I’m sitting at my desk on Wednesday morning. My stomach growls, complaining like a hungry teenager. Do I run across the street and grab some food or start reading? This is me at my rolled gold procrastinating best. And is it any wonder? Open in front of me is the first of 80 pages that comprise the most detailed report yet into how sexual violence was used as a deliberately strategic weapon of terror by Hamas on October 7.
This report is the work of the Dinah project, a multinational organisation composed of legal and feminist experts who have determined that the rapists, the violators, those terrorists who in large part were just grubby sex-obsessed little boys, will not escape justice. The Dinah project exists to give voice to the victims.
This work is named after the seventh child of the Old Testament’s Jacob and Leah. Jacob’s only daughter, Dinah was kidnapped, dragged into captivity and raped. Violated, some translations say, and silenced.
The Dinah project has outlined new evidence gathered over the past year and a bit, which includes the testimony of 15 former hostages who were violently sexually abused while being held captive. The only one to identify herself is former lawyer, Amit Susanna. She also featured in Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary Screams before Silence in which she tells how she was raped by her captor while he held a pistol to her forehead.
Researchers also spoke to 17 people with first-hand and witness accounts of gang rape and murder, and finally with as many as 27 emergency response personnel who arrived at sites across the Gaza envelope that day. Of course, countless items of forensic evidence were also examined and included.
I brace myself, take a breath and start reading.
It’s shocking both in form and familiarity. There is an equally familiar nausea that rises as the detail, the condemning, terrible, detail is recounted in language that is clinical yet manages to tear your heart out.
The confirmed patterns of sexual violence. Women, their broken, violated bodies found fully naked or in part so. Legs spread wide, bloodied. Hands bound, often tied to trees or poles or the like. First-hand witness told of gang rape followed by executions and genital mutilation. My mind drifts momentarily back to Israel six months ago and a conversation I had with a returned hostage. I’m lucky, she told me “because I didn’t get raped.”
The sustained, consistent rape and humiliation while in captivity. It sounds innocuous almost like a “best of a bad option” at first glance. But it is not. It is sinister it is evil and it is the mark of these beasts, those Hamas terrorists and their civilian supporters. Forced nudity. Women forced to be naked in front of their captors. Touched. Worse. The threat of forced marriage and impregnation is a consistent theme from the returned hostages.
Scores and scores of women’s bodies found with pieces of wood, nails and metal in their genitalia. Bullets too, fired at and into their vaginas. Does this make you uncomfortable? Good. Keep reading.
Because as I dragged myself through the pages of this important piece of work, I realised the most devastating part of it (as if the brief precis I’ve outlined here doesn’t win that prize). It’s not, as you might believe, what was done to these women.
No, the most confronting element of the Dinah Report is why it was written, why it was compiled in the first place. Do you want to know why the authors felt it was necessary? To combat denialism. Let’s put it another way. This report was in large part written, because nobody wanted to believe these women.
These women were defiled in the most vicious, brutal, deliberate and sadistic way. They survived, only to have their testimony discounted, diminished or dismissed. Those murdered on and following October 7? Denialism has sought to silence their voices forever. Then there are those who are still alive, but the trauma of it all has stolen their voice.
Believe all women doesn’t apply if you’re Israeli, if you’re Jewish. Worse than the deniers, are the ones who justify. The ones who say yes, rape is resistance. At first, that was something said softly but only a few of the worst. Now? It is screamed with impunity. Scrawled across placards and protest signs. Graffiti on buildings and schools.
There are men in this cohort, obviously, but it’s the women who I will never countenance.
The ones who fawn over each other with your confected sense of righteousness. If you refuse to acknowledge the horror of what was done to the women of October 7 and the women dragged into Gaza as hostages, then it’s time to shut up. Just stop. Not another word. You’re the most useful of all idiots because you betray your own for some kind of status anxiety that speaks to ignorance at best, venomous Jew-hatred at worst.
I loathe these women the most. Hold them in the greatest of contempt because they know, as every woman does, what it’s like for example, to receive unwanted attention from a man. Innocent or otherwise. They know what it’s like to be looked at a certain way. To perhaps have been kissed without permission; again, innocently or with awful, malicious intent. Feeling vulnerable, defenceless and scared for a fraction of a moment. We know. And yes, when victims speak in detail and with courage about the terror that was reigned upon them, your response is; I don’t believe you.
Name me one other cohort of women whose testimony of horrendous sexual abuse is met with – you’re lying, it never happened.
You can’t because there isn’t one. This is perhaps the ugliest and most obvious face of Jew hatred.
Let me ask who you hate more, other women or is it just Jews in general? Either way, your embrace of denialism condemns you to the ranks of the perpetrators. Before you ask me to give examples of this denialism, it was a deliberate choice not to. I refuse to amplify and platform these women, because attention is part of what they seek. But trust me when I tell you they are easy enough to find.
The fact this report was considered necessary for the reasons it was, speaks volumes to the global community’s greater shame in responding to October 7.
If you’ve got the stomach for it (I understand if you don’t, it’s not an easy document to read but it is meticulous and thorough and very clear) please do. At least to arm yourself with information, at least to say, I believe.
If people can deny the Holocaust occurred, then it’s no surprise that this evil has now struck the victims of October 7.
The writers tell us they want acknowledgment of the sexual violence of October 7 as crimes against humanity. What other nature of crime could they be seen as? They want the perpetrators to face justice, and a cohesive and decisive condemnation of the tactical use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. They seek to give a voice to the women the world abandoned, almost from the outset. Meanwhile the world continues to negotiate with terrorists who continue to hold 50 hostages, only 20 believed to be living still.
An old friend of mine, a once dear friend who is Jewish – let’s call her Anna – recalled a conversation with my mother, which now would have been 30 years ago, in which Mum said to me, you never know Gem, one day you might need to hide Anna and her family.
I still remember scoffing at the idea, in total contempt. As if the world would ever let that happen again, I retorted with confidence. Thirty years later, as if the world would.
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