The weaponization of crimes against women

During the early waves of the COVID pandemic, Ethiopia and Tigray were embroiled in a brutal civil war. The mass rape, torture, and murder of women and girls happened then, and continues to happen now, well after a “peace” was reached in 2022. In 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, gruesome accounts of women gang-raped as an act of ethnic humiliation joined with the mass murder of civilians in Bucha, and the ongoing kidnapping of children into Russia and Belarus.

And on October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, killing over 800 civilians and 400 military personnel while it and other armed groups kidnapped some 250 hostages, the possibility of rape was discussed from day one. That first terrible weekend, suggestive footage became the springboard for grand claims on social media, which spiraled well beyond all concrete evidence at the time. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referenced rape in his speech, as did US President Joe Biden and other world officials, but the dissonance between online speculation and what had as of yet been secured as proof also immediately became the foundation for a countercurrent of denialism, too.

On October 10, the UN opened a war crimes commission, the same as they do for every other major conflict. But there, a great deal of early momentum on crimes against women was lost. This is because, as the Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva explained later that month to Reuters, its government did not trust the UN Commission, on account of “pre-existing biased prejudices against Israel”, and would not cooperate with it.

This grievance stems from the country’s refusal to accept the UN Commission on war crimes launched in May 2021, after a two-week bout of violence sparked in part by Israeli police raiding the Al-Aqsa Mosque, then blocking access to worshippers during Ramadan, and by the Israeli Supreme Court ruling on an eviction of Palestinian residents considered by many to be in violation of international law.

Israel is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court, and does not accept aspects of the Geneva Convention that address the responsibility of an occupying force to local residents. Israel does not see itself as an occupying force in Palestinian territories, but rather as the region’s ancestral sovereign authority, so it will never be party to a UN investigation that would also hold far-right governments like Netanyahu’s to account for his aggressive settlement policies and any wartime actions in those areas.

READ: Moral war, a contradiction of terms

Unfortunately, this also means that critical war crimes investigation work was delayed, irreparably damaged, and thrown to the cesspit of propaganda wars.

As the year closes out, we’re receiving another round of news about war crimes involving women on October 7. But what these vivid stories also reveal is how little care was put into properly recording evidence of atrocity early on. There will now always be a level of abstraction, hearsay, and suspicion shrouding the full truth of events that day.

In part, this is because even when outrage about sexual attacks on women and girls first circulate, they tend to matter only insofar as they can be leveraged for immediate retaliatory violence… but not enough to be documented, as well, with the respect each victim deserves. Just as with the early, widespread rumor of 40 beheaded babies in Kfar Aza, early speculation about mass rape stoked fury and strengthened resolve at the outset of a brutal war that has since seen over 21,000 people killed in Gaza, well over 80% of Gaza internally displaced in a humanitarian quagmire, and Israel and the US swept into a war on multiple fronts that shows few signs of slowing early in 2024.

READ: The UN’s failed resolution, and the problem of power in war

The struggle to speak properly for the victims has been a nightmare ever since.

The weaponization of women

A common strategy in women’s rights activism, to get more men on board with respecting the gravity of sexual assault, was once to encourage them to imagine the victim as somebody’s mother, sister, daughter, or wife. This framing received significant criticism, though, because it sidelines the fact that women are “somebodies”, too, or should be. As idealists argue, the importance of harm done to women should not be contingent on the idea that they might “matter” or “belong” to someone else. As pragmatists rebut, though: this is the world we live in. For many, this might be the only way to get them to take rape seriously.

The possibility of rape also features complexly in histories of mass violence. Many people who might look the other way when sexual abuse happens at home, at church, or in other local institutions, suddenly see the protection of women as important when it offers an excuse to slaughter neighbouring Indigenous villages, lynch a Black man or go on a shooting spree, or pathologize people with different sexual orientations. In these matters, white women also have a nasty history of fabricating violent interactions with racialized minorities: out of racism, or in some disturbed cases for attention. The modern phenomenon of the “Karen”, as a white woman with outsized concern about BIPOC members in their communities, is only a slightly milder version of the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old lynched in 1955, whose false accuser died just this year.

