What really happened on 7 October 2023? Is this even a question we should be asking after eight months of Israeli bombardment of the claustrophobic Gaza Strip since the Hamas attack? Is the fate of 1,139 murdered Israelis and 253 hostages, of whom an estimated 128 are still alive in Hamas captivity, even relevant in the face of 40,000 dead and more than twice as many wounded, injured and maimed Palestinians in a country in ruins?
Part of the answer lies in the argument that Israel continues to use Hamas’s violent sexual assault as a form of propaganda war to legitimise the killing of innocent Palestinian women and children – most recently in the form of burned bodies in the makeshift tent camp in Rafah where people were urged to flee the war – a reality that forces us to rehash what happened on 7 October over and over again.
Another explanation is that sexual violence remains the focal point where opposing sides in the war converge.
It is the latter point that puzzles me.
At first, rape did not appear as a point of debate, but rather as a terrible fact. But it soon became clear that different factions would diverge on this particular issue.
Sexual violence as anticolonial struggle
The sociologist Eva Illouz sensed trouble early on and, on 17 October, appealed to the left in the Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC not to gloss over “the mass murder of innocent civilians in their homes, the indiscriminate violence against women, the elderly and children, and the mass kidnapping of Israeli citizens”.
At the end of October, however, North American feminists, queer and trans scholars issued a united call, “Feminists For a Free Palestine. Stop the Genocide. End the Occupation”, against what they understood to be an ongoing “genocide”. They argued that “colonized people have the right to choose their means of resistance, within the boundaries of international law, without exception”. The nearly 150 feminists and academics, including Angela Davis, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, said that Israel cynically used testimonies of sexual violence to justify the unjust war, but that they themselves rejected such “pinkwashing” and “coopting of the LGBTQ rights movement”.
And here the chance for a global feminist Israeli-Palestinian women’s alliance may have been lost.
The criticism then, as now, can be summed up in the fact that the recurring reports of Hamas abuses fall into an Islamophobic and racist narrative of sexual violence and oppression perpetrated by Muslim men, and that decades of humiliation, displacement, oppression and occupation cannot continue without resistance.
This prioritisation of victim categories was not shared by Jewish women, who on 17 November tired of the world’s downplaying of the sexual nature of the attack and demonstrated under the slogan #MeTooUnlessUrAJew, taking aim at the UN’s tardiness in condemning the sexual violence element. The UN Women Committee had a special duty to condemn Hamas’ actions, they said, pointing out that the UN has recognised systematic gender-based violence as a crime under international law.
Meanwhile, more than seventy women’s organisations in Gaza and elsewhere wrote a joint appeal in the Swedish online magazine Parabol in early December, pointing out that “no credible evidence or reports from independent international investigative bodies” had been presented. Nevertheless, they noted, these “unsubstantiated accusations” – not least “against Israeli women held hostage in Gaza”, “without any criticism of sources or caution” – were being used to “justify the genocide” in Gaza.
On 5 December, the BBC reported on the videos of naked and bloody women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack, and the numerous photographs of bodies from the sites indicating that women (and men) had been sexually assaulted by their attackers.
And finally, on 7 December 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris also condemned the sexual violence at X.
The struggle for truth
The first comprehensive article on Hamas sexual assault was published in The New York Times on 28 December 2023, in the article “’Screams without words’ : How Hamas Weaponised Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella. The paper described the video of the woman in the black dress with torn clothes, spread legs and exposed genitals that had gone viral in the early hours of 8 October.
The journalists had spent two months examining evidence in the form of videos, photographs, mobile phone GPS data and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counsellors. The authors concluded that these attacks on women were not isolated incidents, but part of a wider pattern of gender-based violence on 7 October. But the main obstacle to the evidence and testimony was that most of the women who had been victimised were no longer alive.
The credibility of the article was questioned by The Intercept, and some details in The Times text were later retracted.
Shortly after The New York Times report, Al Jazeera published an article based on a 16-page Hamas memorandum, “Our Narrative”, about the events of 7 October. According to the memo, Hamas’ plan was “to target Israeli military sites and to capture soldiers, which could be used to pressure the Israeli authorities to release thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons”. The group also claims that it “is a religious and moral commitment” for fighters in Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, to avoid harming civilians. “If there was any case of targeting civilians; it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation force” the statement reads. The report acknowledges that “maybe some faults happened” during the attack “due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the areas near Gaza”.
