Norman Finkelstein examines a report recently published by an Israeli “Civil Commission” headed by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy Silenced No More—Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity.
Norman Finkelstein is is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. His newest book, Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High has just appeared
Cross-posted from Norman’s Substack
The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.
The masses more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood would never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation of others.
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
On 12 May 2026, an Israeli “Civil Commission” headed by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy published Silenced No More—Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity.1 The nearly three-hundred-page, single-spaced document studded with more than 1,100 multi-referenced footnotes was widely touted as “the most comprehensive report to date” documenting Hamas’s sexual violence.2 It was packaged with effusive praise for its evidentiary rigor from the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, and Rahm Emanuel.3 The Report purported to present a “comprehensive independent evidentiary record” that demonstrated “sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7th attacks and their aftermath.”4 In fact, the Report didn’t contain a shred of credible evidence that Hamas5 systematically committed sexual violence on 7 October 0or against Israeli hostages. On the contrary, if one accepts its central premises, the Report constituted the most compelling proof to date that Hamas did not systematically commit sexual violence. It might be wondered how this can be in light of the sheer bulk of the report and its sprawling scholarly apparatus. But this was an optical illusion. The evidentiary portion of the Report filled less than half its pages,6 and virtually every piece of testimonial evidence adduced in these pages was repeated ad nauseum. Were the repetitions deleted, the Report’s evidentiary bulk would drastically shrink. What’s more, virtually all of the so-called evidence assembled in it is by now stale news: the stories of these allegedly “silenced voices” have already been widely reported multiple times.7
The present assessment parses the prime evidence—testimonial and digital—adduced in the Report. It melds rigorous scholarly refutation with withering mockery of what is, at bottom, not an inquiry into the fraught topic of sexual violence but, on the contrary, a depraved exercise in Hitlerian propaganda. This writer refuses to be browbeaten into adopting a reverential, hushed tone as it would in effect concede that the Report was addressing sexual violence. It is the purveyors of this ridiculous hoax who have trivialized the grave subject matter into a joke.
Preliminary Observations
A) Testimonial evidence
The Report’s evidence overwhelmingly comprised testimonies by alleged witnesses to incidents of Hamas’s sexual violence. Although it at first appears as if the cast of characters and range of situations rivals a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza, the witnesses and incidents quoted in the report prove upon inspection to be small in number, while this cast of characters will be familiar to readers of previous Israeli reports and media coverage. It was in large part a re-released film, albeit colorized. One of the more ludicrous conceits of Israeli hasbara has been that these witnesses were “silenced.” They were about as muted as The Beatles. Whereas the Report is titled Silenced No More, it copiously documented that “[w]itnesses’ accounts and testimonies of sexual violence emerged swiftly after the attack.”8 It was the mind-numbing repetition that fostered the illusion of a vast evidentiary pool: testimonies and incidents were endlessly recounted, more often than not verbatim, on different pages and in different footnotes—even twice in the same footnote or same page of text!9 Stripped of the repetitions, the Report was a supersized nothing burger. (See Table 1.) The testimonies most recycled in the Report (and most publicized by Israeli hasbara) were also the most lurid. The Report tacitly presupposed that if an alleged witness repeated the same testimony in multiple venues, that enhanced their credibility. But couldn’t the witness have just been a chronic or highly motivated prevaricator?
Table 1
RECYCLING WITNESS TESTIMONY AND INCIDENTS
An appendix to the Report laid out its methodology for administering interviews of alleged witnesses. It was “victim-centered” and “trauma-informed” in that it “recognizes the emotional and psychological impact of testimony-giving and implements protective measures throughout the process.” It sought to “ensure that our tone, words, body language, or any other actions do not convey blame, shame, disrespect, judgment, condescension, belittlement, or scorn” so as to “prevent further harm or re-traumatization of the testifiers” and the “risk of re-victimization.” Here’s how the methodological appendix described the desired “atmosphere” of the interviews it conducted:
We recognize that working with victims and survivors requires an open-minded, non-judgmental approach. We will listen without letting our reactions influence the course of the testimony, allowing testifiers full control over how they share their story. . . . We will create a supportive, physically and psychologically safe environment. . . . This is a fundamental element in building a relationship of trust with the testifiers, enabling them to share their experiences and information.
