In Israel and Gaza, war is being fought as wars have long been: with bodies and steel, on land and from the sky.
Around the rest of the world, though, the Israel-Hamas war is being waged with propaganda, protest and social media posts, declarations and dismissals, all too often by ideologues speaking to an audience primed to believe them.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the too-long silence about, downplaying and even outright denial of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas.
Allegations of sexual violence on Oct. 7 were raised early on. But the attacks that day were so shocking and the casualty figures so high and the mission to figure out who was dead and who was kidnapped so urgent that it seems Israeli investigators prioritized identifying victims over in-depth forensic examinations. Stunned recovery teams made every effort to offer dignified treatment of the dead, often failing to photograph the bodies as they were found. Many victims, in accordance with traditional Jewish funeral customs, were buried as soon as possible.
The very work of identifying people was complex and time-consuming: Many bodies were in pieces or charred beyond recognition.
As forensics teams were doing their work, desperate families waited outside the forensic center where truck after truck brought in more and more victims for identification. In some areas, fighting went on for several days, delaying the retrieval of bodies. Some evidence of sexual assault and rape degrades over time, and obviously, it’s difficult to recover material like semen from a badly burned body.
It is easy to understand the decision to get critical information to frantic families and release bodies to bereaved ones for burial. But as several Israeli women’s rights groups have argued, it was also a mistake to not gather more physical evidence. Now, at least in the United States — where many people’s understanding of rape investigations comes from police procedural television programs like “Law & Order: SVU,” which pose little resemblance to the realities of accounting for wartime atrocities — the lack of physical evidence so far released to the public has seemingly only made it easier for skeptics to deny the assaults.
Initially, many journalists, women’s rights advocates and other commentators held off from commenting on sexual violence that occurred as part of the Oct. 7 attacks. I’ve made a career out of writing about women’s rights, including the scourge of rape in conflict, and I also held my tongue and my pen, waiting for substantive reporting and clearer evidence to emerge. This is, after all, an obligation of our profession. Accusations of rape are extremely charged, and uncorroborated claims that turn out to be exaggerated or untrue can undermine the public’s trust in journalists and their belief in the veracity of sexual violence claims more broadly. Rape in war is underreported, difficult to track and hard to corroborate.
But soon after the attacks, the evidence started to come in, and it took the form that evidence of wartime rape often does: accounts from survivors of the attacks, emergency responders, medical personnel, those who examined the bodies and journalists who were permitted to see some attack footage. Some of these accounts have been presented by organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. A Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children has been established in Israel.
The accounts being published are grisly and upsetting. One survivor of an attack told PBS that he hid in a bush for hours as Hamas carried out atrocities. “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls,” he said. “After they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite.” And, he said, “they laughed. They always laughed. It’s — I can’t forget how they laughed.”
Members of Israel’s teams charged with identifying and handling victims’ bodies have described women with broken pelvises, amputated genitals and other signs of sexual brutality. One woman who worked at the military base where many victims were taken testified at a U.N. event that her team saw multiple people who had been shot in the genitals or breasts. One emergency worker said in a statement provided by a search and rescue organization that in one kibbutz, he found a woman with a knife in her vagina.
There is much, much more.
Typically, accusations of rape as a war crime also come from survivors. In this case, it seems that many Israeli people whom Hamas attackers got their hands on were either killed or kidnapped. One woman who was held hostage by Hamas and recently released reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, “They touch girls, and everyone knows it.” Others may — understandably — need time before speaking to the international media about an unthinkable trauma.
But even as evidence mounted, so did disbelief. On social media, accounts often flood mentions of Hamas’s gendered violence with arguments that no such thing happened, often insisting that the allegations were invented by the Israeli government as a pretext for war, are simply too unsubstantiated to be believed or pale in comparison with Palestinian suffering. Some of these accounts may be bots; others have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Hamas, too, denies carrying out any rapes. One Hamas official told The Washington Post that the group considers “any sexual relationship or activity outside of marriage to be completely haram,” using the Arabic word for “forbidden” (unlike, apparently, the mass murder of civilians, including women and babies).
