Top IDF chief confirms rape and other ‘crimes against humanity’ in Oct. 7 attack
‘Whoever they saw, they killed’ — Rear. Adm. Daniel Hagari
A member of Zaka collects the remains of people killed by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri, a small town in southern Israel near the border with Gaza, October 20, 2023 Photo by Dima Vazinovich/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
By Laura E. Adkins October 21, 2023
JERUSALEM — The chief spokesperson for the Israeli military said in a televised statement Saturday night that Hamas was “worse than” ISIS, and listed sexual assault among the atrocities committed during the Oc. 7 terror attack in which the group slaughtered 1,400 Israelis and abducted more than 200.
Hamas “infiltrated Israel and slaughtered, raped, murdered, burned, and killed babies, women, kids, elderly people,” the spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said in a statement that promised the next phase of the war would “increase the strikes and minimize the danger.”
“Whoever they saw, they killed,” Hagari said. “Foreign language speakers, Muslims, they killed. They committed crimes against humanity and abducted into Gaza babies, kids, women, disabled people, elderly people, unwell people, and they are holding them now in the strip.”
Israeli officials and civilian first responders have told various news outlets over the last week that they have found clear evidence that the terrorists raped women, beheaded children and otherwise tortured many of the victims.
“We’ve seen dismembered bodies with their arms and feet chopped off, people that were beheaded, a child that was beheaded,” a reserve officer who is part of the military forensic teams autopsying bodies at an army base in Ramla told reporters. Rabbi Israel Weiss, a former chief rabbi in the IDF who is also working in Ramla, said many bodies showed signs of rape, according to Reuters.
Separately, a morgue worker for the military told the Daily Mail: “There is evidence of mass rape of so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis – women, grandmothers, children.”
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said on Saturday that it had found clear evidence of rape, but would not provide specifics.
Volunteers with ZAKA, an Israeli network of first responders, have also described evidence of torture and rape in media interviews, and shared videos to corroborate it.
In one such video, shared Oct. 18 on the Telegram channel “South First Responders,” ZAKA volunteers working at Kibbutz Be’eri find two children’s bodies tied together with metal wire, their legs bound, with mattress between them. One “was found naked (her clothes removed before she was killed) along with the other body with serious signs of physical abuse,” the person sharing the video said.
Footage posted to the first responders Telegram group much earlier quotes an organizer of the Nova desert dance party, where more than 200 people were killed, describing the atrocities he witnessed.
“The abusing of women, the disrobing of their bodies,” the organizer recounts. “To abuse the bodies of dead women? Children? Families? It’s incomprehensible.”
Several ZAKA rescue veterans described horrors worse than anything they’d seen before in a briefing with journalists last week, including children who had been burned alive.
“There was a couple tied to each other with their clothes down, and you can see definitely, that the woman underwent rape,” an Oct. 17 Reuters article quoted Itzik Itah, a ZAKA commander, as saying. “When she is naked faced down, and her clothes had clearly been taken off not by her, that’s a woman who underwent rape.”
A volunteer named Mendy Habib said of what happened at Be’eri: “It was a massacre I could not imagine. People shot, burned. You see them in the flats, outside the flats, on the lawn, on the path. That means the whole village, house by house. People dead, corpses everywhere.”
Separately, ABC News reported that its journalists had been shown what it described as “an hour-long reel cobbled together from Hamas helmet-cam, mobile phone video, surveillance video, dashboard camera video and victims’ livestreams” on the condition that they not record or use the footage. ABC quoted a senior Israeli military officer who said the video did not include the worst of the images they had proving barbaric crimes.
“You won’t see rape, there’s no rape in this video,” the officer said. “We won’t show you beheaded babies.”
The Israeli news outlet Kan has also reported that some of the hostages being held in Gaza have been raped. Kan quoted from a report by Professor Hagai Levin, an Israeli epidemiologist, saying that the hostages included people who had medical conditions including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, autism, dementia and cancer, as well as some who had “severe injuries following rape.”
They “are in life-threatening conditions, undergoing indescribable suffering and urgently need treatment with life-saving drugs and treatment of injuries,” the report said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