Still, the Commission purported to uphold “rigorous academic and legal standards,” and to have produced a “rigorous legal, historical, and evidentiary work.” But did it? It avowed to “act in the best interests of the individuals providing the information,” as it “prioritizes their safety, physical and psychological well-being.” One might have supposed that a document aspiring to “rigorous academic and legal standards” would, on the contrary, methodologically “prioritize” and “act in the best interests” of truth. The Commission further stated that “The objective is to deliver justice.”10 But the Commission explicitly declared that truth and justice were not its ultimate goals: “The physical and emotional well-being of the testifier is our highest priority, even if it compromises our documentation efforts” (emphasis added). It would appear that the Commission confounded gathering evidence with group therapy. It noted that “The delicate triangle between therapy, documentation, and justice requires constant balance.” But it itself avowedly upset the balance by placing its thumb on the therapy side of the scale. If it put the premium on assuaging the feelings of the alleged victim, then the Commission’s function was essentially stenographic. It proclaimed that “we are committed to relying only on credible information.” This, however, was manifestly untrue. How is it possible to ferret out “credible information” if an alleged witness is preemptively insulated from aggressive, skeptical interrogation? The Commission went on to declare that it “will not make assumptions about truthfulness based on inconsistencies.”11 It shouldn’t surprise, then, that the Report brazenly included without caveat witness testimony of preposterous publicly exposed fabulists such as Rami Davidian.12
The upshot is that the witness testimonies assembled in the Report and constituting the preponderance of it—in and of themselves and in the absence of corroborative material evidence—lacked even a smidgen of probative value. If nearly every Israeli Jew, being an actual or former member of its citizen-army, has internalized the IDF’s genocidal ethos, and if the Gaza genocide enjoyed overwhelming Israeli Jewish support to the point of psychotic relish, and if demonizing Hamas crystallized into a national project in which Israeli Jews reflexively self-conscripted, then, prima facie, the probative value of these witness testimonies absent material corroboration fell below zero. The Report stated that “victims’ experiences must inform legal and institutional responses and should neither be marginalized nor eclipsed by broader considerations.”13 It further stated that “In all cases, factual determinations relied on multiple independent sources that were compared and cross-referenced for verification.”14 But if one State-worshipping citizen-propagandist echoed the testimony of another State-worshipping citizen-propagandist, that scarcely constituted corroborative, let alone dispositive, testimony, while “broader considerations” of truth and justice most emphatically should have “eclipsed” plausibly tainted testimony. In light of the genocidal poison coursing through the Israeli body politic, shouldn’t the default setting have been that these witness testimonies constituted lying propaganda—as credible as the testimony of guards at Auschwitz that there were no gas chambers? The “reasonable grounds to conclude” standard would require at bare minimum witness testimony that was “supported by digital evidence” (Amnesty International).15 If the Report didn’t adopt that standard, if in the main it relied exclusively on witness testimony, then the reason is not hard to find: no digital evidence has been adduced that Hamas perpetrated rape and other acts of sexual violence. The Report dignified its disposition of witness testimonies as it having “archived” them. The process more closely resembled a hoarder accumulating junk.
B) Digital evidence
The Report stated that the Commission had stored fully ten thousand photographs and digital segments documenting the Hamas attack, and that it would take “well over 1,800 cumulative hours” to view all of them.16 Put otherwise, if a researcher plowed through this digital evidence every day for eight hours, it would take more than seven months to view the entire archive. This vast trove of images caught a narrowly circumscribed space in southern Israel abutting Gaza. Not a lot that unfolded on 7 October could have escaped notice of this collective lens. It was the Report’s mantra that, in order to fray Israeli national and kinship bonds, Hamas recorded and then disseminated its gruesome acts on social media as well as in video messages sent to family members of the hostages. It stated that it had in its possession “the perpetrators’ own extensive video documentation and body camera footage, whether live streamed during the attack, posted online and on social media by Hamas and its collaborators soon after, or found on cameras recovered at the scenes.”17 “The perpetrators did not conceal these acts—they glorified them,” Elkayam-Levy underscored in her preface.
They filmed and broadcast them in real time, transforming their violence into spectacle and human suffering into an instrument of terror. During the prolonged captivity that followed, the families of the hostages, and an entire nation, endured months of anguish through images and videos of their suffering. These were intended to imprint themselves on the public consciousness. Visibility itself became a weapon, and the audience was, painfully, part of the plan.18
And in the body of the Report:
[P]erpetrators weaponized visibility and digital dissemination as part of the violence itself, including sexualized content. Armed groups recorded acts of abuse, humiliation, and killing, and circulated the footage through social media platforms and victims’ own digital accounts. In numerous cases, family members first learned of the fate of their loved ones through images or videos distributed by perpetrators. This deliberate use of digital media transformed acts of violence into instruments of psychological warfare directed not only at victims but also at families and society at large.19
A highly disturbing and recurrent pattern documented by the Commission is the extensive use of digital technology and social media, particularly perpetrator-generated images and videos, to document, glorify, and amplify acts of SGBV [Sexual and Gender-Based Violence]. . . . Such recordings were not incidental, but formed an integral component of the violence itself, magnifying the harm inflicted on victims and weaponizing their suffering for propaganda and terror. . . . The perpetrators used social media, including victims’ own accounts, to broadcast and share their acts with the closest circle of family and friends, as well as to the general public. . . . Documents and materials recovered from the bodies of militants included explicit instructions and operational directives on how to film the attacks and upload them to social media platforms. The repeated and widespread nature of the digital dissemination demonstrate that the documentation and amplification of the violence, including SGBV, were inherent elements of the operation rather than spontaneous acts by individual perpetrators.20
