Report says Hamas denial of targeting civilians false

Human Rights Watch details hundreds of war crimes by Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7

Organization with long history of criticizing Israel says number of crimes impossible to determine, including gender-based violence; Israeli watchdog group slams ‘token’ report

Bloodstains are pictured on November 9, 2023, on a room's door at the Thai workers' residence inside Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, after the October 7 attack by Hamas. (Gil Cohen-Magen / AFP)
Bloodstains are pictured on November 9, 2023, on a room's door at the Thai workers' residence inside Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, after the October 7 attack by Hamas. (Gil Cohen-Magen / AFP)

Hamas led armed Palestinian groups in committing hundreds of highly coordinated war crimes, including attacks on civilians and gender-based violence, during the October 7 onslaught on Israel that set off the war in Gaza, Human Rights Watch said in a comprehensive report published Wednesday.

One of the most in-depth international studies on the unprecedented incursion into southern Israel outlines a host of potential war crimes cases during the attack, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

HRW, a frequent critic of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, failed at the time to condemn the attack outright, according to a senior editor who left the group soon afterward claiming that antisemitism had pervaded the organization.

“It’s impossible for us to put a number on the specific instances [of war crimes],” HRW associate director Belkis Wille said at a news conference announcing the group’s latest report, adding that “there were obviously hundreds on that day.”

The crimes include “deliberate and indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects; willful killing of persons in custody; cruel and other inhumane treatment; sexual and gender-based violence; hostage taking; mutilation and despoiling (robbing) of bodies; use of human shields; and pillage and looting,” according to the report.

Although Palestinian terror group Hamas is recognized as the orchestrator of the attack, the report listed other armed groups that committed war crimes on October 7, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Wille pointed to the “incredibly organized and coordinated nature” of the assault on cities, kibbutz communities, a music festival and military bases near the border with Gaza.

“The reality is that it really wasn’t civilians from Gaza who perpetrated the worst abuses,” said Wille. “That was a claim made very early on by Hamas to distance itself from the events, and by Israel to justify its retaliation operation.”

Residential homes, severely damaged during Hamas’s October 7 onslaught on southern Israel, line a street in the Olives Neighborhood of Kibbutz Be’eri on January 1, 2024. (Canaan Lidor/Times of Israel)

“Across many attack sites, fighters fired directly at civilians, often at close range, as they tried to flee, and at people who happened to be driving vehicles in the area,” said the report. “They hurled grenades and shot into safe rooms and other shelters and fired rocket-propelled grenades at homes. They set some houses on fire, burning and suffocating people to death, and forcing out others who they then captured or killed.”

HRW said it “found evidence of acts of sexual and gender-based violence by fighters including forced nudity, and the posting without consent of sexualized images on social media.”

The report quoted a team of the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict who say they interviewed people “who reported witnessing rape and other sexual violence” including “rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.”

But it said the full extent of sexual and gender-based violence “will likely never be fully known” as victims have died, or stigma will stop them from speaking out, or Israeli first responders largely did not collect relevant evidence in real time amid the chaos of that day.

Israeli soldiers at the forensic center in the Shura military base near Ramle, where hundreds of bodies arrived since the October 7 Hamas onslaught, October 24, 2023. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

In a nine-page response to the HRW report, Hamas said its Qassam Brigades planned and led the October 7 attack, not the Hamas political movement, and that fighters were instructed not to target civilians.

HRW said it found the Hamas response “false” and that “the intentional killing and hostage-taking of civilians was planned and highly coordinated.”

Research for the HRW report was done on the ground in October and November, with further research conducted remotely through June. HRW said it interviewed 144 people for the report, including 94 survivors of the shock assault; relatives of survivors, hostages and victims; first responders who collected evidence from the sites of the attack, and medical experts who collected forensic evidence for Israeli authorities; journalists who visited the sites; officials from municipalities affected by the attack; and political analysts of Palestinian armed groups.

Gerald Steinberg, the founder of NGO Monitor, an Israeli nonprofit that tracks left-wing critics of Israel, slammed HRW’s “token” report.

“HRW has repeatedly demonized Israel through the blood libels of genocide, apartheid, starvation and war crimes, while erasing the victims,” wrote Steinberg on social media platform X. “Now, in a pseudo research report, HRW cynically seeks to exploit these immense tragedies to falsely claim ‘balance,’ following the PR strategy based on tokenism as used for 20 years.”

Steinberg also mentioned Danielle Haas, a senior editor at HRW who left the group shortly after October 7 accusing the group of dwelling on the attack’s “‘context’ of ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’ before blood was even dry on bedroom walls.”

In an email announcing her departure — which the organization claimed was unrelated to the attack — Haas said HRW’s response to October 7 showed how “institutional creep culminated in organizational responses that shattered professionalism, abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness, and surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.” Haas also noted that a manager in the group did nothing when she alerted him to “experiences over the years” that felt “a lot like antisemitism.”

Throughout the war, HRW has accused Israel of weaponizing starvation in Gaza and using white phosphorous on residential buildings in Lebanon. The New York-based group, among the world’s preeminent human rights organizations, had previously accused Israel of committing apartheid against Palestinians both inside its borders and in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

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