The schism within the Jewish left
During a panel discussion in Paris on 3 March, Jewish philosopher Judith Butler described Hamas’s 7 October attack as an expression of armed resistance with tactics that we can be for or against. Butler themselves made it clear that she was disgusted by the tactics.
Reactions were not long in coming. Illouz, writing in Haaretz on 21 March under the sharp title “The Global Left Needs to Renounce Judith Butler”, stated bluntly that Butler’s comments in Paris came not after a moment of doubt, the day after 7 October, but after the publication of several in-depth reports and contributions. Illouz’s concludes with resignation that “in the face of the extreme sexual violence suffered by Israeli women at the hands of Hamas members, in the face of reports and investigations by the New York Times, lawyers, doctors, NGOs, journalists, and civilians, all of whom have testified to extreme sexual violence (including genital mutilation, bloodied naked women’s bodies, vaginas with nails inserted, breasts cut off with a knife, and women who were tied up with ropes and then shot in the face), faced with the world-wide images of a young woman killed and paraded on a Gaza street to the chants of the crowd, what does Judith Butler tell us? That they want evidence. “Whether or not there is documentation for the claims made about the rape of Israeli women” – a sceptical grimace [from Butler] – “OK, if there is documentation then we deplore that, but we want to see that documentation.”
Butler was and is far from being alone in their position as a Jewish critic of Israel in general and the war in particular. Up to 1,000 anti-Zionist Jewish feminists in the United States have so far signed the 28 February 2024 petition “Open Letter to the Israeli and U.S. Governments and Others Weaponising the Issue of Rape”. The letter takes as its starting point the “particular responsibility to speak out in support of Palestinian rights and against the current genocide”, while opposing “efforts to discredit supporters of women’s rights who speak out against rape but also oppose Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza”. A similar balancing act was put forward by writer Masha Gessen in The New Yorker the other day (20 July 2024).
UN report on conflict-related sexual violence
The first UN statement on the 7 October incident was issued on 4 March 2024, the day after Butler’s speech. Pramila Patten, the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, stated that there was “clear and convincing information” that gang rapes, sexual torture and abuse of women tied up and executed with their genitals cut off had taken place in at least three kibbutzim along the Gaza border on the day of the attack.
The findings of the Patten Protocol were later reflected in the UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ report on conflict-related sexual violence in the world in 2023 (along with allegations of sexual offences committed by the Israeli IDF); “Mission report Official visit of the Office of the SRSG-SVC to Israel and the occupied West Bank 29 January – 14 February 2024”, published on 4 April 2024. It quotes Patten’s conclusion that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations”, i.e. the Nova music festival and its surroundings, Route 232 and Kibbutz Re’im.
It goes on to say that at the Nova music festival and its surroundings “there are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of sexual violence took place with victims being subjected to rape and/or gang rape and then killed”. Further testimony came from “individuals who witnessed at least two cases of rape of corpses of women”.
On Route 232, “credible information based on witness accounts describe an incident of the rape of two women by armed elements”. At Kibbutz Re’im, the mission verified another rape of a woman in front of a bomb shelter and “across the multiple locations of the 7 October attacks, the mission team found that “several fully naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down were recovered – mostly women – “with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head”. In the case of Route 232, the statement said, a similar pattern was found, including the bodies of some men. “Although circumstantial, such a pattern of undressing and restraining of victims may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”, the UN said in its memorandum.
With regard to the hostages taken to Gaza, the report states that the mission team “received clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time in captivity” and that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that this violence may be ongoing”.
Two widespread reports of sexualised violence were, according to the UN, misinterpreted by untrained observers. In one case, a first responder said that a pregnant woman’s baby had been cut out of her womb. It turned out that the woman was not pregnant, but that her intestines had been removed.
Results questioned
Distrust of the evidence of sexual violence appears to be fairly widespread within the broad autonomous left. In the magazine Parabol, Francisco Contreras interviews the Swedish-Uruguayan Ernesto Katzenstein, who apparently have worked with aid in Guinea-Bissau and in the construction of trains, and who had been described in the magazine Proletären as “the engineer and lay researcher in the humanities”. With this expertise, Katzenstein has written a book with the fairly self-confident title OCTOBER 7 – Hamas against Israel: The Myths, The Propaganda, The Truth and, together with Contreras, “goes through what really happened on 7 October”.
