NY Times verifies Hamas rape allegations

The NY Times has spent two months investigating allegations of rape by Hamas attackers inside Israel. Now it goes without saying the NY Times is not a conservative newspaper. In fact they even give Hamas an op-ed. So when the NYT says they have verified what happened, all but the most loathsome should accept the reality.

And what is the reality. Well here’s a summary:

• interviews with more than 150 witnesses, medical personnel, first responders, soldiers, rape counselors, and government officials along with the scanning of video footage, photographs and GPS data from cell phones.
• partially charred remains of a woman whose face is burned beyond recognition, and who is naked from the waist down, legs spread, her black dress hiked up.
• identified at least seven locations across southern Israel where women and girls were apparently sexually abused or mutilated and those the paper interviewed described finding the bodies of more than 30 women in and around the Supernova rave site and in two nearby kibbutzim in a similar state as Abdush’s — “legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.”
• Photographs viewed by The Times included ones of a woman in a besieged kibbutz who was found with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
• Footage viewed by the newspaper showed two dead Israeli soldiers at an overrun military base apparently shot directly in their vaginas.
• A paramedic from a commando unit told the newspaper he had found the bodies of two teenage girls, sisters aged 13 and 16, in a room in Kibbutz Be’eri with their clothes ripped. One was lying on her side with “bruises by her groin’ and the other “was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.”
• came upon the body of a young woman lying on her stomach, unclothed from the waist down, legs spread, and who appeared to have been sliced open in her vaginal area, “as if someone tore her apart.”
• Similar scenes were discovered in at least six different houses in the Be’eri and Kfar Aza Kibbutzim, where at least 24 bodies of women and girls were found either stripped, tied up with zip ties or mutilated — sometimes all three
• The witness said she saw at least five women raped in front of her while she tried to hide.
• “They all gather around her… She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.” “Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”
• Shoam Gueta, a friend of Cohen’s who was hiding with him, told the newspaper that he saw that the men were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and then one of them stabbed the victim repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”
• At least 10 bodies of female soldiers from a Gaza observation post were found with signs of sexual violence
• One victim was hiding in the brush on October 7 when she saw one terrorist rape and stab a female captive in the back every time she flinched while another cut off her breast. “One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” she recalled.
• Another witness described watching five men take turns raping a young, naked woman “They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words,” he remembered.
• One paramedic said that he found two teenage sisters,  13 and 16-years-old, with there pants and underwear pulled down and ripped with semen on them.
• Other first responders said they found women naked with hands tied behind their back or with the vaginas “sliced open.”

None of the perpetrators of these rapes and murders will be held accountable by Hamas. To the contrary they are feted as heroes. Those who call for Israel not to respond to the atrocities of 7 October, are implicitly trivialising what happened to those women.

A good start to a ceasefire would be Hamas handing over the rapists to stand trial.