From a phonetic Hebrew cheat sheet given to Hamas fighters:
"take your clothes off"
"lie down"
"spread your legs"
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4OCO9Msl_m/
Transcript from Bari Weiss' excerpts of eyewitness accounts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFVXFXZ9xGA&t=555s
irsthand testimony that is coming out of the mouths of women
who were there and who saw what was happening with their own eyes. One released
hostage, 17-year-old Agam Goldstein-Almog, told The Free Press
that about 50 days into her captivity, she met some of these young women in the tunnels,
some of whom still had bloody gunshot wounds that had been left untreated, and one of whom
had a dismembered limb. They told Agam that they had been sexually abused.
Here is what Agam told us. “I heard from them accounts of terrifying
and grotesque sexual abuse,” she said, “often at gunpoint.”
“They told me that when they were sad and cried, their captors would take advantage
of their helplessness even more and stroke and caress them and then shove and grab
intimate parts of their bodies. They were treated,” Agam told us, “like playthings.” Chen
Goldstein-Almog, Agam’s mother, who was held hostage with her daughter, told
The New York Times that she, too, met women in the tunnels who said they were sexually abused.
In recounting a conversation she had with these hostages, Chen told Israeli media
that Hamas, quote, “simply put a gun to their heads and did what they wanted
to them at gunpoint.” Twenty-one-year-old Mia Shen, who was released
after 54 days in captivity, told Israeli media that before she was taken to Gaza,
she was, quote, “groped on her upper body by her first kidnapper.” It was only when he realized
that her arm was severed, she said, that he stopped.
When she got to Gaza, she said she feared death and she feared rape.
She said she thinks the only reason she wasn’t raped in captivity is because her captor’s
wife and children were present in the home the whole time. Did he ever do something
like that? No.
Only because his wife was outside the door. If we were there alone, something was bound to happen
Aviva Siegal, 64 years old, was held in Gaza for more than 50 days.
Her husband is still in captivity. She testified before a Knesset committee
that she witnessed a woman being tortured and another who showed signs that her captor had violated her.
It’s not
just the released hostages giving these testimonies. One of the doctors who treated the released hostages
reported that ten of the people who were freed, including men, were sexually abused
in captivity. Another doctor said that among the 30 female hostages that he treated
between the ages of 12 to 48, many suffered sexual assault during captivity.
Another doctor said that many of the released female hostages showed signs of PTSD
and said that the patients are, quote, “deeply traumatized by extremely serious
sexual assaults.” None of this should come as a surprise,
because the entire world saw what Hamas did on October 7 aboveground
in broad daylight, proudly captured in their own photographs and videos
for the entire world to see. The extent of the rape and sexual violence
by Hamas on October 7 has been well documented in pictures,
in videos, in eyewitness accounts, in testimony from rescue teams and medics,
in testimony from pathologists, and from people who prepared Jewish bodies for burial,
according to Jewish law. A New York Times investigation last month—the
haunting must-read piece is called “Screams Without Words”—reported
that medics found more than 30 bodies of women and girls with their clothes torn off
and with signs of sexual abuse. They reviewed photographs of one woman’s
corpse with, quote, “dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.”
They also reviewed a video provided by the Israeli military, quote, “showing two dead
Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.”
One witness, a 24-year-old woman named Sapir, who survived the Nova Festival on October 7,
spoke to the Times about what she saw that day. And this next part is hard for me to read,
and it may be hard for you to listen to, but I think it’s important for me to read it. Quote: “The first victim
she said she saw was a young woman with copper-colored hair, blood running down her back,
pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over.
Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife
into her back.” She said she then watched another woman, quote, ‘shredded into pieces.’
While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off
her breast. One continues to rape her and the other throws her breasts to someone else
and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the ground.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view.
Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads
of three more women.” Another witness at Nova, Raz Cohen
told the Times, and later CNN, of a gang rape he witnessed at the festival on October 7.
00:14:12:01 - 00:15:04:12 It was like a half-circle,
and the girl was in the middle of the circle. And after they
pulled the cloths off the girl,
they started to—one of them started to
rape her. And then—it was something like
forty seconds, and then after
he raped her, he take a knife
and he kill her, murder her. And after he did it,
he continue to rape the dead body. In countless IDF testimonies,
soldiers and medics and volunteers have testified to what they found in the homes of the kibbutzim
near Gaza. One rescue officer testified that when he entered the home
of one of the communities attacked, he found a 14- or 15-year-old girl who had been raped
and then killed, shot in the head in her bedroom next to her sister.
Some first responders testified that they couldn’t even tell if the bodies they found
were men or women. That’s how badly these people were mutilated. 00:15:51:20 - 00:15:59:15 I saw in front of my eyes
a woman laying. She was naked.
She had nails and different objects
in her female organs.
Her body was brutal in a way that we could not identify her.
Others who work for the military morgue testified that they saw, quote, “women with bloody underwear,
with broken bones, broken legs, and broken pelvises.” As the Times
investigation points out, the true number of women assaulted on October 7 will never be known.
