From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
At Davos, Israeli MK lambastes women’s groups for silence on Hamas sexual crimes
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
The “deafening silence of the international women’s organizations” in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack sends a message of “#MeToo, unless you’re a Jew,” the chairwoman of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality tells members of the Women Political Leaders (WPL) organization on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“The reactions from the UN in general and from the women’s committees in particular were too little, too late,” says National Unity lawmaker Pnina Tamano-Shata, arguing that “if the world is incapable of standing with Israeli women who experienced the atrocities of terrorism under the auspices of Iran and its proxies, the promise ‘Never Again’ has lost its meaning.”
Calling on her fellow female lawmakers to “stand shoulder to shoulder alongside Israeli women,” Tamano-Shata says that “what happened in Israel could happen anywhere in the world, if we don’t work together to defeat terrorism and bring these monsters to justice.”
Hamas engaged in widespread sexual assault during its attack on the south, when thousands of terrorists invaded Israel by land, sea, and air, killing 1,200 people — a majority of them civilians — and taking 240 others hostage into Gaza.
Tamano-Shata has also criticized the Israeli government’s assistance to sexual assault victims, declaring at a hearing of the Committee on the Status of Women earlier this month that the various agencies handling the issue appeared to have failed to coordinate their efforts satisfactorily.
The Times of Israel Community.