In my explainer, I examine how the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children tried to document one of the most difficult and painful questions surrounding the Hamas-led October 7 attack: how to investigate sexual violence when many victims were murdered, crime scenes were chaotic, and much of the conventional forensic record was never collected or could not be preserved.
The 300-page report, Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled, argues that sexual and gender-based violence during the attack and against hostages in Gaza was not incidental, but part of a wider pattern of terror directed at individuals, families, communities, and Israeli society. Led by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the Civil Commission drew on legal scholars, international jurists, researchers, archivists, trauma experts, and human rights specialists.
The explainer walks readers through the commission’s evidence base: more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, more than 1,800 hours of visual analysis, and more than 430 interviews, testimonies, and meetings with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, first responders, experts, and victims’ relatives. It explains how investigators sought corroboration across testimony, video, body-recovery accounts, geography, timing, and repeated patterns of violence.
The report identifies 13 recurring forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, forced nudity, mutilation, sexual abuse after death, public display or parading of victims, threats of forced marriage, and sexual violence against boys and men. It also treats hostage captivity as part of the same continuum of alleged crimes, citing accounts of sexual humiliation, threats, coercion, abuse, and sexualized torture.
The explainer also addresses the report’s legal claims, including possible war crimes, crimes against humanity, and, if specific intent were proved, genocidal acts. It places the report alongside international precedents from Rwanda, Bosnia, the ISIS campaign against the Yazidis, Ukraine, and UN Security Council Resolution 1820.
Read the full explainer because I go beyond the findings themselves to show how the commission built its case, where its limits lie, and why the report frames sexual violence not as a footnote to October 7, but as part of how the attack was carried out, experienced, and may eventually be prosecuted.
