Journalists accuse UN sexual violence envoy of enabling Israeli attacks
Sex crimes official under fire in presser after presenting report that indicates widespread rape on October 7 though it doesn’t directly accuse Hamas of perpetrating the crimes
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
Journalists at a Monday press conference at which a UN report accusing Hamas of rape was presented accused the organization’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict of enabling Israeli attacks in Gaza.
PassBlue reporter Dwan Clancy asked the UN’s Pramila Patten if she was concerned that the report “is being weaponized as a way to continue violence in Gaza.”
Al-Quds Al-Arabi UN Bureau Chief Abdelhamid Abdeljaber said the report “is only a validation of the Israeli narrative.”
Nabil Abi Saad from AlAraby TV asked if Patten had seen the bodies of the Israeli victims, and whether she had talked to released Israeli hostages who, according to Abi Saad, had praised Hamas.
There was also frustration in Israel over the report, which indicated that rape and gang rape likely occurred during the October 7 Hamas onslaught against southern Israel. Despite affirming earlier reports of widespread Hamas rapes, the report did not directly accuse Hamas of carrying out the sexual violence.
The 24-page report did mention Hamas 10 times, but only talked about “sexual violence linked to the attacks committed by Hamas and other armed groups.”
When describing the specific attacks, the report refrained from noting who had perpetrated them: “There are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of rape, including gang rape, occurred in and around the Nova festival site during the October 7 attacks.”
לכל מי ששואל למה הדוח של האו״ם בכלל חשוב ולמה ישראל שיתפה איתו פעולה, או שיש ביקורת על הדוח שהוא לא מספיק מצדד בעמדה שלנו – מוזמן לצפות בקטע הבא של שאלות העיתונאים למחברת הדוח , תת מזכ״ל האו״ם פרמילה פאטן. שאלות הזויות, היא ממש הותקפה שהיא מאמצת את הנרטיב הישראלי. לראות ולהשתגע pic.twitter.com/mQhDjR61dN
— יונה לייבזון yuna leibzon (@YunaLeibzon) March 5, 2024
However, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, chair of the Israeli Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, was broadly supportive of the report’s portrayal.
“Hamas is mentioned in [Monday’s UN] report,” she told Channel 12. “Despicable acts by Hamas and other groups are cited. The report itself presents a horrifying picture of the cases that we knew about…. that we gathered material about.
“The very fact that the report succeeded in describing this constitutes a colossal [allegation of] responsibility against Hamas. It will be hard for them to evade this,” she said.
Still, shortly after the report emerged, Foreign Minister Israel Katz recalled UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan for consultations, saying on X that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “acting to soften the serious report that he himself ordered on the sexual offenses of Hamas, trying to keep Hamas from being held responsible and not ordering that the Security Council be immediately convened to discuss the report and recognize Hamas as a terror group, with all the sanctions that entails, while calling for an unconditional release of all hostages.”
Guterres’s spokesman denied that he was attempting to suppress the report.
The report will be debated in the UN’s annual April meeting on sexual violence in conflict.
The report, based on more than two weeks of meetings on the ground, stated that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that terrorists committed rape and sexual abuse during their murderous rampage on October 7, and that there is an even higher standard of evidence to indicate that hostages kidnapped by Hamas that day were subject to rape in captivity.
Presenting the report at UN Headquarters in New York, Patten said that there was “clear and convincing information that sexual violence including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” was committed against hostages being held in captivity in the Strip by Hamas.
“The mission was a difficult one in terms of what we heard and the details,” said Patten at the press conference. “We saw a catalog of the most extreme and inhumane forms of torture and other horrors,” she said, noting that her mission “was neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature.”
The team said a “fully-fledged investigation” would be required to establish the overall magnitude, scope and specific attribution for the sexual violence.
Patten said that based on her evidence-gathering, there are reasonable grounds to believe that “rape and gang rape” occurred during the October 7 attacks in at least three locations: the Supernova music festival site, Kibbutz Re’im, and along the nearby Route 232.
In most such instances, she said, evidence shows that victims were “first subjected to rape and then killed,” noting as well “two incidents” pointing to the rape of women’s corpses.
The music festival grounds, Patten said, was the site of “brutal mass murders,” noting that many bodies were found extensively burned or disfigured, and that there was also a “recurring pattern of victims found fully or partially undressed, bound and shot.”
Patten noted that “some allegations” of sexual violence from Kibbutz Be’eri were determined to be unfounded, including a story about a pregnant woman’s fetus being cut out of her body, while other allegations could not be verified.
She added that interviews in the West Bank of both male and female Palestinian detainees pointed to “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment by Israeli security forces, including “sexual violence in the forms of body searches [and] threats of rape.”
In response to the report, Erdan lambasted the international body for taking so long to recognize what happened in Gaza-adjacent communities on October 7.
Israel has railed at international women’s groups that ignored evidence of Hamas’s weaponization of sexual violence during the attacks.
It took about eight weeks for UN Women, a women’s rights group under the tutelage of the UN, to post, and shortly thereafter delete, a condemnation of the October 7 onslaught itself. Another week would go by before the agency registered the existence of “disturbing reports of gender-based and sexual violence on October 7.”
The delayed response sparked outrage among Jewish and Israeli feminist groups, rallying to the hashtag “#MeToo_UNless_UR_A_Jew” and charging the UN body’s silence was motivated by antisemitism.
The campaign gained traction by December, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United States President Joe Biden both publicly castigating international women’s groups for ignoring mounting evidence that Hamas had used rape as a weapon of war. Later that month, the New York Times ran a damning report on the extent of sexual violence during the October 7 attacks.
Amy Spiro and AFP contributed to this report.
