Progressives are wrong on Hamas rape denials

This week, a team of United Nations experts that visited Israel last month to investigate claims of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 Hamas raids said that it had found “reasonable grounds” to conclude that such violence did in fact occur. This comes after months of denial and minimization from many on the left. While the deniers are unlikely to be chastened by the U.N. team’s statement, the new report is a powerful reminder of the atrocities that began the current war in Israel and Gaza and of widespread progressive hypocrisy on the subject.

Reports of rapes during the raids, particularly at the Nova music festival where numerous people were murdered and kidnapped, emerged right away. Disturbing images from the raids — a young woman’s nearly naked body displayed like a trophy on the back of a truck, another woman being shoved into a car with her pants visibly stained with blood — were also strongly suggestive of sexual violence. Yet people who talked about this on social media — even self-identified social justice activists and Palestinian rights advocates — quickly found themselves accused of using racist tropes of “brown men” raping white women.

Some, such as podcaster Briahna Joy Gray, carped on the lack of forensic evidence and criticized the Israelis for failing to collect rape kits from dead bodies — even though the burning and mutilation of many bodies made evidence collection impossible.

When The New York Times published a lengthy report on Dec. 28 based on interviews with survivors, first responders and others, concluding that Hamas terrorists had engaged in systematic sexual violence, a chorus of pro-Palestinian commentators and outlets quickly tried to discredit the story. They seized on the fact that the sister and brother-in-law of a victim prominently featured in it, Gal Abdush, felt manipulated by the Times and insisted that Abdush, who was killed with a gunshot, had not been raped.

But these critics omitted the fact that Abdush’s mother strongly felt it was important to publicize the apparent rape. Nor did they acknowledge that family members, especially in a conservative subculture where rape may still carry a stigma, would have had strong motives to deny it.

In fact, even if one discounts eyewitness accounts as unreliable, the circumstantial evidence of rape chronicled by credible news outlets, such as visual records of women’s bodies found exposed below the waist, is grim and strong. And such crimes are hardly inconsistent with other, amply documented acts of terror committed by Hamas that day, such as burning bound victims or killing parents in front of young children.

As for the supposedly racist trope of sexual violence by “brown men,” the use of rape to terrorize a population has also been widely discussed in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, with no racial aspect.

Whether the Israeli military response against Hamas has shown insufficient effort to spare civilians and crossed the line into retaliation is a separate question that deserves attention and concern. Reports submitted to the U.N. of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees should also be investigated. But it is no less important to remember that the U.N. also acknowledged credible information about ongoing sexual violence toward Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas.

Above all, the absurd contortions to deny the rapes must be seen as an obscenity — often coming from people who claim to be champions of women’s rights but who will not speak for dead women who cannot say “me too.”

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.