The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, led by Israel Prize laureate and international law expert Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, on Tuesday published its report, \u201cSexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity,\u201d presenting what it describes as the most extensive evidentiary record compiled to date on the sexual atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the captivity in Gaza.<\/p>\n
The report\u2019s central contribution is not only its conclusion that sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the attack, but its attempt to move from recognition to prosecution \u2013 a question that has shadowed the issue since the earliest days after the massacre, when many victims were murdered, scenes were burned or destroyed, forensic documentation was partial, and surviving witnesses were often traumatized, saw only fragments, or were unable to testify.<\/p>\n
The answer offered by the report is an evidentiary model built not on a single witness, video, or forensic finding, but on cumulative proof: preserved materials, cross-referenced accounts, recurring patterns, and the legal connection between specific proven crimes and the wider machinery of October 7.<\/p>\n
That model rests on what the Commission calls a dedicated war crimes archive comprising more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, amounting to well over 1,800 hours of visual analysis, alongside more than 430 testimonies, interviews, and meetings with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts, and family members. Victims represented in the data analysis, the report said, included 52 nationalities.<\/p>\n
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The destruction caused by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, near the Gaza border, in southern Israel, November 21, 2023 (credit: CHAIM GOLDBERG\/FLASH90)<\/p>\n
The material was logged, coded, cross-referenced, mapped across time and geography, and integrated into a database focused specifically on sexual and gender-based crimes. The investigation also used open-source material, geolocation-supported datasets, site visits, expert consultations, and trauma-informed documentation practices.<\/p>\n
Because the Commission began collecting evidence immediately after the attacks, the report said, it preserved early and perishable material, including original footage, communications, and testimonies that were later removed or lost.<\/p>\n
This is where the report seeks to answer the prosecutorial problem.<\/p>\n
In ordinary criminal cases, investigators often work backward from a victim, a scene, a suspect, and a body of forensic evidence, but October 7 did not present ordinary crime scenes: Many victims did not survive, some bodies were burned, first responders were working under mass-casualty conditions, witnesses often saw only fragments of what happened, and some of the most direct evidence came from perpetrators\u2019 own footage, victims\u2019 phones, family testimony, body-identification sites, and released-hostage accounts.<\/p>\n
The legal analysis argues that such fragmentation does not make prosecution impossible but requires a different method: preserving the available evidence, testing it against other sources, identifying repeated conduct across locations and phases of the attack, and determining whether specific incidents can be placed inside the broader criminal context.<\/p>\n
That broader context is critical because the report argues that prosecutors would not necessarily have to prove every sexual crime committed on October 7, or prove that sexual violence<\/a>, as a category, was independently widespread or systematic. Under international criminal law, even a smaller number of proven incidents can carry legal weight if they are tied to the wider criminal context: the massacre, the abductions, captivity in Gaza, and the broader attack on civilians.<\/p>\n That distinction is what gives the archive its legal significance.<\/p>\n A single piece of evidence may help establish one crime, but a cross-referenced archive shows how that crime fits into a broader system of violence.<\/p>\n The report identifies 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence across attack sites. These include rape and gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, forced nudity, executions linked to sexual violence, postmortem sexual abuse, sexual assaults carried out in the presence of family members, filming and digital dissemination, threats of forced marriage, and sexual violence against boys and men.<\/p>\n The examples themselves serve as the factual basis for the report\u2019s argument that the crimes were not isolated episodes but conduct that appeared repeatedly and in recognizable forms across different settings.<\/p>\n The report concludes, as the Commission\u2019s legal position, that these acts constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocidal acts, torture, and terrorism-linked sexual and gender-based violence under international law.<\/p>\n