Protests and cries of indignation continue to mount against the United Nations, and UN Women in particular, for their silence in the face of increasing stark evidence of rape, among other forms of sexual brutality and the savage killing of women perpetrated by Hamas when they attacked Israel on 7 October.
Israeli law professor Dr. Cochay Elkayam Levy, who heads a commission formed to probe the 7 October killing of women and children by Hamas, said she sent a letter containing signatures of dozens of scholars to UN Women calling for an "unequivocal condemnation" of the massacre, including the rape of women by Hamas, to which she received "No response."
Gilad Erdan, Israel's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, sent two letters with supporting photos of victims' bodies to UN Women Executive Director Sima Sami Bahous, denouncing the use of rape by Hamas militants and, he said, "I got no response whatsoever, not even a "we received your letter."
Altogether, over 1,500 eyewitness accounts of rape and/or evidence of other forms of brutal sexual violence on 7 October have been collected, according to Israeli officials.
At the UN in New York on Monday, 4 December, a group organized by Erdan that included philanthropist and former Meta chief executive Sheryl Sandberg along with three Israelis, a police officer, a first responder, and a member of a morgue team that processed bodies took turns presenting evidence of the large-scale violence to a chamber packed with women's rights advocates and diplomats, among others.
An account in The New York Times told of a horrified Israeli volunteer first responder, Simcha Greinman, who helped collect the remains of victims massacred in the attack by Hamas.
Taking long pauses as he spoke, Greinman told of "horrific things I saw with my own eyes," describing the body of a woman with different objects, including nails, driven into her female organ. "She was abused in a way we could not understand and could not deal with." And another person's genitals that were "so mutilated we could not identify if it was a man or woman."
Israeli military reservist Shari Mendes, who was among those assigned to prepare the bodies of female combatants for burial, saw several "shot in the crotch, intimate parts, breasts…."
Documentation by Israeli police's International Crime Investigations Unit head, Meni Binyamin, included descriptions of "violent rape, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen."
Israeli police superintendent Yael Richert showed video of interviews of witnesses, including a paramedic who said, "We saw a lot of female victims whose sexual organs were targeted."
Addressing the 4 December event at the UN, an emotional New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said the raw footage she was shown "takes your breath away with the sheer level of evil it depicts."
The atrocities presented at the UN last Monday have never really been documented or given much attention by human rights groups and media in general and, sadly, by the UN itself.
Hamas has denied that its combatants had ever committed sex crimes.
But substantial evidence has been gathered, including video taken by Hamas elements themselves as well as first-hand witnesses like one woman who said she watched Hamas fighters take turns raping and mutilating before shooting in the head a young woman whom they had pinned down after swarming a music festival in southern Israel on 7 October.
How the UN can call out the Israelis' bombardment of Gaza, saying it is out of proportion to Hamas's 7 October attack on Israel, even as it remains virtually silent or indifferent to the savage sexual attacks suffered by women at the hands of Hamas militants, is mystifying, to say the least.
At the UN event, the Israeli first responder Greinman, his voice quivering, told the hushed chamber about how, in another house, he came upon the body of a woman leaning on a bed, naked from the waist down, shot through the back of her head.
Struggling to keep his composure as he spoke, Greinman said, "I am standing in front of you to make sure that you hear the voices of those women that cannot stand next to us now, and be here to scream out what happened to them."
