The body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs”. In another house, a person’s genitals were so mutilated that “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman”.

Simcha Greinman, a volunteer who helped collect the remains of victims of the Hamas-led October 7 assault on Israel, took long pauses as he spoke those words on Monday at an event at the UN.

“Horrific things I saw with my own eyes,” he said, “and I felt with my own hands.”

Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli military reserve unit tasked with preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial, said her team saw several who were killed on October 7. They “were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast”, Mendes said. Others had mutilated faces or multiple gunshots to their heads.

Since the October 7 attack, during which more than 1,200 people were killed and some 240 people were kidnapped, Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence — rape and sexual mutilation — particularly against women.

Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny from human rights groups, or the news media, amid the larger war between Israel and Hamas — and until a few days ago, they had not been specifically mentioned or condemned by UN Women, the UN women’s rights agency, which has regularly spoken out about the plight of Palestinian women and girls.

Israelis and many Jews around the world say they feel abandoned by an international social justice community — women’s groups, human rights groups, and liberal celebrities, among others — whose causes they have supported in crises around the world.

On Monday, some 800 people, including women’s activists and diplomats representing about 40 countries, crowded into a chamber at UN headquarters in New York for a presentation laying out the evidence of large-scale sexual violence, with testimony from witnesses like Mendes and Greinman.

“Silence is complicity,” Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive, told those assembled. She, along with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, was among the event’s primary organisers. “On October 7, Hamas brutally murdered 1,200 souls and in some cases, they first raped their victims,” Sandberg added. “We know this from eyewitnesses, we know this from combat paramedics, we would know this from some victims if more had been allowed to live.”

Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sex crimes, which it said would violate Islamic principles.

But ample evidence has been collected, like the bodies of women found partially or fully naked, women with their pelvic bones broken, the accounts of medical examiners and first responders, videos taken by Hamas fighters themselves, and even a few firsthand witnesses like a woman, in a video made public last month by police officials, who said she had watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilate her and then shoot her in the head. Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said in an interview that it had documented “violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen”, on October 7, against women and some men. “I am talking about dozens.”

Outside, hundreds of protesters accused the UN of a double standard when it comes to sexual violence. Some chanted: “Me too, unless you are a Jew.”

The UN, and UN Women in particular, have become a primary focus — though hardly the only one — of mounting anger for their silence. Secretary-General António Guterres immediately condemned the Hamas massacre, but not until late November did he issue a statement that the related sex crimes specifically must be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted”.

Dr Cochav Elkayam Levy, an Israeli law professor and founder of a commission on October 7 crimes against women and children, said that on November 1, she sent a letter to UN Women, signed by dozens of scholars, calling for an “urgent and unequivocal condemnation of the massacre committed by Hamas”, including the use of rape as a tool of war. “They didn’t even respond,” she said.

Erdan, the Israeli ambassador, said he sent two letters about the use of rape by Hamas militants, appended with photographs of victims’ bodies, to Sima Sami Bahous, the executive director of UN Women.

“I got no response whatsoever,” said Erdan, “not even, ‘We received your letter.’” On November 25, UN Women first addressed the issue on social media, saying it was “alarmed by reports of gender-based violence on October 7”, but the post did not mention Hamas.

In a statement on Monday, UN Women condemned “the abhorrent attacks by Hamas against Israel” and said it had been “closely following reports of brutal acts of gender-based violence against women in Israel since they first came to light”.

The agency added, “We believe a full investigation is essential so that perpetrators
at all sides can be held accountable and justice can be served.”

Last week, a bipartisan group of more than 80 members of Congress released a letter calling the agency’s response “woefully unsatisfactory and consistent with the UN’s long-standing bias against Israel”.

Since the start of the war, UN Women has focused its advocacy on bringing attention and humanitarian relief to girls and women in the Gaza Strip, and on pushing for a ceasefire as Israeli airstrikes resulted in thousands of Palestinian casualties.

Several supporters of Israel in Congress expressed outrage at the silence from international organisations. “I’ve been internally raging for about two months,” said Representative Lois Frankel.

New York Times News Service