The Commission coined the neologism “kinocide” and “kinocidal sexual violence” to capture this supposedly novel crime21 and posited that not only the direct targets of Hamas violence but also the recipients of the digital recordings should be reckoned torture victims.22 The oddity, however, is that, even as, according to the Report, Hamas systematically deployed SGBV as a strategic weapon, and even as brazenly perpetrating and then broadcasting its criminal violence was integral to Hamas’s purported gameplan, neither the Israeli State nor the Civil Commission has released even one frame, from among the ten thousand photographs and digital segments it amassed, that depicted Hamas committing rape or other acts of sexual violence. No such image or video footage has been reported, according to Amnesty International.23 Not a single Israeli CCTV, traffic surveillance camera, or individual cellphone captured Hamas committing rape or other acts of sexual violence. The Commission collected “extensive” digital evidence from Hamas digital paraphernalia. Hamas allegedly exploited its gruesome images from 7 October and of the Israelis held hostage as “an instrument of terror.” If inspiring terror was the avowed objective, then, it would seem, the more barbaric the sexual violence it disseminated the better. But not a single confiscated Hamas bodycam, GoPro, or dashcam contained an image of rape or other acts of sexual violence. Not a single Hamas posting on social media or footage transmitted directly to family members of hostages contained an image depicting rape or other acts of sexual violence. The Report effectively conceded, if only by indirection, this critical lacuna:
Across multiple locations, including the Nova Music Festival, civilian communities in the kibbutzim, and military bases, perpetrators filmed, photographed, and disseminated images and videos of abducted women and children, desecrated bodies of women, and families in states of extreme vulnerability. In several instances, content was circulated in real time or shortly thereafter, depicting victims—alive or dead—being paraded, humiliated, or abused, and in some cases accompanied by celebratory or inciting commentary.24
Perpetrators documented themselves during the attacks, including while assaulting, humiliating, abducting, and killing women and desecrating their bodies. Footage circulated by Hamas and its collaborators depicts women and girls being violently dragged, humiliated, and abducted; female corpses being abused, mocked, or burned; and female hostages being tormented, abused, taunted, or humiliated on camera. Other videos of female hostages show their faces covered in plastic or cloth, preventing them from seeing or breathing properly. In many archived cases, footage shows militants and Gazan civilians celebrating over abused female bodies. . . . Videos depicting abused, partially naked bodies, the abduction of a young woman lying lifeless on the back of a pickup truck, or of a mother clutching her two infant children in distress while being captured from her home, were widely circulated worldwide.25
The attack included the public display and desecration of female bodies, as well as the circulation of images and videos of partially clothed or abused bodies of women and men, the torture and abduction of women and girls—including elderly women, mothers with children, and, in some cases, entire families.26
That is, the Report delineated all manner of violent acts documented by Hamas perpetrators—but these did not include acts of sexual violence, defined by the Report as “the commission or attempted commission of sexual acts.”27 The Report correctly stated that Hamas did post brutal images of an execution and of corporal abuse.28 It also claimed to possess a video depicting “the lifeless, bloodied, body of a woman in a home, with a perpetrator stomping on her head.”29 But no image posted by Hamas depicted it perpetrating rape or other acts of sexual violence. The Report’s own annotated inventory of “Photographic and video documentation of the attacks and of the bodies found afterwards” does not include a single image of Hamas perpetrating sexual violence.30 If neither the Israeli State nor the Civil Commission possessed any digital evidence depicting rape or other acts of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas, and if, according to the Report, it was Hamas’s strategy to transmit for public consumption its most heinous crimes, yet it didn’t post on social media or privately transmit to hostage families a single image depicting rape or other acts of sexual violence, then Hamas could not have “strategically employed sexual violence as a weapon of war and terror.”31
The Specifics
A) Rape
The Report purported that it “has identified repeating cases of rape, gang rape.”32 What did its evidence show?
-
7 October
The Report alleged that numerous rapes, including gang and even necrophiliac rape,33 occurred on 7 October. However, it pretended to document the testimony of all of one—male—rape survivor. This one and only alleged rape survivor to step forward publicly has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Israeli government for negligence. His testimony has been received with less than resounding confidence in Israel.34 Although the Report stated that he was “subjected to a violent gang rape,” his testimony quoted in the body of the Report did not explicitly assert that he was raped: “There were several of them, and they genuinely enjoyed it. They laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll. It felt like all boundaries were broken. . . . There were no boundaries. I was completely naked. They did whatever they wanted to me. . . . It felt as though they were on a mission. They laughed at me and humiliated me. They trampled all the human dignity I had left, they trampled my body and my soul.” The Report continued: “He further recounted the perpetrators threatened to kill him and pressed a gun to his head. They threatened to cut off his genitalia and other body parts. The abuse continued until, according to his testimony, he lost consciousness and did not remember what happened to him.”35 If they did rape him, he didn’t tell it to the Commission. Not one single frame from among the ten thousand photographs and digital segments documenting 7 October captured a rape. The preponderance of these alleged rapes was said to have occurred at the Supernova music festival. The attendees were “mainly young men and women.”36 The witnesses to these alleged rapes secreted themselves in hiding places.37 The Report stated that it had collected “numerous photographs . . . from the Nova site and surrounding areas.”38 Not one among the hidden Gen Z witnesses—wouldn’t they reflexively have recorded on their phones a crime unfolding in real time?—thought, however, to capture these rapes occurring all around them in an “open desert area.”39 Strange. And even as the Report alleged that it had “identified repeating cases of rape, gang rape”;40 and even as, according to the Report, the motive behind Hamas’s sexual violence was to make of it a public “spectacle,” “instrument of terror” and “thereby extending the humiliation and amplifying the psychological terror inflicted on victims, their families, and the wider public,” “to document, glorify, and amplify its atrocities,” “these videos were deliberately disseminated on social media . . . to widen the audience”;41 and even as “Hamas commandeered victims’ own phones and social media accounts to post, share, or live stream the brutalities as they unfolded”42—notwithstanding all this, Hamas did not post on social media a single image of rape on 7 October. Also, strange. To clinch its case, the Report fell back on multiple “eyewitnesses and earwitnesses.”43 Its star witness was an earwitness. From within the confines of a vehicle, she claimed to have heard not one, not two, but a trifecta of three discrete rapes, including a gang rape: “I was sitting here in the caravan; I heard rape here, here, and here. I can point to where. It was very distinct. It was on this side, on this side, and on this side—three points.”44 This writer can’t distinguish between a buzzer sounding inside his apartment versus from a passing vehicle outside. But the witness made out three distinct rapes “here, here, and here.” Here’s what else she audibly discerned: “I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams. . . . Another one was that I heard someone screaming, ‘Don’t touch her, don’t do this,’ and then they apparently raped his girlfriend . . . in front of his eyes. And then they killed both of them.” How could she have known any of this? It hasn’t been ascertained whether she also heard the Vienna Boys Choir, the Boston Pops, and The Beatles reunion “here, here, and here.”