Against this ugly backdrop of complex human behaviour, we still have the very real phenomenon of sexual violence as a routine part of war. But almost immediately, that sexual violence is also winnowed in news cycles to just the women and children. In the case of October 7, as forensics eventually disclosed, one prominent form of violence was the desecration of genitalia: male and female alike, with the numbers for this site of sexual violence grouped together. But this, and other possible acts of sexual violence toward men and boys, does not figure significantly in how we leverage rape for civic fury in war. Do they matter any less? Do male victims not deserve the same respect for their trauma?

The problem is that talking too much about the sexual violation of male bodies can demoralize more than aid, when trying to drive a military force forward. It’s easy to think of a war campaign as retaliatory violence “for my sisters”. It’s harder to imagine going into combat when one’s own genitalia and sexual integrity are also seen as on the line.

As the idealists might say: this isn’t fair; all acts of sexual violence matter.

As the pragmatists might say: yes, but this is the world we live in. Violence against women is simply more “useful” for everyone involved.

Excuses for the investigative mess

A December 28 article by The New York Times summarizes the current state of evidence for sexual assault on October 7. It also offers excuses for the lack of more concrete evidence, which speaks to how little consideration was given to this war crime by local authorities at the outset. Two of the most glaring come from the claim that Jewish funeral customs required the bodies to be buried quickly, so no proper testing could be done, and also that early responders regret in hindsight that they did away with evidence and didn’t take photos at the time, out of “respect”:

The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.

…

Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.

Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.

“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”

“‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”, The New York Times, December 28

It is certainly true that Jewish funeral customs require a swift burial so that mourners can sit Shiva and start their official period of mourning. It is also true that Israel’s hardworking forensics team had some 959 body bags a week or so after October 7, and in the course of its work took careful note of the stories of the dead as they identified them. Although they later reported signs of sexual violence (a broad term used here to cover everything from assault in life to desecration of sexual organs in death), evidence was not made readily available to outside sources for third-party analysis: quite possibly, due to government orders pertaining to its own political battle with external groups.

It’s also not surprising that the volunteer workers, particularly from ZAKA, did not take better care of their crime scenes. As noted in “Disembodied grief, and the challenge of remembrance“, emergency rescue volunteers had to be trained on-the-go in corpse removal processes, and have on many occasions repeated or walked back hearsay in lieu of direct testimony about what they saw. This is less a “conspiracy” and more a result of the immense trauma they experienced while sifting through so many bodies, trying to make sense of what they saw, touched, and smelled, even without the appropriate training to rule on causality. Many made on-the-spot forensic assessments about an order of events, or origin of certain injuries, that even the forensic team lead, Dr. Chen Kugel, emphatically stressed that he could not make without further analysis in a lab setting.

But another part of their regret is striking, for in this article they talk about how “respect” for the dead kept them from taking photos of the scenes before they significantly tampered with them, and lost key evidence. ZAKA is an ultra-Orthodox group, and such religious extremists have posed a significant challenge for Israeli record-keeping and remembrance in the past. Their newspapers have a policy of hiding the faces of women: a practice that has included the documentation of Holocaust atrocity. Any outfit with a mandate not to take photos of a crime scene is an impediment to a proper war crimes inquiry.

In subsequent weeks, another form of disrespect revealed itself in the heartbreaking news that female IDF spotters had sent warnings up the chain about Hamas planning a significant attack, only to be dismissed by their commanding officers. The idea of an all-female surveillance force that tried to sound the alarm before disaster hit adds another level of pain to the sudden “respect” for women claimed once they’d been reduced to victims: most who cannot speak for themselves about the atrocities they endured, either in voice or through their bodies, thanks to further choices made by men around them.

By this juncture, though, the local investigation was also mired in propaganda politics. Two key principles were at play by late October. It was then, while the world was bracing for Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza at any day or hour, that Shin Bet and Israeli police published confessions of sexual atrocity by an unnamed, blurred member of Hamas, who further readily agreed that Hamas were “animals”, no better than ISIS.

