Guardian aware of sexual assaults for which multiple corroborating pieces of evidence exist. In videos from 7 October, the body of a young woman is lying face down in the back of a pickup truck, stripped to her underwear, one leg bent at an unnatural angle. One of the men sitting next to her pulls her long hair as armed men around him shout praises to God. (…) In the more than three months since the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, the atrocities the militants committed have been well documented. Israel is still grappling with the trauma: entire families burned alive, torture and mutilation, children and elderly people ripped from the arms of their loved ones, seized as hostages. (…) The most detailed witness account of rape is from a young woman who attended the Supernova music festival, where more than 350 young people were killed. The witness, who was shot in the back, said she was hiding in vegetation just off route 232 when a large group of Hamas gunmen arrived, who between them raped and killed at least five women. “They laid a woman down and I understood that he is raping her … They passed her on to another person,” she told police in a video reviewed by the Guardian. “And he cuts her breast, he throws it on the road and they are playing with it.” One raped woman was “shredded to pieces” and another “stabbed repeatedly in the back while she was being raped”, the same witness said in an interview with the New York Times. The witness has provided police with photographs of her hiding place, and another survivor hiding in the same spot has testified that he saw at least one woman being raped. One of the festival’s organisers, Rami Shmuel, who returned to the scene the day after the attack, has described finding the bodies of three young women “naked from the waist down, legs spread”. “One had the face burnt,” he said. Another was “shot in the face” while the last had been “shot all over the lower part of her body”. (…) Individual victims will be able to file complaints amounting to crimes against humanity charges against Hamas at the international criminal court in The Hague, and the court is also expected to open a specific investigation into sexual violence on 7 October.
via guardian: Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks
