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The Silence over Hamas' Mass Rapes Is a Betrayal of All Women

(Newsweek) First Lady of the State of Israel Michal Herzog - At the President of Israel's Residence in Jerusalem, we are preparing for the day the UN General Assembly has designated the International Day for the Prevention of Violence against Women, which is observed every Nov. 25. Every year, I host victims, civil-society leaders, activists, and scholars committed to women's rights and safety. But this year will be different. The Hamas massacre on Oct. 7 deeply impacted our visceral understanding of the cruelty of gender-based sexual violence - and our faith in the international organizations that claim to care about women. At the Nova music festival, witnesses hiding in the bushes saw terrorists gang-rape, then murder and mutilate women. A Hamas video from a kibbutz shows terrorists torturing a pregnant woman and removing her fetus. Our forensic scientists have found bodies of women and girls raped with such violence that their pelvic bones were broken. Confessions of captured terrorists makes abundantly clear that mass rape was a premeditated part of Hamas' plan. International organizations like UN Women exist to protect women from such crimes, thus, our second shock: The inconceivable and unforgivable silence of these organizations when faced with the rape and murder of Israeli women. It is not that condemnations of gender-based violence by Hamas have been weak or insufficient - there have been none at all. The silence of international human rights organizations, and the unwillingness to believe Israeli women in the face of overwhelming evidence, has been devastating.
2023-11-24 00:00:00
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