There are reports one reads for information, and there are reports one reads because looking away would be a moral failure.

Silenced No More, the newly released report of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, is the second kind. It is 300 pages of documentation, testimony, legal analysis, and unbearable evidence of sexual and gender based violence committed on October 7th and against hostages in captivity. The report draws on more than 430 interviews, testimonies, and meetings, more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, and over 1,800 cumulative hours of visual analysis. It identifies thirteen recurring patterns of sexual and gender based violence across multiple locations and concludes that these crimes were not isolated, but systematic, premeditated, widespread, and integral to the attacks and their aftermath.

For decades, we have understood sexual violence in conflict as something hidden, buried beneath shame, fear, stigma, trauma, death, and silence. Survivors are threatened or disbelieved. Bodies disappear. Families are left with fragments. Much of the global struggle against sexual violence has therefore been a struggle to make the hidden visible, to bring what happened in the dark into the moral light and legal record of humanity.

But October 7th forced us to confront something else.

This was sexual violence meant to be seen.

The victims, survivors, and hostages of October 7th were women, men, children, babies, families, Israelis, foreign nationals, Jews and non Jews. The report notes victims from 52 nationalities and documents sexual and gender based violence against women, girls,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)