Oct. 7 massacre: The fight for accurate testimonies of Hamas's atrocities

• Published date: 12 April 2024
• Author: TAMAR URIEL-BEERI
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

An argument constantly made by those that not only oppose Israel's position in the war against Hamas but actively deny the atrocities that occurred on Oct. 7 is that there is no sufficient evidence. They do not just want to hear witness testimonies, they want to see proof

Immediately, Israeli women's organizations were outraged. Building an Alternative (Bonot Alternativa), one of Israel's leading women's rights and gender equality organizations, reached out to its activists worldwide to instigate immediate protests.

"The first thing we did was to activate the groups of Building an Alternative around the world and hold presentations and protests," Moran Zer Katzenstein, an Israeli women's rights activist and founder of Building an Alternative, told the Magazine.

"Some demonstrations were more provocative, such as women with blood on their clothes, like what we did in New York, and some less provocative. We decided on a city-by-city basis what was best suited."

The very notion that proof is being demanded worldwide is horrific, not to mention what it says about the special conditions that Israel needs to face – conditions no other country has to meet in order to prove that its people were raped and massacred.

Nevertheless, the question remains: How does one go about collecting evidence of mass sexual assault and rape when survivors are seriously traumatized, witnesses are considered only somewhat believable, and victims who were murdered after and during rape were then burned, therein destroying evidence?

How do you find evidence of mass sexual assault and rape on October 7?

ORIT SULITZEANU, executive director of ARCCI, told the Magazine that there are four main types of sources that the ARCCI uses as evidence of sexual violence by Hamas: "Overt sources such as journalistic investigations; first responder interviews; independently conducted interviews; and information that reached us via our rape crisis centers."

Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy immediately recognized the challenge of proving the atrocities of Oct. 7 and sought to do whatever was necessary to preserve evidence and testimonies of the sexual violence used by Hamas as a weapon of war.

Elkayam-Levy, a Sophie Davis post-doctoral fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute Program on Gender, Conflict Resolution and Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU), heads the Civil Commission on Crimes on Oct. 7 by Hamas Against Women and Children.

"I'm an international law scholar, and I teach about the global...