror, such violence is directed at symbols of procreation and societal continuity, she said, and many of the crimes are deliberately carried out in public spaces to amplify their impact on the wider community.
Sexual violence as a weapon of war, she explained, extends beyond rape.
“There are acts that in everyday life might not be defined as sexual violence, but are considered so in the context of conflict-related sexual violence,” she said.
As an example, Zagagi-Pinhas cited testimony from hostages released from Hamas captivity who described being under constant threat of forced marriage to their terrorist captors.
“This is a symbol of coerced sexual relations and must be acknowledged as such,” she said. “We also heard from returned hostages that they were stripped and forced to shave all body hair, including from their genitalia. This, too, is an act of sexual violence, because the captors seek to strip victims of their sexuality. If we view these acts only through the lens of ordinary crimes, there will never be accountability,” she added.
Reviewing the Dinah Project’s evidentiary framework, Zagagi-Pinhas said 18 returned hostages testified to experiencing sexual violence, often severe, including one male hostage who described an attempted rape of extreme severity.
She said 17 witnesses saw or heard sexual violence being perpetrated against others. After analyzing the information, Zagagi-Pinhas said the project identified at least 15 cases in which sexual violence was used as a weapon of war.
“We found that the sexual violence was widespread and took place in six areas on Oct. 7, including Route 232, the site of the Supernova music festival, southern Israeli kibbutzim and an army base,” she said. “We identified recurring patterns of sexual violence that were very distinct and similar—women naked or half-naked with their hands tied, sometimes to poles and sometimes to trees.”
Due to the fact that many victims were murdered during or after the sexual assaults they endured on Oct. 7, and therefore were unable to testify, some hostages felt compelled to speak out. Among them was Amit Soussana, the first hostage to publicly describe her own ordeal of severe sexual assault prior to and during captivity, in order to inform the world that the violence was ongoing.
According to Zagagi-Pinhas, the visit to Israel of Pramila Patten, the United Nations special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, which the Dinah Project helped coordinate, was key to breaking the wall of silence and denial—particularly from organizations such as UN Women.
“The report by Patten, which stated that there were reasonable grounds to believe sexual violence was perpetrated in three areas in southern Israel, identified patterns she found, and concluded that there was clear and convincing evidence that hostages were being sexually abused, was groundbreaking,” Zagagi-Pinhas said. “It was the first international, global recognition of sexual violence on Oct. 7.”
Addressing the issue of responsibility for the assaults, Ben-Or, a former Jerusalem District Court judge, said it would never be possible to know who did what to whom, but that this should not impede accountability.
She said that in the case of Hamas—much like that of the Nazis—the process of indoctrination and dehumanization was such that everything became permissible, even acts theoretically prohibited under the group’s own ideological teachings.
“Hamas’s charter uses the same language found in other antisemitic publications. It accuses the Jewish people, who lost a third of their population in World War II, of responsibility for and profiteering from the war, and cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as proof of a Jewish plan to control the world,” she continued.
“The IDF found instructions in Gaza to brutalize and terrorize the civilian population. Even if one does not find specific instructions to commit sexual assault, it flows from the nature of the attack. The attack is genocidal, and rape is genocidal. The aim is to terrorize the community by any means,” she added.
Ben-Or said that once an individual submits to the group, there is no longer a need to prove individual responsibility. As such, crimes are likely to be replicated worldwide.
Zagagi-Pinhas said she hopes Israel will develop a framework of joint responsibility that can be applied internationally, along with protocols and systems for indictment.
She said the Dinah Project believes that Hamas should be designated by the UN as a terrorist organization, which would require action by both the General Assembly and the Security Council.
“If something like this happens again, countries must be ready to respond, prosecute and know how to treat survivors,” Zagagi-Pinhas concluded.
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