The United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, like all other UN organizations, has failed to condemn the horrendous sexual violence meted out onto Israeli civilians, from girls to elderly women, on October 7.
The statement that CEDAW finally issued almost two weeks later referred only vaguely to the “gendered dimensions of [the] conflict” between Israelis and Palestinians in general. This statement avoided recognizing explicitly the mass raping of female Israelis that took place during the massacre of October 7.
More importantly, the international bodies remained silent about the urgent need to provide raped Israelis who are still held as hostages in Gaza with the medical treatment they require and to provide them from further sexual assault, asserted comparative European history Prof. Tamar Herzig, Tel Aviv University vice-dean for research, specializing in religious, social, minorities, and gender history.
“The deafening silence of global feminist organizations that were expected to spearhead the acknowledgment of gender-based violence in its most severe manifestations was followed by a denial campaign,” she stated on Thursday. “This was led by activists such as Samantha Pearson, director of the University of Alberta’s sexual violence center, who disputed the rapes executed by Hamas terrorists as part of the October 7 massacre in Israel.
“The cruel sexual violence inflicted on Jewish girls and women in the course of Hamas’s attack on southern Israel was filmed by body cameras and uploaded to social media by the perpetrators and their collaborators on October 7,” Herzig said. “In these videos, the terrorists are heard discussing plans to rape specific girls. They are also seen parading the rape victims that they kidnapped to Gaza, with their clothes ripped off and blood gushing from between their legs.”
Victims inside Israel speak
nly used as an effective strategy of war, research has shown that rape in armed conflicts is not inevitable and that its frequency and severity vary considerably. In her powerful 2020 book Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: War through the Lives of Women, Christina Lamb reminds us that rape remains the world’s most neglected war crime.
“When people think about war and when journalists discuss ethnic or national conflicts, what they refer to as ‘casualties’ is those who were killed, not those who were ‘just’ brutally raped. As a form of violence that is targeted primarily at women, wartime rape is easily forgotten and its significance belittled, I have shown how the brutal group raping of Jewish women from North Africa, who were captured by Italian corsairs in 1610, was intentionally erased from the archival record shortly after it occurred. Then, as now, the intersection of sexual violence, gender, and ethnicity ignited erasure,” Herzig said.
Before October 7, 2023, the occurrence of rape in this prolonged conflict was so rare, that one anthropological study even focused on the possible causes of its almost complete avoidance. “According to American political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood, it is unlikely that the rarity of known rapes perpetuated by both parties in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict before the systematic raping of October 7 reflects underreporting, given the intensity of international scrutiny on their behavior.
“As Wood observes, close monitoring by human rights organizations does not seem to deter both sides in other practices, such as the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers and of Israeli civilians by Palestinian groups and individuals,” Herzig concluded.
The sexual violence by Hamas terrorists that just took place “constitutes a dramatic watershed in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, one that should have called for a massive mobilization of feminist outrage. Instead, it has met with silence and discrediting. Denying its occurrence not only adds to the suffering inflicted on its female victims, but also undermines the most significant achievements of global feminism in the last half century, thereby endangering girls and women across the world.”
Wartime rape has a long history
Wartime rape has a long history, she went on. “We can trace its early manifestation in the myth of the founding of ancient Rome by means of the serial raping of women of the neighboring tribe, known as the Rape of the Sabine Women, in the eighth century BCE. Yet it was only in the wake of the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1994 that the rape of enemy women during armed conflicts became a prosecutable crime and, when perpetuated systematically, also recognized as a crime against humanity.
“But while it is commonly used as an effective strategy of war, research has shown that rape in armed conflicts is not inevitable and that its frequency and severity vary considerably. In her powerful 2020 book Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: War through the Lives of Women, Christina Lamb reminds us that rape remains the world’s most neglected war crime,” Herzig lamented.
“When people think about war and when journalists discuss ethnic or national conflicts, what they refer to as ‘casualties’ is those who were killed, not those who were ‘just’ brutally raped,” she said.
“As a form of violence that is targeted primarily at women, wartime rape is easily forgotten and its significance belittled; I have shown how the brutal group raping of Jewish women from North Africa, who were captured by Italian corsairs in 1610, was intentionally erased from the archival record shortly after it occurred. Then, as now, the intersection of sexual violence, gender, and ethnicity ignited erasure.”
Before October 7, 2023, the occurrence of rape in this prolonged conflict was so rare, that one anthropological study even focused on the possible causes of its almost complete absence. “According to American political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood, it is unlikely that the rarity of known rapes perpetuated by both parties in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict before the systematic raping of October 7 reflects underreporting, given the intensity of international scrutiny on their behavior,” Herzig said.
“As Wood observes, close monitoring by human rights organizations does not seem to deter both sides in other practices, such as the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers and of Israeli civilians by Palestinian groups and individuals,” she said.
The sexual violence by Hamas terrorists that just took place “constitutes a dramatic watershed in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, one that should have called for a massive mobilization of feminist outrage. Instead, it has met with silence and discrediting,” she concluded.
“Denying its occurrence not only adds to the suffering inflicted on its female victims, but also undermines the most significant achievements of global feminism in the last half century, thereby endangering girls and women across the world.”