Enough of blood and tears- War doesn't determine who's right, only who's left
Israel and Hamas need to find a way to stop the madness before more innocents die for no reason...and rape must never be used as a weapon of war
The level of human suffering is intolerable. It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible.
Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, President, International Committee of the Red Cross
I’ve never done this before, but I need to offer my readers a caution. This post contains some very gruesome and graphic descriptions of rape and desecrations committed upon female victims of 10/7. I do this not to gratuitously upset my readers but to illustrate the brutal, inhumane, and truly vicious nature of this war. This post may not be for you if you are easily offended by such graphic descriptions.
Jack
With the breakdown of the truce between Israel and Hamas and the resumption of the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, I can’t help but think constantly of the words of Bertrand Russell (and I’m paraphrasing):
War doesn’t decide who’s right or wrong, only who’s left.
The Israel Army initially told Palestinian civilians to flee northern Gaza. Now, it has dropped leaflets ordering them to leave southern Gaza. With the Egyptian frontier closed to them, the question’s obvious: Where are the 2.5 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to go? They can’t go to Egypt or stay where they are. Meanwhile, Israel continues its brutal onslaught.
I get it; Israel wants (and deserves) its pound of flesh from Hamas. What happened on 10/7 represents the Jewish state’s 9/11. Women and girls were raped and killed in the most vile and brutal fashion. Men and boys were murdered. The brutality visited upon innocent civilians and noncombatants was unimaginable. Who among us can blame Israel for not wanting to go into Gaza and root out every last terrorist responsible for 10/7? Who among us can blame Israel for wanting to obliterate Hamas?
Were we to be in Israeli shoes, most of us would want to do the same thing. We want to extract our measure of revenge, justice, or whatever word you attach to it.
Israel has the right to exist. It deserves security and safety. Its people should not have to live in mortal fear. If it takes military action to destroy their enemy’s capacity to conduct terrorist activities like 10/7, then so be it.
I believe there is also a huge “HOWEVER” that comes with that statement. Israel must not sink to the level of those it’s trying to eliminate from the face of the Earth. It cannot be seen as killing indiscriminately. It cannot be killing innocent civilians and noncombatants. And it cannot contravene the internationally accepted laws of war.
Israel can argue that Hamas violated virtually every universally accepted law of war, and it would be spot on. Being correct, however, does not provide the Jewish state justification to assume it has carte blanche when it comes to its response. First World countries cannot and must not sink to the level of those who refuse to follow the rules the rest of the civilized world lives by (and, yes, I understand the irony of using “civilized world” in conjunction with “war.”)
Unarmed men, women, and children must not be targeted. Hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings must not be targeted. Yes, urban combat is difficult, but that’s not a compelling reason for the seemingly random shelling of civilian targets of little to no apparent military value.
Is Israel committing war crimes? There’s certainly anecdotal evidence to indicate that it has. There seems little doubt that Hamas committed innumerable war crimes on 10/7, but fighting fire with fire is not a practical or moral response.
Israel must find ways to prosecute its just war without creating civilian casualties. Civilians can’t be written off as “collateral damage.” Nor should schools and hospitals be defined as legitimate targets, regardless of what Hamas may be doing.
Israel must do the hard work of defeating Hamas without also killing innocent civilians.
There’s another side to the brutality, one that should neither be ignored nor minimized. Some of what happened on 10/7 are things I find difficult to imagine human beings doing…and yet it happened. And these things need to be talked about.
The world needs to know that Hamas has used rape and sexual assault on Israeli women as a weapon of war.
Israeli security agencies published video footage Monday from the apparent interrogations of seven Hamas terrorists who were captured following the Palestinian terror group’s October 7 onslaught, in which they admitted they had been ordered to carry out atrocities against Israeli civilians.
In one video released by the Israel Defense Forces, a person whose face is blurred said that gunmen were given instructions to kill everyone they saw, including beheading victims and cutting off their legs.
“The plan was to go from home to home, from room to room, to throw grenades and kill everyone, including women and children,” he said. “Hamas ordered us to crush their heads and cut them off, [and] to cut their legs.”
He also said they were given permission to rape the corpse of a girl.
Some of the things witnessed by survivors of 10/7 are almost too terrible to ponder, especially when considering what some did to ensure their survival.
She had, he says, the face of an angel. Night after night Yoni Saadon, 39, wakes in anguish to the faces of women.
First, that of the young woman hiding next to him under the stage of the Supernova festival where he had been dancing to electronic music as the sun rose on October 7 and Hamas militants opened fire.
