An Israeli nonprofit released the findings of a two-year investigation into sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, drawing on interviews with more than 430 survivors and witnesses and thousands of images to produce what it calls evidence of the "widespread weaponization of sexual terror" during the massacre that left nearly 2,000 dead in Israel.
The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children compiled testimony from the Nova music festival, from Israeli kibbutzim overrun that morning, and from hostages held for months in tunnels and apartments across Gaza. The accounts, reported by the New York Post, describe a pattern of deliberate, organized sexual cruelty, not incidental violence in the fog of combat, but acts carried out methodically and, according to one survivor, with open enjoyment.
That distinction matters. It matters because international institutions spent months hedging on whether sexual violence occurred at all. It matters because campus activists in the United States and Europe have spent two years treating the massacre as a debatable footnote. And it matters because the people who survived it are still living with what was done to them.
One survivor of the Nova festival massacre told the commission what he heard that day:
"There was laughter. There were jokes. They were passing them from one to another. It wasn't, it was done for fun. They were celebrating there. They were really, really celebrating with this."
The same survivor described what followed in terms that resist any sanitizing:
"I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams, screams you have never heard anywhere. It's between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die."
He said that after the attackers finished, one told another to proceed, "Ta'al," meaning roughly "go ahead" or "to the next one." Then: "And after they finished, they shot her."
Another witness at Nova, according to the report, saw two Hamas fighters attack a woman they had caught near a car. The report states that the witness said "she was fighting back and not allowing them to strip her. They threw her on the ground and one of the fighters took a shovel and beheaded her, and her head rolled along the ground."
The commission's findings extended beyond eyewitness testimony. The report described what was found on the bodies of female victims across multiple sites:
"Female bodies were found naked or partially naked, in some cases with aluminum cans, grenades, nails, blunt objects, rods, household tools and spike-like instruments, inserted into genitals and other parts of the body, as well as with multiple gunshot wounds, cutting injuries and targeted burning in genitalia and breasts, or the face."
Bodies that arrived at morgues, the report continued, showed "broken pelvises and/or legs, bloodied underwear, gunshot wounds to the genitalia and other intimate areas, and other signs of violence to their stomachs or groins."
One person who searched the Be'eri kibbutz on Oct. 9, two days after the attack, described entering a room and finding what remained:
"When we went inside, there was a hospital bed and a body... I understood that it was a woman. In the room were knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers, tools, tools from the household. All of those were embedded in the body. The body was completely mutilated."
The report noted that "some of these bodies displayed visible signs of torture, including burning, mutilated genitals, breasts and faces." Families had been pulled from bed and raped in their own kibbutz homes. Similar scenes of sexual abuse were documented across multiple communities.
The violence was not limited to women. A male survivor at the Nova festival described sustained abuse in captivity. His account makes clear that the sexual cruelty Hamas inflicted was not confined to one gender or one moment of chaos.
"We went through abuse of every kind. They spat in our faces, humiliated us, said things about Jews. They injured my genitalia. I was beaten with a belt, they also laughed at me."
He described attackers who "genuinely enjoyed it", who "laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll." He said there were "no boundaries. I was completely naked. They did whatever they wanted to me." Today, he said, "I shower a thousand times a day, and I still feel disgust and filth. I never returned to myself physically."
The question of hostages and their treatment in captivity has been a persistent element of the broader conflict. Amit Soussana, a hostage who was raped by her captor, described the particular psychological torment of being unable to escape after the assault:
"In a 'normal case' after a sexual assault, you go home. You shower. You cry. But there, you have to... you're still there. You can't shower. You can't cry. Crying is forbidden. And, there's no one to comfort you. You have to face it all alone. And not only that, you also have to be nice to him."
The commission's findings gain additional weight from the testimony of former hostages who have spoken publicly about who held them in Gaza. Former hostage Tal Shoham, who endured 505 days in captivity before being released in February 2025, told the Washington Free Beacon that his captors were not all trained militants.
"One of the guards was a first-grade teacher, another was a lecturer at a university, and another was a doctor. These are normal people becoming terrorists."
Shoham described his captors as "so brainwashed and full of hate." His account, and additional reporting that ordinary Gazans, including teenagers, women, children, and doctors, participated in abducting, holding, and mistreating hostages, challenges any framing that treats Oct. 7 as the work of a small armed faction operating without broader civilian complicity.
The involvement of professionals and civilians in hostage abuse raises uncomfortable questions for the international community. It is harder to dismiss the violence as the work of a rogue militia when a first-grade teacher is standing guard.
The commission spent two years building this record. Two years of interviews, forensic review, and documentation. That timeline itself tells a story, not about the difficulty of the investigation, but about the institutional reluctance to confront what happened.
For months after Oct. 7, major international bodies hesitated to acknowledge the sexual violence. UN Women took weeks to issue a statement. Activist groups that had built entire platforms around the slogan "believe women" went quiet. On American campuses, faculty members have been documented fueling antisemitism rather than confronting the documented atrocities committed against Israeli civilians.
The selective outrage extends into media and political circles. Some of the same voices that demanded accountability for every allegation during the #MeToo era have treated the mass sexual violence of Oct. 7 as inconvenient to their preferred narrative about the conflict. The commission's report makes that evasion harder to sustain.
Meanwhile, the broader cultural environment around the conflict has only grown more toxic. Political figures have aligned themselves with media personalities whose rhetoric around Israel and terrorism raises serious questions about the normalization of extremism in mainstream discourse.
The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children has now placed more than 430 testimonies and thousands of images into the public record. The accounts describe not isolated acts of wartime violence but a systematic campaign of sexual terror, carried out with tools gathered from kitchen drawers, with laughter, with the participation of people who held ordinary jobs the day before.
The report found that Hamas weaponized sexual violence across the Nova festival, across kibbutzim, and in the months of captivity that followed in Gaza. The evidence is not ambiguous. The testimony is not vague. The forensic findings are not open to gentle interpretation.
One male survivor put it plainly: "One of them took out a knife and started laughing about different things. I told him I was sorry and begged him to leave me alone. I don't know what they took before they did this, they were like animals."
There were several of them, he said. "And they genuinely enjoyed it."
The people who looked away from this, the institutions, the activists, the academics who found every reason to hedge, delay, or change the subject, owe an accounting. Not to opinion writers or political opponents. To the survivors who carried this testimony for two years while the world debated whether to believe them.
When the evidence is this clear and the silence lasts this long, the silence is the indictment.