Palestinian groups have repeatedly denied claims that the fighters committed acts of sexual violence during the October 7 attack.
A UN team of experts said there were “sufficient grounds to believe” that sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred during the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The team, led by Pramila Patten, the UN special envoy for sexual violence, visited Israel from January 29 to February 14 and released a report summarizing its findings on Monday.
Hamas, the Palestinian group that rules Gaza, has repeatedly denied claims that its fighters committed acts of sexual violence during the attacks.
The 24-page U.N. report also said that “credible circumstantial information was gathered that may suggest some forms of sexual violence, including genital mutilation, sexual torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” It is written.
“The mission has found clear and convincing information that some of the hostages taken to Gaza have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence, and that such violence continues today. “We find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that there may be,” the report said.
The report was released nearly five months after the Oct. 7 attack, which killed at least 1,139 people, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on official Israeli statistics. About 250 other people were taken hostage in the attack.
Since then, Israel's war on Gaza has devastated the besieged area, killing more than 30,500 people and displacing more than 80 percent of the population, according to the Palestinian Health Authority. The United Nations has announced that a quarter of Gaza's 2.3 million people are facing hunger.
Ms Patten said her team had been unable to meet with victims of sexual violence “despite concerted efforts to encourage them to come forward”.
But they held 33 meetings with Israeli agencies and interviewed 34 people, including survivors and witnesses of that day's attacks, freed prisoners of war, and medical providers.
Patten said the team recovered “several bodies, most of them women, naked or semi-naked from the waist down, with their hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head.” Stated.
Although circumstantial, she said it could be “indicative of some type of sexual assault.”
On Highway 232 (on the way back from the Nova music festival, which was part of the attack and whose premises bordered Gaza), “reliable information, based on eyewitness accounts, indicates the rape of two women by armed groups.'' ,” Patten said. .
Mr Patten said his team had confirmed that a woman had been raped outside an air raid shelter at Kibbutz Rem.
At Kibbutz Beli, Patten's team was able to determine that “at least two allegations of sexual assault that were widely repeated in the media were found to be unsubstantiated due to superseded information or inconsistencies in collected facts.” Stated.
No other reported incidents of rape could be confirmed during the team's stay in Israel.
Experts said a “full-scale investigation” was needed to uncover more details about the scale of the sexual violence that may have occurred that day.
The UN team said it had also received information from civil society sources and direct interviews about “sexual violence against Palestinian men and women.” [Israeli] Detention settings during house searches and at checkpoints since October 7th.
The UN envoy raised these allegations with Israel's Ministry of Justice and Military Justice, which said it had not received complaints of sexual violence against Israeli military personnel.