Denials and deflections have come from people with vast reach. Some work at prominent magazines; others run popular podcasts, YouTube channels and websites. These denials have migrated into global leftist discourse and seem intended to sow doubt or prompt wholesale dismissal of the subject.
Israeli authorities say that police investigations are ongoing. According to one Israeli diplomat, evidence of rape has been submitted to the United Nations, and last week, one person who recovered bodies and another who prepared them for burial testified as part of a U.N. event in which speakers condemned the vast silence on Oct. 7 gender-based crimes. A U.N. commission of inquiry charged with investigating war crimes by both Israel and Hamas will look into acts of sexual violence on Oct. 7, and its chair said there are people ready to provide testimony. Israel, though, believes the commission is biased and is apparently refusing to cooperate.
While we wait for more information to emerge, it may seem flummoxing to casual observers that anyone would downplay the existing evidence: Does it really seem so outlandish that a group that murdered some 1,200 people, broadcast some of the killings and seemed to revel in degrading their victims might have committed acts of sexual violence, too? Does anyone really believe that, were it not for rape claims, Israel’s campaign in Gaza would be any less brutal, let alone nonexistent?
But that misses the point. For many denialists, truth doesn’t seem to be the goal; a monopoly on righteousness is.
From the earliest days after Oct. 7, individual supporters of all sides have disseminated and fallen for distortions and blatant fabrications. This war comes at a time of minimal global trust and maximal ability to seek out evidence that supports whatever theory suits one’s political context.
Reporting on the attacks and the war also produced genuine confusion. Muddying the picture even more were claims later modified by reputable journalistic outlets, which has only propelled conspiracymongering and denialism. Further, while much of the obfuscation has been stoked by bad actors — be they hostile foreign governments, right-wing bigots or cynical left-wing activists — those atrociously dishonest messages are then amplified and repeated, even by no doubt well-meaning people who simply sympathize with a brutalized population.
Sadly, some of this is familiar territory. Wartime rape is routinely denied or downplayed by those accused of committing it, as well as by their governments and supporters who are sure that their guys are always the good ones. In progressive spaces, this is made all the more one-dimensional by a hierarchy of oppression that often breaks the world down into oppressed versus nonoppressed and attaches presumptions of righteousness or malevolence to those categories. Within these all-good versus all-evil frameworks, dead civilians can be rationalized away as unavoidable collateral damage of a necessarily vicious war or byproducts of a justified and admirable anticolonial resistance. Even just wars, the argument goes, leave some innocents dead.
And yet there is no legitimate military aim that rationalizes sexual violence, only a desire to dominate, hurt and humiliate.
Some of those who deny or question allegations of Oct. 7 sexual abuse argue not only that those abuses may not have happened but also that giving credence to these claims is, in effect, justifying Israel’s war in Gaza — a theory weakened by the fact that the Israeli incursion began well before stories of sexual violence made very many headlines. It’s a profoundly morally bankrupt position, one that demands silencing the truth to achieve a desired end. It’s a means of undermining stories of violence that has worked throughout the ages, as women have been told to keep quiet for the cause or encouraged not to ruin a good man’s life or written largely out of history as inconvenient or even deserving victims of the good guys.
The horrors of this war do not have to be either/or. One can both face the mountain of evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7 and confront the staggering Palestinian death toll — people who were not mere collateral damage but individuals whose lives were brutally snatched away and many more who will carry this displacement and loss and trauma with them for the rest of their lives. One can seek to understand the context in which a group like Hamas comes to be and curb the impulse to recast openly misogynist fundamentalists into freedom fighters. One can hold deep contempt for this right-wing Israeli government and oppose this war with every bone in one’s body.
One can do all of that without letting that contempt carry over to Israeli women and without allowing opposition to the war calcify into a refusal to see or hear anything that might engender sympathy for innocent Israelis or conflict with what one badly wants to be true. The only way to truly stand against the inhumanity of this war is to face and condemn inhumane acts — whoever commits them.