-
Hostages
The Report stated that “Hostages were routinely subjected to grave violations, including rape, sexual assaults, severe physical and psychological pain, and sexual humiliation.”45 The nature of many of these acts, however, was cast in the Report not in a legal idiom but, on the contrary, the gauzy language of a trashy Gothic novel. One anonymous survivor recalled these incidents:
I go into the shower and he allows himself to enter the shower because he’s a medic and he’s coming to help me shower, and I’m injured, and I have no power over them. And I’m in a situation where there’s nothing I can do, and he took everything from me. . . . They constantly grab my leg. They are giving me a massage on the leg, and then move up to my thigh. And I try to push them away with kicks and pull back, but he keeps grabbing my leg. In the end, what am I next to him? He is much stronger than me. . . . I went to the bathroom and he came after me, and that’s where the third assault happened, and it was the worst of all. It lasted almost half an hour.46
The Report stated that a male survivor reticently recalled that a “guard repeatedly attempted to pressure him into performing a sexual act on himself.”47 One of the Report’s key witnesses recounted: “We all know that something happened. You could see it on her face. . . . Then she told us that he touched her, and she told us exactly how he touched her and what he did. . . . [W]e all know. And it’s a nightmare.”48 Even as Israel takes pride in being a sexually libertine atoll amidst a sea of medieval Muslim sexual repression, strangely, these witnesses became coy as a Southern belle testifying in a Black-rape trial, whereas repressed Gazans matter-of-factly described, as if having nothing to dissimulate, the sexual horrors inflicted on them by Israeli captors.49 It’s as if the Israeli witnesses endeavored to inflate the actual crime by tantalizing insinuation and innuendo or by feigning virginal innocence. If the Commission was “committed to relying only on credible information,” then why didn’t it simply ask them what happened?
The Report’s pages are saturated with the Hamas rape accusation. It thus comes as a surprise that, on close inspection, only one hostage explicitly alleged having witnessed a rape (fellatio) and only one explicitly alleged having heard rumors of rape in captivity.50 More surprising still, the one and only hostage who had allegedly survived rape in captivity and then publicly testified to it did not herself explicitly state that she had been raped. Amit Soussana quickly emerged as the poster girl of Hamas barbarism while her recounted ordeal clinched Israel’s case for Hamas rape in the court of public opinion.51 The Report devoted nearly nine consecutive pages to quoting multiple iterations of Soussana’s experience.52 Of the climactic to her abuse, Soussana had this to say: “[I] was forced to act nice to the person who had just sexually assaulted me in the most horrifying way”; “He forced me to commit a sexual act on him”; “[H]e forced me to perform a sexual act on him. A severe sexual act.”53 Whatever happened, nowhere did she purport that she was raped. Even the Report itself did not allege that she had been raped but rather that she was “sexually assaulted,” “forced to commit a sexual act,” endured “a severe sexual assault.”54 The bottom line is this: Whereas the Report alleged that “Hostages were routinely subjected to grave violations, including rape,” it couldn’t substantiate a single instance of any hostage being raped.
B) Other forms of sexual violence
-
7 October
Witnesses alleged seeing countless disrobed corpses. Further, the Report depicted protracted sequences of their legs spread to expose genitalia as well as breasts severed and played with, hands tied behind their backs, the nude bodies fastened to trees and poles and then shot dead. A search of the words “naked,” “nudity,” “undressed,” and “unclothed” yields a whopping 227 results. Amidst the text’s swirling repetitions, it is impossible to say how many of these alleged instances were discrete. The documentation consists overwhelmingly of testimonies. One horrified witness recalled seeing the burnt body of a woman whose “dress was pulled up, and she wasn’t wearing underwear, not because it burned, because there was no trace. If it had burned, there would have been some plastic residue, some trace, because the dress itself was intact. If the underwear had burned, the dress would have burned too. It didn’t. They removed her underwear. Her legs were spread. Her genitals were exposed.”55 Another witness from the Supernova festival remembered “[w]omen tied with their hands behind their backs. And it was evident that they had been sexually harmed. Very evident. . . . From the fact that they had no underwear. From injuries in the lower areas.” It seems not to have occurred to our amateur Sherlocks that perhaps the victims weren’t wearing underwear.56 Be that as it may, it is credible that bodies were found partially or fully naked: the attack began in the “predawn and dawn hours”;57 the largest massacre unfolded at the Supernova festival that was celebrating “free love.”58 The Report itself stated that Hamas militants killed or took hostage Israelis before they had occasion to dress, and then dragged these scantily clad captives along the ground: “Bodies were abducted fully or partially naked, and victims, both living and dead, were taken while wearing sleepwear or underwear.”59 One returning hostage recalled that when taken captive she was wearing “tiny shortie pajamas. Everything [was] very exposed.”60 In and of themselves, however, none of these various degrees of undress would instantiate sexual violence. Still, the Report also alleged that Hamas militants intentionally stripped their captives’ bodies, sexually degraded them, tied their hands, fastened the naked bodies to objects, and then shot them. That would cross the threshold of sexual violence. But did it happen? The Report touted that it had accumulated fully ten thousand photographs and digital segments documenting Hamas sexual violence on 7 October. The sexually violated bodies were said to have been strewn in the wide open across open fields and highways. But not one single frame in this massive trove captured a Hamas militant perpetrating these consecutive acts of sexual violence. The trove included “extensive” digital evidence from Hamas bodycams, GoPros, and dashcams. But not one single frame from this surfeit of confiscated Hamas footage depicted a militant perpetrating an act of sexual violence.61 It was the Report’s mantra that Hamas posted images of its heinous sexual predations on social media in order to “transform their violence into spectacle and human suffering into an instrument of terror.” But Hamas did not post a single image of a Hamas militant intentionally stripping an Israeli, let alone spreading her legs, severing and then playing with her breast, binding her hands behind her back, pinning her to a tree or pole, and then murdering her. How can this be? Or, put otherwise, if Hamas didn’t post such images, that can only be because it didn’t possess any; and if it didn’t possess any, that can only be because it didn’t commit such acts of sexual violence—let alone that they had been “planned and rehearsed.”62