Katzenstein insinuates that Israel may in fact have been responsible for the killing of civilians – and is presented as a credible source in left-wing media such as Magasin Konkret, Kommunistiska Arbetarföreningen and Proletären (all by male journalists), which all point to the book as a good source for finding out what is actually known. Katzenstein’s reliability is partly based on his Jewish origins (which he shares with some 15 million others) and his own genealogy. “There are two things that are always used for propaganda purposes in war. They are women and babies”, Katzenstein explains, adding that he is prepared to “put my hand in the fire that there were no rapes on 7 October” (and with that stake, defending his position should be quite important).
Lisa Bjurvald, a journalist at Vestmanlands Läns Tidning VLT, on the other hand, expressed her scepticism about the basis of Katzenstein’s book, describing his arguments as “wrapped in a storm of hard-to-control and detailed ‘facts’”.
Screams Without Words – The New York Times under the microscope
In the United States, The New York Times’ publication “Screams Without Words” would also be criticised. On 29 April 2024, 59 professors of communication, media and journalism sent a letter of concern. The letter, addressed to Mr Sulzberger, the newspaper’s CEO, was entitled “Letter from the Journalism Academy to The New York Times”. It called for a full investigation and verification of the facts on which the article was based. The main argument was that the content of the text risked legitimising the ongoing genocide in Gaza, due to the high profile of The New York Times, and also expressed doubts about both the content of the article and its authors due to their links to Israel and their actions on social media.
Why did they chose to do that? asks journalism professor Laurel Leff in the article “Why Did a Group of U.S. Journalism Professors Attack the New York Times’ Story on Hamas Sexual Violence?” in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 8 May 2024. How come that all these professors come together to protest The Times article – out of thousands of published texts on the case, Leff wondered?
Leff examines the exchange between The Intercept and The New York Times and questions the claim that The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Jeffrey Gettlemen, is more biased than anyone else. Most importantly, Leff asks for clarification on what was actually wrong with the article and how it could be considered so powerful that it – on its own – “helped precipitate ‘genocide’”. Had the sexual violence not taken place, or was it unimportant or unsystematic, Leff wonders? And how does the professors’ own protest fit into the ongoing propaganda war? Shouldn’t journalists try to investigate during an actual war, and if so, what does such an attitude mean for journalism?
Rape not a matter of sympathies in the war
Doubts about Hamas sexual abuse prompted US liberal feminist Sheryl Sandberg to make a film called Screams Before Silence – with clear reference to The New York Times article. In the in many ways biased film, released on 26 April 2024, Sandberg meets with witnesses from the 7 October festival and examines testimony from survivors, soldiers and medical personnel, as well as photographs of desecrated female bodies.
Sandberg was, not surprisingly, heavily criticised by the Palestinian channel Electronic Intifada, which said the witnesses were not credible. In Sweden, only the Christian newspaper Världen idag seems to have paid attention to Sandberg’s film.
On CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper on 2 April, Sandberg clarified her position and the purpose of the film, emphasising that one’s attitude to rape should not depend on one’s position on the war. I definitely agree with Sandberg on this point.
In conclusion, one thing seems clear: if the idea of confronting journalists, witnesses, testimonies and evidence was to prevent these stories from being used in the propaganda war, it is fair to say that the result has been the opposite. Instead, the perception of sexual abuse was turned into explosive material.
What would have happened if the early reports – the ones that actually stand up – of rapes of women alive and dead, of breasts cut off and genitals slashed, had not been disputed but had coexisted with criticism of Israel’s alleged violations of international law? Could the column inches, not least on social media, now devoted to the question of whether the sexual violence (the veracity and extent of which has been investigated by several experts) actually took place, have instead been devoted to more substantive issues?
The follow-up question is why. What does it matter to critics of Israel’s devastating warfare if there were systematic elements of sexual violence in the Hamas attack on 7 October? Does it undo any war crimes committed by Israel? Would it be impossible to harbour Hamas’ sexual torture while professing to be pro-Palestinian? Or does sympathy for the Palestinian cause depend on Hamas’ innocence on this point?
This logic is particularly likely to divide women who, like Sandberg, either focus on the sexual abuse of Israeli women – and thus appear directly pro-Israeli in our polemical era. Or, like Angela Davis, they show their support for Palestine by downplaying – or even denying – this component on 7 October, in line with the self-proclaimed male revolutionaries of the left. The politicised line-up shows, in my view, how the very basis of solidarity bonds is formulated on highly questionable premises, under which a gender perspective remains distant.