The first propaganda principle is the practice of feeding your enemy enough rope to hang itself: sharing breadcrumbs that invite alternative interpretations (in this case, around the anonymized nature of the attacker, and the possibility of confession extracted by torture), so skeptics can “out” themselves and face criticism when fuller details emerge later.

The second is deflection. What does it matter if your internal investigation is a mess, if you can keep media attention on global response instead?

By early November, Israeli women’s groups and local news media like Ynet (in Hebrew) and The Times of Israel (in English) were sounding the alarm about the profound and irreparable losses in early data collection. Some work with international investigations was then noted, but only with respect to Israel delivering its internal findings to the Hague. The government also criticized Israeli action groups for expressing demoralizing concern about the state of its internal investigation. Families of the dead victims thus found themselves joined with families of the hostages, in strongly condemning Netanyahu throughout this war for deprioritizing their losses in the middle of his military objectives.

Around that time, Israeli police also released shocking witness testimony. In the earliest iteration of its November 8 report, Haaretz claimed that there were multiple witnesses to a sordid case of a woman raped and mutilated, but in the article the second witness said that he was relaying what the first witness had reported to him, from their shared hiding spot. The piece also noted that only in the last few days had the first witness stepped forward to talk to police at all, highlighting a grievous delay in collecting witness statements.

In the latest New York Times piece, it’s possible that the two people referenced above are Sapir (last name withheld) and Yura Karol, who were hiding in the same spot on October 7. In this later account, Sapir describes seeing five women brutally raped, one with her breast cut off, one mutilated with a box cutter, and three other women’s heads carried around. Karol says he saw one of the rapes firsthand, too. Unfortunately, the time between reports, and related gaps and inconsistencies in details, do more to exacerbate doubts among armchair analysts than serve the victims of these crimes.

The problem is that such “doubts” can also be useful for a government at war, by fortifying an internal sense of the world not caring what happened to Israeli civilians.

On December 1, after months of broader expressions of horror and a stronger focus on alleviating the active humanitarian nightmare for women and children in Gaza, UN Women released a statement expressly naming Hamas, and again reiterating the importance of supporting the UN Commission into local sexual violence, which was launched soon after October 7. Netanyahu then leveraged this late explicit statement to shame the international community, demanding to know “Where the hell are you?” on sexual war crimes… that his own government did not grant the commission access to investigate right away.

A wilful descent into propaganda

To be sure, many international groups fell hard for the propaganda from both sides: the express denial by Hamas of any such war crimes, and also the strategic and spaced-out release of details by Israeli defense organizations, which serve to sow a level of data uncertainty that can then be used to undermine a news outfit or world leader’s credibility later on. (This is a useful maneuver when you know you’re fighting a battle with most of the world against you. No government at war ever owes its citizens truth at cost to “victory”.)

In mid-November, a Canadian women’s center criticized the dissemination of “unverified” accounts of rape, and sparked a significant international row over the denial of violence against women. Here, violence against women was pitted against violence against women. The center’s argument was that the invocation of “unverified” rape was being weaponized to shore up support for ongoing actions in Gaza, which have now cost at least 14,000 women and children’s lives since October 7. Nevertheless, it was read by many as a profound site of hypocrisy, when most sexual crimes against women lack the formal verification necessary to yield proper recourse under the law.

Both can be true.

In war, violence against women is weaponized in many ways.

What happened to women and girls, along with men and boys, on October 7 will never be fully known now, and not just because so many were brutally murdered by Hamas and other armed forces that broke into Israel that day.

The victims of these atrocities deserved a different kind of respect, from day one. If a country is so committed to using the rape of “its” women as a rallying cry for retaliatory violence, let it at least permit investigative teams with the field training, resources, and lack of religious extremism necessary to document war crimes enter and provide families of the victims and other witnesses the full forensic attention they deserve.

It is now too late for most of the victims of October 7.

May their memory be a call to action, for every war crime still to come.