The Report additionally alleged that Hamas grotesquely mangled bodies. It stated that “first responders” discovered a woman’s body that had “several nails driven into her lower abdomen and groin area, as well as a metal or plastic object embedded in the groin area.” It went on to state that “three forensic pathologists who reviewed the images and videos from the site” confirmed the responder testimony.63 (Were they employed by Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, & Mengele Inc.?) But a Haaretz journalist who has herself purveyed the Hamas rape hoax, as well as multiple independent forensic pathologists consulted by Human Rights Watch, all concluded that the photographic evidence did not confirm this testimony.64 The Report also adduced other first responders. One “recounted that the victim’s body had her legs spread. When he attempted to move and position the body respectfully, he was unable to close her legs and observed that metal cans had been inserted into her vaginal area. . . . ‘I couldn’t close her legs in order to place her into the [body] bag. . . . They had inserted various cans into her. Her legs were spread open. I looked more closely: she was half-naked, and they had inserted tin cans, into her genital area.’”65 Alas, he didn’t specify how many cans, or whether or not they were Campbell’s Soup. Another first responder testified that, upon entering a room, “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.”66 Other first responders testified that “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.”67 And yet again just three pages later in this demented Report: “Female bodies were found naked or partially unclothed, with objects, including improvised sharp items, nails and household tools, in their genitalia and other parts of their bodies.”68 And still yet again in the Report’s legal analysis: “The Civil Commission likewise documented cases in which bodies were found with various objects, including nails, aluminum cans and other items, inserted into their genitals.”69 It appears that the witnesses tastefully omitted the kitchen sink, toilet bowl, and corner gas station. The Report quoted this ghastly testimony-cum-philosophical musing on Hamas’ ineffable iniquity:
The witness also described a scene involving a male and female victim that had been deliberately staged: the male victim’s genitals had been severed, and, in his words, it appeared that “someone had engineered it” so that the woman’s hand was placed holding the severed genitals. Asked to conclude his impressions, the witness described the case: “The purpose was humiliation. Not victory. . . . One can try to place this within the rules of war, to talk about it within that framework. . . . But when you move into necrophilia, that is already beyond that framework. When I find a body . . . and someone has ‘engineered’ the scene so that her hand is placed on his genital area after his genitals were cut off, this is not incidental. This is pathology.”70 (emphasis in original)
Another witness “testified that he observed the body of a man with severed male genitalia in his mouth.”71 (With or without condiments?) The Report stated that “first responders . . . provided the Commission with videos and photographs . . . documenting . . . victims’ bodies, including materials relevant to SGBV.”72 It therefore perplexes in the extreme why the first responders didn’t preserve digitally for posterity—and, of course, propaganda—these artifacts of Hamas pathology. If neither Israel nor the Civil Commission has made it publicly available, then it’s a sure bet that such photographic evidence doesn’t exist. Conversely, according to the Report, Hamas sought to sow terror throughout Israeli society by disseminating via social media its sadistic acts. But if the whole point of them was to shatter the Israeli national esprit, why then didn’t Hamas post on the Web images of these foul deeds? Except if they didn’t happen. If credit be lent to these twisted testimonies of Hamas corporal sexual disfigurement, then it should be as projections of and testaments to the pathological Israeli psyche—not least of the Report’s chief author.
-
Hostages
The Report stated that “[t]he accounts of returning hostages and medical professionals treating them indicate that hostages—both men and women—were systematically subjected to extreme physical and sexual violence and sexual torture while in captivity.”73 Specifically, the hostages variously alleged that Hamas had subjected them to touching, groping, ogling (“raping you with his eyes,” “undressing her with their eyes”74), invasive body searches, and severe breaches of personal space. It is impossible to determine, based solely on the testimonies, how much was true, how much exaggerated, how much fabricated; how much was “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” versus being born of the hostages’ vindictive rage or support for the genocidal assault; whether captivity was closer to Sodom and Gomorrah or frottage on the subway at rush hour. One ex-hostage indignantly recalled that she had “refused to wear the clothes” provided by Hamas “because they were very, very small, tight, and revealing.”75 Another anguished that “her captors procured a bra for her, asked about her bra size, and disputed her responses.” (It’s a wonder they didn’t booby-trap it.) “She described this incident as emblematic of the broader pattern of control and humiliation imposed during her detention.”76 The Report is dotted with sexually charged shower scenes, as if Psycho on an endless loop. (Wasn’t there a water emergency in Gaza?) The male hostages repeatedly waxed horror-stricken as Hamas guards purportedly came on to them: “He grabbed me from behind and started touching me all over. . . . Kisses the back of my neck and my back. He told me that he loves me”; “He rubbed his genitals against my anus”; “You go into the shower, and he comes to shampoo you. He puts shampoo in his hand and starts soaping you in the shower”; “once, twice, maybe three times, maybe more . . . [he] would come up behind me and hug me or put a hand on my shoulder.”77 Kinky Hamas gay blades even hooked up a hidden camera in the shower to videotape Israeli hunks, while one male hostage heroically if in vain sought to “avoid [showing his] private parts towards this angle.”78 (How did he know it was a homo peep show and not a humdrum security camera?) It was as if Hamasland meets Manhattan’s Chelsea and Florida’s SoBe. Who would’ve thunk? The testimonies didn’t always cohere upon cursory inspection. A hostage told the Civil Commission that one of his guards “shaved me—he told me before he started that I should undress. So I took off my pants and shirt and sat there in my underwear. Then he told me to take off my underwear. I told him I didn’t want to take off my underwear. . . . So he got angry, called me an idiot, and shaved me.” But in other iterations the hostage’s singular experience multiplied into “more than once” and, whereas his wife also testified that “I will never forget that the terrorist took Keith to the shower and shaved his entire body,” he told the UN Committee Against Torture that the “young terrorists forced me to . . . shave my body.” If this incident—whatever it was—didn’t already shock the conscience, one of the guards repeatedly opined that “I have a large penis and that the other hostage has a small penis.”79 It might be thought, Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Its credulity (cynicism?) knowing no limits, the Commission duly recorded the testimony of an injured ex-hostage that, after being taken to al-Shifa hospital, “They brought me into a room. . . . One man simply