The Dinah Project says the accounts from people who saw or heard incidents of sexual violence showed that such crimes were “widespread and systematic” on 7 October.
According to the report, five witnesses reported at least four separate cases of gang rape; seven reported at least eight other separate cases of rape or severe sexual assaults, some of them in captivity; five reported at least three separate cases of sexual assaults, some in captivity; and three reported three separate cases of mutilation.
Nine of those cases related to the Nova music festival, two to the Nahal Oz military base, one to the Route 232 road, and four to incidents occurring in captivity in Gaza, the report says.
Twenty-seven first responders meanwhile described dozens of cases which showed “clear signs of sexual violence across six locations”, the report says – the Nova festival, Route 232, and the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Alumim, Nahal Oz and Re’im.
The report also says that “most victims were permanently silenced”, because they were either killed on 7 October or left too traumatised to talk.
In response, the authors provide what they describe as the “first global legal blueprint explaining how to prosecute sexual violence as a weapon of war – even when evidence is messy, survivors are gone, and individual perpetrators can’t be tied to individual acts”.
That includes an evidentiary framework to categorise information based on its proximity to incidents and its evidentiary value, and a legal framework for establishing criminal responsibility for atrocities committed during mass attacks, even when an individual did not personally commit each specific act or were not aware of its commission by someone else.
The report concludes by saying that justice is “essential not only for individual victims but for affirming broader principles: that sexual violence in conflict is a serious violation of international law, that perpetrators will be held accountable, and that the international community will not allow such crimes to be committed with impunity”.