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Thursday, March 28, 2024
Captured PIJ terrorist confesses to raping Israeli woman on Oct. 7 in new IDF interrogation footage
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
The IDF has released new interrogation footage of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist who appears to confess to raping an Israeli woman in a kibbutz in southern Israel during the Hamas-led October 7 onslaught.
The terrorist, Manar Qassem, who was captured by the IDF earlier this month in Khan Younis, says he is a member of Islamic Jihad’s naval forces.
In the interrogation carried out by the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504, Qassem is asked what he did on October 7, to which he provides a detailed response.
Qassem says he entered Israel through a breach in the Gaza border fence between the Khan Younis area towns of al-Fukhkhari and Khuza’a, armed with a handgun and two grenades.
He says that as he reached the unnamed kibbutz, he entered the closest home, where he encountered a woman who was startled.
“I took her and threw her on the couch,” Qassem tells the interrogators, recalling in detail what she looked like and what she was wearing.
“The devil took over me, I laid her down, started undressing her, and did what I did,” he says.
Pressed by the interrogator as to what he did, Qassem responds by saying: “I slept with her.”
Asked again, Qassem says “I raped her,” according to the IDF. The audio in the footage is unintelligible at some points, due to the military censoring the voice of the interrogator.
“She pushed me, it didn’t last long… Two minutes. Maybe a minute and a half,” he says.
At that point, according to Qassem, two members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades entered the home and put the woman together with her mother for a short while, before taking both out of the house. It was not immediately clear if the woman is alive.
Qassem says he was left alone and decided to head back to the Gaza Strip. He says he heard gunshots, and then shot one Israeli man near him, before throwing one of his grenades and fleeing the kibbutz.
The IDF says the footage is “further proof of the onslaught of murder and sexual violence by the terrorist organizations on October 7th, in an attempt to make the voices of those who can no longer tell be heard.”