starts cutting off all my clothes. One man takes off my shoes, another takes off my earrings, and another removes my jewelry from my body, and I’m just like. . . around 15 people who are touching me, like, all at once, until it gets to the point where they cut off all my clothes. And then I was lying there naked—completely naked.”80 In the middle of a genocide, as hospitals were being targeted and swamped with patients, fully fifteen staff simultaneously went AWOL, engulfed her body, and took turns ravishing her. Could it be that this hostage had viewed, liked, and shared one too many gangbangs on Pornhub? It won’t altogether surprise at this point that the Report alleges on seven different pages that sibling minors were “coerced into performing sexual acts on one another.” The Report also enters this lurid embellishment: “They were reportedly compelled by their captors to take off their clothes, and their captors then touched their private parts and whipped their genitalia.” Alas, the reader will never learn all the juicy details of this pedophile-cum-incest-cum-S&M sicko cum-fest because the case was “anonymized due to the victims’ age and privacy concerns.”81 (It might be wondered why the Report’s author wasn’t also anonymized due to privacy concerns about her mental impairments.) Amidst these flamboyant fantasies, it repays to ponder the understated musings of the hostage with the contested bra size:
[T]hese were the things that broke me: the lack of privacy, the silence, and them being with us in the room all the time; even when we went to the bathroom I had to ask permission, and if it took me too long they knocked on the door . . . And even just going to the bathroom, you can’t flush because there’s no water. So our waste is on top of theirs, and the smell in the bathroom. . . it’s horrible. It’s horrible. You can’t. . . After we came back, they found bacteria in me and my mother, hospital-level, highly infectious bacteria. Hygiene was very hard.82
The worst of it, then, was the cramped, invasive, unsanitary conditions. A recent UN Commission of Inquiry documenting Israeli crimes against Palestinian children in Gaza observed: “One mother told the Commission about staying with her four young boys in a dog cage with a cover on top to give them some protection from rain and cold. Some recounted sharing mattresses with up to 10 people or sleeping in turns. . . . Temporary shelters, with one toilet for 700 people on average, became centers for disease outbreak.”83 In other words, Israeli hostages had to endure the tiniest fraction of what millions of Gazans suffered during the genocide.
The Report obliquely conceded by omission the lack of digital evidence that Hamas perpetrated rape and other acts of sexual violence on the hostages: “Videos and images filmed by Hamas during captivity, show hostages being tormented, abused, taunted, or humiliated on camera”; “Hamas released multiple videos depicting hostages begging for their lives or showing their bodies”; “Hamas . . . repeatedly released images and videos from captivity for months following the attacks, including visual materials depicting female bodies, children, and abused hostages”; “Hamas systematically staged, produced, and disseminated videos of hostages during captivity. Hamas released multiple videos of female hostages, some of them minors, in a visibly deteriorated physical condition begging for their lives. In one such case, the visual sequence of a young hostage concludes with footage of her lifeless body. Other videos filmed by perpetrators show female captives while ill or injured.”84 Hamas did post distressing images of hostages—not, however, of rape or other acts of sexual violence. But by the Civil Commission’s own logic, if Hamas was premeditatedly waging “psychological warfare and terror” on social media; and if the Report itself purported that Hamas posted “sexualized content”85 and “acts involving SGBV”86—it didn’t, per the Report, shy away from let alone make an exception for such content; yet Hamas, pace the Report, didn’t publicly disseminate images of rape and other acts of sexual violence; then it can’t but be that no such images existed; and if none existed, then it can’t but be that Hamas didn’t systematically perpetrate rape and other acts of sexual violence on the hostages.
Conclusion
In May 2026, an Israeli “Civil Commission” published Silenced No More. It was widely touted as the most comprehensive report to date documenting Hamas’s systematic resort to sexual violence on 7 October and against the hostages. Although running to almost three hundred pages, the Report’s hefty bulk was deceptive. The actual evidence of Hamas sexual violence filled less than half its pages while, if the mind-numbing repetitions were stricken, the actual evidence filled much less than half of the half. The Report rested its case on testimonial and digital evidence. In taking testimony, the Commission prioritized the emotional health of the witnesses over judicial fact-finding. It didn’t interrogate witnesses; it stenographed therapy sessions. The witnesses sprung forth from a genocidal society in which demonizing Hamas was a national duty. Prima facie, the probative value of these witness testimonies absent corroborative evidence fell below zero. The Commission stated that it had in its possession fully ten thousand pictures and digital segments from 7 October. This vast archive didn’t contain a single image of Hamas perpetrating rape or other acts of sexual violence. Prima facie, this constituted compelling a contrario evidence that Hamas did not systematically commit rape and other acts of sexual violence. The Report nonetheless pretended to document that Hamas had repeatedly perpetrated rapes and gang rapes. Its star witness or, more exactly, earwitness alleged that while hiding in a vehicular container she was able to discern sounds outside of three discrete rapes including a gang rape, “here, here, and here.” First responders testified that they discovered sexually mangled genitals such as a vagina stuffed with aluminum cans. Curiously, it did not occur to any of them to digitally document these Hamas bestialities for posterity or propaganda. The Report stated that Hamas routinely raped hostages. Yet, only a couple of the ex-hostages even claimed that they had witnessed or heard rumors of rape, while the ex-hostage poster girl of Hamas rape did not herself allege that she was raped. The Report purported that the hostages endured other acts of sexual violence such as groping and invasive body searches. It’s impossible to determine, based solely on the witness testimonies, whether the allegations were true, exaggerated, or fabricated whole cloth. What’s certain is this: The Report posited that Hamas posted images on social media of the hostages’ wretched state in order to inflict “psychological terror” on Israeli society. It did not, however, post any images of rape or other acts of sexual violence. Applying the Commission’s own logic, if Hamas didn’t post images of rape and other acts of sexual violence, then they didn’t happen. The Report stated that it “applied a tiered evidentiary approach” in which “[f]indings are based at a minimum on a ‘reasonable basis to believe,’ and in most cases meet ‘substantial grounds to believe.’”87 But a close reading of the Report demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that it applied a zero-tiered evidentiary approach in which findings were based on no grounds to believe.
***
Hitler laid out two rules for effective propaganda. First, “it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Second, the bigger the lie, the more persuasive it is, for, in the simple minds of the masses, even as they themselves lie “in little things,” no one would be so brazen as to concoct an outrageous lie. In Silenced No More, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy has proven herself to be a worthy disciple of the Führer’s techniques.
The author wishes to thank Noah Kruemmling and O. S. Zinn for commenting on a draft of this article.
Hereafter: Report. The timing of its release was not arbitrary. It was plainly designed to distract attention from a devastating article on Israel’s sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners that was published the day before by The New York Times.
Luc Bronner, “October 7: New report documents extent of sexual violence committed by Hamas,” Le Monde (12 May 2026); Isabel Kershner, “Israeli Report Examines Sexual Violence During and After Hamas-Led Attack,” New York Times (12 May 2026).
Sandberg, a former Meta COO, is singled out in the Report “for her steadfast support, mentorship, and moral leadership from the earliest days of this work,” while Emanuel, chief of staff in the Obama administration, is identified as “one of the earliest and most enduring supporters of this work . . . a constant source of strength and resolve” (p. 6).
Report, p. 16 (also p. 25).
Hamas refers in this article to both the organization itself as well as other Gazan armed groups that participated in the 7 October attack.
Report, pp. 30–163. The remainder of the report consisted of “thematic” and “legal” analyses of the evidence.
The Report’s principal secondary source was authored by Pramila Patten, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. She was extensively quoted in in thirty-four footnotes to the Report’s raw findings (Report, Part I, sections I–II, nn4, 7, 9, 11, 15, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 74, 76, 84, 86, 87, 89, 103, 115, 161, 162, 203, 209, 227, 228, 231, 232, 233, 249, 251, 263, 282, 339, 375, 412). But by Patten’s own admission, the delegation she led in Gaza was “neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature.” See Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers: An inquiry into corruption in high places (New York and London: 2026), p. 3. The next most-cited secondary source was the oral testimony and a handful of publications coauthored by the Civil Commission head herself. A shrinking violet Elkayam-Levy is not. She cited herself in twenty-two footnotes (often twice in the same footnote) to the Report’s raw findings (Report, Part I, sections I–II, nn6 (twice), 11 (twice), 15 (twice), 16, 20, 21 (twice), 22, 41, 49 (twice), 50, 52, 75, 89, 96, 203, 205, 226, 305 (twice), 339, 362 (twice), 405 (twice), 406). Making no pretense to impartiality, Elkayam-Levy acquitted herself in the Report as if Israel’s chief prosecutor. She repeated hasbara talking points such as Hamas having placed hostages in UN buildings and hospitals as well as having routinely “murdered” them (among the many hostages allegedly executed by Hamas, probably two were); her list of “numerous” armed conflicts in which “sexual violence against both women and men has occurred” excluded Gaza (Report, pp. 56, 57, 120, 126, 129, 132, 183, 187, 199). The cumulative evidentiary value of the Report’s major secondary sources thus totaled a grandiose zero.
Ibid., p. 33.
Ibid., p. 18, p. 22, p. 142, para. 169; pp. 34–35n18, p. 134n405, p. 188n681, p. 190n697; pp. 34–35 and n19, p. 122, para. 124n343, pp. 133–34, para. 147n399, p. 177; p. 35n20, p. 124n348; p. 37n22, p. 184n645; p. 74, para. 11 and n138; p. 76, para. 15, p. 132, para. 144; p. 83, para. 28; p. 92, para. 57 and n213; p. 96, para. 69 and nn232, 235; pp. 100–101, para. 81 and nn252, 253, 254, 255, p. 133, para. 145 and n395, p. 177; p. 104n267 and p. 105n270; p. 110, para. 106 and n307; pp. 111, 113n311 and p. 116n325; p. 114nn315, 317; p. 122, para. 124 and n343; p. 123, para. 125 and n346, p. 145, para. 175; p. 131, para. 141 and p. 138, para. 157; p. 136n411, p. 154, para. 190; p. 143, para. 171, p. 149, para. 184; p. 152n461, p. 155, para. 195; pp. 124–25, para. 127 and n353; pp. 177, 179 (“lifeless”—both passages refer to Joshua Mollel); p. 192 and n716.14
Ibid., p. 238.
Ibid., pp. 10 (“historical”), 47n59 (“delicate triangle”), 270–82 (Appendix).
Ibid., pp. 76–77, paras. 16–18, p. 168n538, p. 169n540, p. 176nn593, 595, 597, p. 177n608. See Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, p. 31.
Report, p. 236.
Ibid., p. 48.
Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, p. 13.
Report, pp. 16, 46n53.
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., pp. 190–91 (see also pp. 20, 21, 22, 23, 34, 37, 38, 105, 135, 186).
Ibid., p. 10 (see also pp. 22, 190).
Ibid., p. 31n6.
Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, p. 19. When the Report purported or implied that it possessed “digital materials . . . indicating incidents of rape, gang rape, sexual torture” (p. 68), it was flat-out lying (see also pp. 35, 135, 188). The digital evidence of Hamas sexual violence adduced by the Report missed the mark. For example:
Hamas’s recordings and footage from Nahal Oz military base, released during and after the attack, depict scenes consistent with SGBV against female soldiers. In one such video, unarmed women are seen handcuffed, bloodied, and visibly injured, surrounded by the bodies of other female soldiers and by armed Hamas militants. In several sequences, the perpetrators are heard shouting threats and obscenities as they physically assault, drag, bind, and strike the victims, who appear terrified. The women display signs of severe beating and other injuries. (p. 104)
Brutal it might have been but how, pray tell, is this sexual/gender-based violence?
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid., pp. 190–91.
Ibid., p. 213.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., pp. 173, 177, 186.
Ibid., pp. 87–88.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 166.
Ibid., pp. 74, 167.
Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, pp. 43–44.
Report, pp. 71–73 (see also pp. 193–94). The Report stated that “He underwent a polygraph examination that confirmed his testimony.” It did not state, however, that he was explicitly questioned as to whether he had been raped.
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 166.
Ibid., pp. 9, 21, 34, 37n22, 38, 186, 220, 224.
Ibid., p. 185.
Ibid., p. 167.
Ibid., pp. 69–71. The Report stated that “the testimony of this witness was corroborated by at least one additional witness, who hid in the same caravan throughout the attack” (p. 70). But this witness’s quoted testimony did not explicitly state that she heard a rape.
Ibid., p. 207 (see also pp. 18, 33, 57).
Ibid., pp. 138–40.
Ibid., p. 194.
Ibid., pp. 153–54.
Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, pp. 26–29.
Report, pp. 155, 156.
A UN Commission of Inquiry stated that “one released female hostage reported that she had been raped,” and it then proceeded to accuse Hamas of the “war crime” of “rape.” Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, pp. 15–16.
Report, pp. 142–52.
Ibid., pp. 142, 143, 148.
Ibid., pp. 142, 143, 147, 169.
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid., pp. 36n20, 123n347; Anna Gordon, “‘I Was Saved by a Miracle’: A survivor recounts the horror of the Hamas attack on Israel’s Supernova Festival,” Time (9 October 2023).
Report, p. 179.
Ibid., pp. 130–31 (see also pp. 22, 121). On this point, see esp. this footnote in Amnesty International’s report on the Hamas attack:
One independent forensic pathologist consulted by Amnesty International confirmed the difficulties in making conclusions in relation to the images it analyzed of bodies of people killed with missing or displaced clothing, or signs of injuries to the crotch. For example, victims may not have been fully clothed when attacked; they may have been dressed minimally while at a party or while sleeping just prior to the attacks. Their clothing may have been burnt away or torn during their efforts to escape. First responders or security forces may have displaced or removed clothing to administer emergency medical treatment or to check the body for booby traps. Clothing may have come loose or otherwise been disturbed if the body was moved, particularly if it was dragged. Blood seen in the crotch may have originated from wounds to other areas of the body, apparent knife wounds to sexual organs may have been caused by tangential or otherwise atypical gunshots and gunshot injuries to sexual organs may not necessarily result from direct targeting of these body parts. Burning apparently focused on the genital region could be explained by the presence of clothes acting as a wick and concentrating the fire in this area. (“Targeting Civilians: Murder, hostage-taking and other violations by Palestinian armed groups in Israel and Gaza” (December 2025), p. 29n15)
The Amnesty report was otherwise biased against Hamas. See Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, pp. 42–52.
The Report cited ad nauseam the notorious instance of Shani Louk, whose partially naked corpse was paraded by Hamas in Gaza where some spectators spit on it. The incident certainly fit the war crime of an “outrage upon personal dignity.” It was not, however, sexual violence: Louk was already dead when militants transported her body to Gaza. Unlike sexual violence, an “outrage against personal dignity” can be committed against the dead. See Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, p. 18. The Report itself denoted the incident not “sexual violence” but, rather, “sexualized humiliation” (p. 122); the abuse of another victim’s partially naked corpse was properly denoted “post-mortem desecration” (p. 193).
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., p. 92 (see also p. 172).
Finkelstein, Gaza’s Gravediggers, p. 33.
Report, p. 85.
Ibid., p. 93.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., p. 171 (see also pp. 80, 115).
Ibid., p. 203.
Ibid., pp. 83–84.
Ibid., p. 86.
Ibid., p. 80 (see also p. 169).
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., pp. 154, 160.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid., p. 158.
Ibid., pp. 140–42, 153.
Ibid., p. 142 (see also p. 194).
Ibid., pp. 152–53, 155 (see also pp. 179, 189 (“a male hostage was forced to undress and shave his entire body”), 194).
Ibid., p. 138 (see also p. 140).
Ibid., pp. 18, 22, 142n435, 170n546, 172n567, 189n692, 217.
Ibid., p. 158.
Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem and Israel, “The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed”: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023 (18 June 2026), paras. 213, 221.
Report, pp. 23, 37, 105, 186, 191.
Ibid., pp. 17, 22, 34, 49, 192.
Ibid., pp. 35, 188, 190.
Ibid., p. 51.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Norman Finkelstein’s new book, GAZA’S GRAVEDIGGERS: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places, has finally been published. You can purchase a copy here: https://orbooks.com/catalog/gazas-gravediggers/ The first chapter of the book, “Rape Fantasies,” parses a staple of Israeli propaganda about 7 October—i.e., Hamas weaponized rape and sexual violence—that was then repeated by a UN Commission of Inquiry and major human rights organizations. I concluded that Israel didn’t adduce any credible evidence to substantiate this allegation.
Be the first to comment