Tel Aviv [Israel], January 23 (ANI/TPS): “There will be some difficult things to digest here, so take a deep breath.” The Lobby for Victims of Sexual and Gender Violence, a caucus of Israeli Knesset members, opened Tuesday’s meeting with a trigger warning, accompanied by continuous weeping among the participants.
“I myself don’t want to believe what happened,” says Haim Otmazgin, a ZAKA volunteer who was in charge of a team rescuing bodies from the scene of the massacre at the Nova music festival after the October 7 massacre. “When I hear someone questioning what happened there, I stand up and say, my eyes have seen it, and it’s all on my cell phone.”
His harsh descriptions of the massacre scene are paramount to the goal of the caucus — to spread the awareness of Hamas’ brutal sexual violence that day.
“My eyes saw the women stripped of their clothes; you can see someone struggled with them to undress them the way we found them in,” he recalled.
Otmazgin described the way his team was working like a machine, in order to rescue as many bodies as fast as possible while the army was still fighting terrorists close to them and there was a threat of bodies being kidnapped to Gaza.
“Another woman is cuffed, another one is stripped, another one has her body parts cut off. It’s like a series of pictures being repeated again and again. We saw the same things at Reim and later in kibbutzim.”
“In a house at a kibbutz we found a mother with the handcuffs on her hands and next to her daughter in a safe room. In another room next to it, we found a young girl, on the bed, clothes rolled up, shot in the head and her throat split. Her pants rolled down, without underwear on her. Instances like these are too many, and no, we don’t have the video footage to see what was done to these women, but the pictures we saw tell a story that cannot be interpreted in any other way.”
One released hostage, Chen Goldstein Almog expressed her concern for the girls in captivity.
“There are girls there who have not had their periods for some time, perhaps because of the conditions of captivity, and this is the thought that crosses our minds, that maybe at least this way they will not get pregnant while they might be raped in captivity.”
Aviva Siegal, who was released during a temporary ceasefire in November, told lawmakers it wasn’t easy for her to attend, but felt an obligation.
“The terrorists bring doll clothes, inappropriate attire for those girls, as they turn them into dolls on a string, they do whatever they want whenever they want to them. And it must be said that the boys also go through what the girls go through. They don’t get pregnant but they are also a puppet on a string. There was not a minute that we were not abused in every possible way and those girls are still there in survival,” she recalled as people in the audience sobbed.
“My heart is still there, and it explodes,” she added. ” I can’t understand that the world is silent.”
As time passed and international women’s organizations ignored or denied the sexual abuse Israeli women suffered, the government formed an independent civil commission tasked with documenting the sexual violence, raising awareness and pursuing justice for the victims.
Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a law professor chairing the commission told lawmakers, “In light of the international silence, we understand that we have a historic task. The failure of the international organizations, their silence that causes our demonization in the world, if international community is not willing to speak up, we will do it for ourselves.”
The true scope of the rapes may never be known, because most of the victims and witnesses were killed. At least 1,200 people were massacred in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on Oct. 7. Several female hostages released during a November ceasefire have already described being sexually abused while in captivity.
“As we sit here, there is a girl who is stuck in a tunnel and being raped, and it should be said!” said Shir Siegel, sitting besides her mother, Aviva. “Enough talking about it politely while drinking water. Everyone in the world should think about it. You should go to bed like it is your daughter and ask yourself if you did enough for them today.”
MK Tsega Melaku, described some of the propaganda that prompted her to become a co-founder of the caucus.
“There is a clip of a man protesting in Britain, claiming there could be no sexual violence on behalf of Hamas terrorists as they are Muslims and Islam prohibits sex outside of marriage. That’s how much propaganda we see,” the Likud lawmaker said. “But is there anyone to counter that? Even some world leaders’ wives who deny it happened. Where are the women organizations?” (ANI/TPS)
