‘We know most of the women who were raped and sexually assaulted were also murdered.’
By World Israel News Staff
Israeli police investigators are currently involved in a probe to gather evidence for several rape cases connected to the Hamas attacks on October 7th.
The process is expected to be complex and will last from between six to eight months.
Major news outlets, including Fox News, CNN and France 24 focused on the ongoing investigation by the Israel police force, Lahav 433, into severe sexual crimes perpetrated by Hamas terrorists during the October 7th massacre.
CNN’s Jake Tapper featured an in-depth story that focused on interviews with police, paramedics and witness testimonies.
A similar story was seen on FoxNews. France24 English also released a detailed segment.
Although the police admit this isn’t a traditional rape investigation, David Katz who heads cyber crime at Lahav 433, the Israel Police’s criminal investigation division said at a press conference on Tuesday, “We have multiple witnesses for several cases” of sex crimes on October 7.
“We have no living victims who said ‘we have been raped,” said Katz, however, physical evidence from corpses shows clear signs of sexual assault and mutilation. In addition. Lahav 433 has gathered evidence from surveillance videos, witness accounts, and confessions from captured terrorists.
David Katz announced the Lahav 433 has 1,000 statements and 60,000 video clips with possible evidence of sexual violations. Although there are eyewitness accounts of rape, it’s uncertain whether any of the sexual assault victims themselves survived.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a human rights law expert at Hebrew University, has established a commission to document evidence of the atrocities. She told CNN, “We’ll never know everything that has happened to them. We know most of the women who were raped and sexually assaulted were also murdered.”
Rape kits have to be utilized within 48 hours, and given the combat conditions at the scene following October 7th, it wasn’t possible to gather information in this way. However, those who dealt with corpses, including Zaka, reported that many bodies showed signs of sexual assault.
Many of the female corpses had their underwear pulled down around their thighs and ankles. Others had a suspiciously large amount of blood in their underwear. Many corpses showed signs of genital mutilation, and in some cases, gunshot wounds in the private parts. This was also seen in some male corpses.
The police also screened a segment featuring testimony from a musical festival survivor known as Witness S.
“He is here raping her,” S. said on a video recording, “and then they pass her on to another person…she stood on her feet, she was bleeding from her back…one of the terrorists “slices her breast and throws it on the road, and they’re playing with it.”
CNN interviewed a paramedic from the elite 669 Special Tactics Unit recalls going from house to house at Kibbutz Be’eri and seeing one teenage girl on the bed and another on the floor.
“Her pants are pulled down toward her knees and there’s a bullet wound on the back side of her neck near her head,” he said. “There’s a puddle of blood around her head and there’s remains of semen on the lower part of her back.” The other girl was also badly beaten with a bullet in her head.
Rami Shmuel, organizer of the Nova music festival, described the harrowing scene, including many women with no clothes remaining on their bodies.
“Their legs were spread out and some of them were butchered,” he told CNN.
There are likely to be similar testimonies in addition to those already gathered by the police, but even 5 weeks on, “many of the victims who survived the massacres are not ready to speak,” said Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai.