Justice coming to Hamas perpetrators of sexual violence

A shocking new report has revealed the atrocities committed by Hamas against women during the 7 October 2023 rampage against Israel. This report, compiled by the Dinah Project, a collaborative initiative led by Israeli legal and gender experts, seeks to document, analyse, and secure justice for the widespread sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas militants during the 7 October attacks.

The name “Dinah Project” draws from the biblical Dinah, symbolising victims whose voices are silenced, and aims to act as a voice for those who cannot speak. It is led by legal scholar and women’s rights activist Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari.

The Dinah Report, partly funded by the British government, aims “to counter denial, misinformation and global silence” about the massacre, and seeks to “set the historical record straight: Hamas used sexual violence as a tactical weapon of war”. The report compiles testimonies from 15 returned hostages; a survivor of the Nova festival; 17 people who witnessed or heard assaults; and 27 emergency response teams. The team also analysed forensic evidence from photos and videos.

The investigation shows that Hamas terrorists raped and then murdered the women, some of whom were assaulted even after death. Dozens of victims from at least three different sites were found stripped naked and tied to poles. The findings describe a consistent pattern of systematic sexual violence, rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, forced nudity, and torture, across multiple locations and often followed by execution.

In October 2024, former hostage Amit Soussana became the first to speak up about the sexual violence she endured at the hands of her captors. Since this time, the Jewish world has been waiting with trepidation to hear from the returned hostages of their treatment while in captivity. Now 14 other brave female hostages have come forward in the report to detail their horrors of abuse endured in captivity, including forced nudity, verbal and physical assaults, including “unwanted physical contact in private parts”, and threats of forced marriage.

Until this point, the naïve hope existed that the other female hostages would have been spared from the sexual torture suffered by Soussana. This hope has now been shattered. Our one remaining hope is for the perpetrators of these atrocities to be held accountable legally and to be punished to the fullest extent of the law. However for this to happen, the law needs to be amended in order to be made applicable to these acts of mass violence and sexual torture.

The members of the Dinah Project propose a legal platform where responsibility is attributed based on the principle of collective responsibility, where acts were executed under cover of the masses. There was no individual moral compass, inhibition, or restraint.

This brutal and barbaric behaviour was carried out devoid of moral compass, inhibition, or restraint and made possible by perpetrators adopting the norm of “the absence of any norm”. The project’s lawyers write that “when the plan is to rampage under the cover of the masses, when it’s a ruthless, lawless, and reckless plan, every act is done to fulfil it and doesn’t deviate from it, every atrocious act indeed received approval, and thus everything is within the realm of expectations”.

They hold that from a legal point of view, these sexual assaults were clearly a joint criminal operation. Everyone who participated in the mob behaviour is accountable. Using this principle, they aim to attribute responsibility to the perpetrators without the need to link a victim and a specific perpetrator directly, and without relying on the testimony of a living survivor.

The report makes it clear that these acts of sexually motivated torture fall squarely within the definition of conflict-related sexual violence or CRSV. The aim of CRSV is to degrade, demoralise, and humiliate both the victims and the society as a whole. By committing these brutal rapes and sexual assaults in public and filming and sharing them in real-time on victims’ social media, the terrorists aimed to degrade the community as a whole and assert their control over the enemy, namely Israel.

The report confirms that these acts were systematically carried out across many different sites indicating premeditation, instructions, and intention to use sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Prosecuting cases of CRSV has particular challenges, as is evident in this case. In general, rape cases are prosecuted with the victim present to give their testimony in court. In the case of the Hamas terrorists’ attacks, however, most of the victims are no longer alive, having been murdered during or after the sexual assaults were committed. Many of the victims who remain alive are so severely traumatised, they are unable to talk about what they endured or witnessed.

At the time of the attack, various factors combined to complicate the gathering of evidence, including the fog of war; the ongoing chaos of battle; the desperate attempts to find those missing or deceased; the immense scale of the victims that had to be identified; as well as the urgency of bringing the deceased to burial, as dictated by Jewish law.

These limitations necessitate finding additional and novel ways to prosecute these perpetrators. The authors of the Dinah Report detail other types of evidence, such as “silent witnesses”, in other words bodies whose condition speaks volumes, revealing sexual torture. Eyewitness reports as well as hearsay evidence of sexual violence can be included. Camera evidence taken by the terrorists and shared by the perpetrators on the victims’ own phones establish – even without the direct testimony of the victims – a factual basis for sexual-violence offences.

Despite the claims by detractors of a lack of forensic evidence of sexual violence and a consequent inability to prosecute alleged perpetrators, the members of the Dinah Project assert that the law can be amended to allow for successful prosecution. They aim to map the legal challenges and the necessary amendments for managing the criminal proceedings in a way that leads to accountability. The project’s organisers have already briefed the United Nations Security Council; United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights; and White House senior staff.

Despite our worst fears being confirmed by the report, we remain hopeful that a new day has dawned when it comes to prosecuting Hamas and its collaborators. We’re optimistic that through initiatives such as the Dinah Project, great strides will be made in holding to account those who give the order to commit such atrocities, as well as the individuals who carry them out with impunity. We are ever grateful to these brave change makers who are making it possible to see justice served in the most daunting of circumstances.

• Wendy Hendler is a co-founder of Koleinu SA, a helpline and advocacy organisation for victims of gender-based violence and child abuse in the Jewish and wider community.