“She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,” he said. “I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”
After an hour, he peeked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.
The horror did not end there. Hiding in bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters. “They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.
Saadon, a shift manager in a foundry, told his story to The Sunday Times in a support area set up in Sitria, southeast of Tel Aviv, for survivors of the festival.
I suspect most of us learned about the Holocaust at some point during our education. We’ve learned the number- six million Jews murdered by the Nazis- and we may have seen a few documentaries.
Some have been fortunate to have visited local Holocaust memorials or the National Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC. While those are all excellent and sobering resources that can and should be used to teach succeeding generations about the horrors of the Holocaust, there’s no way to fully and accurately understand the sheer, unmitigated terror of living through that period.
Stories from those who survived 10/7 will be vital for the same reason stories from Holocaust survivors are. We must never forget what those consumed by hatred and anti-Semitism are capable of.
Eight weeks after the attack in which 1,200 were killed and 240 taken hostage, there is mounting evidence of widespread rape on October 7. Israeli police have begun their biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women. “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people,” says Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the investigation.
They have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips, which she says “as a Jewish mother the mind and soul cannot bear”, including “girls whose pelvises were broken they had been raped so much”.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that rape was used as a weapon of war by Hamas, and it was a strategy carried out with devastating effect.
We must never forget that many who were in positions to offer assistance and either refused to believe the stories or declined to provide that assistance initially.
The first indications came on the day itself when Hamas livestreamed some of the horrors it was perpetrating. Footage showed several women stripped of their clothing. One video showed a young woman with bloodstains on the crotch of her underwear.
“We didn’t understand at first,” says Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an expert on international law at Hebrew university of Jerusalem who heads a civilian commission into Hamas crimes against women on October 7. Survivors arriving at hospitals were not asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits for evidence.
However, those tasked with collecting the bodies began reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals.
Rape as a weapon of war was something Israelis hadn’t encountered before. They weren’t programmed to think in those terms; civilized armies don’t fight like that, and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), in their experience, hadn’t encountered anything remotely like that. It’s a brutality beyond conventional human comprehension. Even in writing this, I find it hard to comprehend that human beings could inflict such suffering upon others simply for being who they are.
So when it came time to treat those wounded in the 10/7 attack, rape was the furthest thing from the minds of most Israelis. That would change quickly.
Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, a voluntary religious organisation that collects the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they can be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition, has no doubt about what they saw.
“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said. “No one saw more than us. “It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”
He describes finding two girls’ bodies in a field, both shot in the head, legs apart, one with shorts ripped and shot in the vagina and other with jeans pulled down and bruises on her legs. A father of six, he finds it hard to talk about. “One of my girls is 24, around the same age,” he says. His team are all receiving therapy.
Once the bodies were collected they were taken to the main morgue at the Shura military base to be identified and prepared for burial. Among volunteers in an all-female team to prepare female corpses was Shari, 60, an architect who lives in Jerusalem.
These aren’t hardened combat veterans. These are civilians not accustomed to the work of gathering bodies from battlefields, especially when that battlefield is the sight of a terrorist attack. When it became clear the attackers had been trying “to kill, to burn alive, to rape,” those sights would test the mental makeup of even hardened combat soldiers, much less civilians not used to such environments.
But there was much worse to come once the bodies were gathered and brought to the main morgue.
Working there day and night for two weeks starting the morning after, she describes scenes of unimaginable horror. “This is a huge building but there were literally body bags filling every room and lining corridors floor to ceiling, all oozing liquids.
“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see. They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.
“Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”
Her team had to wait while doctors, dentists and DNA experts worked to identify the bodies before they could then gently put them in white linen burial shrouds. “We are just normal women not doctors, we never expected to see such horrors,” she said.
Surprisingly, the initial reaction to the reports of rapes and sexual assaults that Israeli authorities had so thoroughly documented was silence, even from groups such as UN Women.
Dr. Elkayam-Levy, at first taken aback by the world’s reluctance to acknowledge the shocking degree of rape and sexual torture that had occurred on 10/7, helped to set up a civilian commission investigating sexual crimes committed by Hamas.
They also wanted to use the commission as a database and archive for videos, photos, and witness statements relating to sexual crimes committed by Hamas on 10/7.
Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s hope is that such a database and archive will also be used to raise international awareness.
Elkayam-Levy says these make clear what Hamas was trying to achieve. “They wanted to terrorise us for generations to come and instil in us insecurity in the most basic way, and that’s why they targeted women in this way.
