It’s been almost two months since the slaughtering of party-goers and farmers in the Gaza corridor, and I am just beginning to collect myself from the shock long enough to wonder why the rest of the world hasn’t noticed that there were mass rapes here. And then it hit me – we haven’t said how many women were raped and murdered, how many were mutilated, how many were just raped, and so forth. So I began to look for information, for specific facts. As a woman who has undergone rape, I found it a more focused subject than the general slaughter. Throughout this time, for instance, there have been testimonies and films – often go-pros of the terrorists themselves. Women gang-raped, women killed in the middle of gang rapes, women mutilated and murdered and raped in front of their children, little girls as well as teen-agers raped.
I saw a lot on film, but how many actual cases were there? I could not find evidence. I wanted to turn to Zaka, the voluntary search and rescue organization which appears wherever there are tragedies, has saved so many lives, and mopped up seas of blood before burials. But when I got to them, it turned out that the speaker for the organization had just suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized. I shouldn’t be surprised – experienced paramedics broke down on television when questioned about what they had seen.
Who else could tell me? There weren’t enough pathologists to take care of the bodies at the party and it has taken all this time and we’re still working on identifying all of them. In fact, we had to import pathologists from abroad to help out putting the pieces back together. After all, when you only have parts of bodies it’s hard to identify them, much less know if they were raped, alive or dead.
And as far as I know nobody’s asking the freed hostages what happened to them, whatever their ages are. They have enough trauma to work through.
I assumed this information will be put together before too long, and the truth will come out. But at the moment I wanted to publish this, nobody seems to be sharing. I myself didn’t talk about a much more civilized rape for fifty odd years.
But as this piece was going to press, on the first of December, the hint of the organization of the materials began to become apparent. Dr. Kochav Alkayam-Levi has quietly established a civil commission in the matter of “Crimes of Hamas against Women and Children” in order to collect information about the carrying out of explicit written instructions of methodical rape, torture, mutilation and murder. The vastness and the volume of the evidence makes the accuracy of the evidence far more complex than a listing of victims can signify. One detail, the existence of bodies whose gender could not be established, may function as a synecdoche of the entire massacre. Alkayam-Levi has not released most of the data, with the idea that the trauma is too great at the present time, and the international denial too widespread for any reasonable analysis.
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P.S.: Until this war, my rule in recording these events was never to reread and never to correct what I’ve declared. But things happen so fast here, and what was considered false becomes true from minute to minute. I have to alter what I wrote yesterday. The UN women yesterday heard the pleas of those who are gathering the facts about October 7, and today heard eyewitnesses of the mass murder and rape and mutilation. It doesn’t bring the hundreds of those young people to life, it isn’t going to bring the hostages back home or ease the horrible trauma so many individuals have endured, it isn’t going to change the situation of the fifty odd orphans who witnessed the murder of their parents, it isn’t going to change the minds of the millions who have been screaming hatred against Israel for wanting to erase the movement that designed this mass murder. It isn’t going to bring back the lives of the Gazans either. But it may give just a bit of peace to all the victims of the stupid war we have been forced into.