Barbaric Hamas terrorists had “a thing with sexual organs’’ and targeted the genitalia of male and female victims during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to harrowing United Nations testimony Monday.
Some of the fiends’ unspeakable acts involved a murdered woman found with “nails and different objects in her female organs” and a gang-rape victim who had one of her breasts cut off — with her attackers then playing with it in the road, Israel said.
There were “horrific things I saw with my own eyes and I felt with my own hands,” said stricken Simcha Greinman, a volunteer who helped collect the remains of the slaughtered victims, according to the New York Times.
The Jewish state accused the UN during the special session of moving too slowly to address reports that the terror group unleashed sexual violence as a weapon of war in its attack, NBC News reported.
“This was premeditated. This was planned. This was instructed,” Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan said at the session, held at the UN’s Manhattan headquarters, according to All Israel News.
Demonstrators hold posters reading “UN Women, your silence is loud” along with a red paint-stained sheet reading “UNbelievable” during a rally in London. AFP via Getty Images
“Sadly, the very international bodies that are supposedly the defenders of all women showed that when it comes to Israelis, indifference is acceptable,” he said.
“To these organizations, Israeli women are not women, the rape of Israelis is not an act of rape. Their silence has been deafening,” he added, referring to UN groups and the international community.
About 800 people, including Jewish groups and diplomats from dozens of countries, attended the presentation, which laid out the evidence of large-scale sexual violence.
A female police officer said in video testimony played at the event that during the sneak attack, “shooting was targeted at sexual organs,” adding, “We saw that a lot,” All Israel reported.
“The women we received, they were civilian. … We mainly saw either breast amputations or gunshots just to the breast, simply shooting from one side of the breast to the other,” another female cop said.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, lashed out against the world body’s slow response to reports about sexual violence by Hamas. AFP via Getty Images
“As for men, they were also shot in their genitalia,” she added.
One of the officers said, “They had a thing with sexual organs — both in women and in men, either amputation or targeted shooting [to that part of the body],” the Messenger reported.
Shari Mendes, a member of an Israel Defense Forces reserve unit in charge of identifying and preparing the bodies of female soldiers for burial, also testified that she saw “systematic genital mutilation,” according to All Israel.
The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of the attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists. REUTERS
One female survivor of the attack on a musical festival where hundreds of people were massacred described how a woman was raped during the atrocity.
“I remember how [one attacker] shifted her position, then passed her on to another person,” she recalled in the video testimony.
“She was alive. … She was standing. … She was bleeding from her back. … She had a long hair, and he was pulling it. … She wasn’t dressed. … He cut her breast. He threw it on the road, and they played with it,” the woman recounted in the gruesome testimony.
Protesters gathered at the offices of the United Nations Women late last month. Getty Images
Israeli national police Superintendent Yael Richert, who presented the sickening accounts, said, “Everything was an apocalypse of corpses — girls without any clothes on, without tops, without underwear, people cut in half, butchered, some were beheaded.”
It was only recently that UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who had condemned the Hamas attack, said, “There are also numerous accounts of sexual violence during the attacks that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted,” NBC News reported.
“Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere,” Guterres wrote last week.
Erdan, the Israeli ambassador, slammed Guterres for allegedly dragging his feet on the condemnation.
“Two months after the massacre and the rapes, the UN remembered to propose an investigation? And by an antisemitic body? The only investigation that should take place is into the shocking silence and indifference of UN Women in the face of the rape and crimes of sexual violence committed against Israeli women,” he said, according to All Israel, referring to the United Nations agency that says its mission is gender equality.
The group Bring Them Home Now held a protest Nov. 27 to observe International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Getty Images
Erdan said he sent two letters about the rapes by the terrorists, appended with images of victims’ bodies, to Sima Sami Bahous, executive director of UN Women, according to the Times.
“I got no response whatsoever, not even, ‘We received your letter,’” Erdan complained.
US Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) spoke about the “raw footage” she had been shown that “takes your breath away with the sheer level of evil it depicts.
“When I saw the list of women’s rights organizations that said nothing, I nearly choked. Where is the solidarity for women in this country and in this world to stand up for our mothers, our sisters and our daughters?” she said.
“The United Nations must denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization that uses rape as a weapon of war. The United Nations must live up to its purpose of upholding the principles of international law, and the United Nations must condemn these evil crimes against humanity,” Gillibrand added.
Former Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg also addressed the UN session, where she stated that “rape should never be used as an act of war” and that “silence is complicity” in the face of atrocities.
“It threatens to undo decades of progress, to undo an entire movement. The world has to decide who to believe, do we believe the Hamas spokesperson … or do we believe the women?” she said.
Israeli soldiers inspect the burned cars of Israeli music festival revelers at the site of the Oct. 7 attack. REUTERS
About 150 activists, including those from Jewish women’s groups, also marched in front of the UN headquarters and accused it of failing to act over the abuse of Israeli women.
Cochav Elkayam Levy of the Davis Institute for International Relations at Hebrew University of Jerusalem said the “deafening silence” over reports of sexual violence raises the question of whether Israeli women are protected by international law.
“When the institutions that are globally mandated to protect women stay silent — not only international law loses meaning, humanity’s shared values lose meaning,” said Levy, a law professor and founder of a commission on Hamas crimes against women and children, according to NBC News.
In a statement Monday, UN Women condemned “the abhorrent attacks by Hamas against Israel” and said it had been “closely following reports of brutal acts of gender-based violence against women in Israel since they first came to light.
“We believe a full investigation is essential, so that perpetrators at all sides can be held accountable and justice can be served,” the agency added.