“I’m a feminist,” she adds, “I teach and fight for women’s rights, yet after October 7 I told my husband to get a gun. For me to want a weapon and put it in my house — against everything I believe in and ever believed in — shows what they did to us.”
Israel Defence Forces (IDF) sources claim that Hamas fighters captured in Gaza have told them in interrogations that they were instructed to “dirty” or “whore” the women. They also showed The Sunday Times photographs and footage not previously seen and too graphic to publish.
Some have questioned the accounts because of the IDF use of propaganda and the fact no victims have come forward. But Dr Dvora Baumann, director of the Bat Ami Centre for Victims of Sexual Abuse at Hadassah hospital, points out: “Usually people who are sexually abused don’t report it for a long time because it is so hard to talk about and they worry they will be judged. We have plenty of other evidence. I’ve been in this field over 20 years and I have never heard such horrific things.”
Those questioning the accounts of sexual crimes on 10/7 appear to believe that, like any other crimes, victims will come forward and give accounts of what they suffered. But, as Dr. Baumann stated, victims of sexual abuse are often far less likely to come forward immediately or at all in some cases. Whether out of shame and embarrassment or fear of being shunned as “damaged goods,” sexual abuse victims are often reluctant to come forward and speak openly about what was done to them.
In more Conservative parts of Jewish society, where sex is still spoken of in hushed tones, rape and sexual abuse are not subjects spoken of openly. There may be a stigma attached to being sexually assaulted or raped, and that stigma may not be easily overcome. If a woman is concerned about being viewed as “damaged goods” or the bearer of a scarlet letter, it’s possible that she may not be likely to come forward.
One can understand why Israel may be so heartily seeking vengeance, much like America did after 9/11. The problem, though, is one of proportionality; how much is enough? When does enough become too much? When does your drive for vengeance turn you into the villain?
I don’t have the answers to those questions. I’m not smart enough to weigh the philosophical pros and cons and determine a fair balance, not when lives and generations-long hatreds are in the balance.
What I do know is that at some point, Israel will have to recognize that it can’t bomb its way to peace, not when one in every ten buildings in northern Gaza has been damaged. In a place that was desperately poor to begin with, how do you put those pieces back together? Where do Palestinian civilians go to get their homes, lives, and livelihoods back?
I support Israel. I support Palestine. I’m on Team Humanity. I believe there’s a solution out there somewhere that will be fair and provide security for everyone concerned.
Do I know what that solution is? Hell, no, I don’t. I may be many things, but I’m not a Nobel Peace Prize-winning diplomat. But there are good and well-meaning people out there willing to work for peace in whatever form and format that might assume.
To quote the late Yitzhak Rabin: “Enough of blood and tears.” More bodies and more destruction won’t bring this war any closer to a peaceful resolution.
At the very least, though, those who’ve used rape and sexual assault as a weapon of war must be brought to justice…which is more than they granted their victims.
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The refusal of either side to deal with the facts on the ground, in the name of some idealized fantasy of "Justice" has rendered the entire situation untenable.
I'm now seeing posts that are making the claim that the 10/07 attacks were "really" carefully directed at military targets and personnel, that the rapes and murders didn't "really" happen, etc. Sandy Hook denial levels of BS, backed my "evidence" that is magically never provided.
Very well expressed sentiments here, Jack Cluth. The horror that Hamas inflicted on 10/7, particularly to women, is monstrous. Clearly, what they did is orders of magnitude worse than when Israel unintentionally kills civilians in their quest to destroy Hamas. Those on the the Left equating the two are either that benighted to elide the difference, or are just intellectually dishonest. That said, as you so appreciably noted, what Israel has been doing has created it's own monstrous legacy, due to the sheer number of dead and the physical destruction of much of Gaza. Like you, I want it to stop. There has to be a way to strike out Hamas and minimize harm to civilian lives. At this point, Israel needs to play the long game with Hamas. They should cease fire, secure their border with Gaza, restart peace negotiations with Saudi Arabia, collect intelligence on Hamas' leadership, and have Mossad take them out surgically, whether within Gaza, or abroad. They need to be of two minds; with one mind strategizing to eliminate Hamas leadership, with the other working feverishly for a diplomatic solution. Like you, I'm a supporter of the existence of a Jewish state. In that sense, in the formation of the extreme Left I'm a Zionist; good. I've no problem being considered as such, because the history of Jews is rife with episodes of violence against them spanning millennia. If any group of people require a nation of their own for their safety it's Jews. But regular Palestinians also deserve their own land and the means of self determination. Neither Jews or Palestinians are going anywhere in that place, so pragmatism demands that they compromise enough so that both can exist there in peace.