Sexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 attacks

Sexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 attacks refers to the rape, gang rape, genital mutilation and sexual torture inflicted on Israeli women, men and hostages by Hamas gunmen and the Gazans who followed them across the border fence on October 7, 2023, a pattern documented by a United Nations investigative mission, Israeli forensic pathologists and police, and freed hostages’ own testimony, and denied outright by Hamas and downplayed by some of the same voices who otherwise accept the Gaza casualty count without qualification.

What happened

At the Nova music festival near Re’im, along the escape route of Road 232, and inside the border kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz, the gunmen who breached the Gaza fence on the morning of October 7, 2023 killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel in a single day and dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza, the worst single day for the invasion that opened the current Gaza war. Alongside the shooting and burning, first responders, ZAKA volunteers recovering bodies and Israeli police forensic teams documented a recurring pattern at multiple sites: women found dead with clothing removed or cut away, hands bound, and injuries consistent with rape, gang rape and, in a number of cases, mutilation of the genitals before or after death. The attackers were not a single disciplined unit; the first wave of Hamas’s military wing was joined within the hour by fighters from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and by an unknown number of Gazan civilians who crossed the breached fence behind them and took part in the killing, looting and abuse, a fact Hamas has since used to blur its own chain of command and responsibility.

The investigation

Israel’s police opened a dedicated unit, later nicknamed the Dinah Project, to collect physical evidence and testimony specifically on sexual crimes, an effort complicated by the fact that most of the victims at the worst-hit sites were killed and could never testify themselves. The most consequential outside inquiry came from the United Nations: Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, sent a mission to Israel and the West Bank in January and February 2024 that reviewed video, photographic and forensic material and interviewed officials, first responders and released hostages. Its March 2024 findings, reported through the UN’s own Office on Sexual Violence in Conflict, stated there were reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape, had been committed against hostages held in Gaza, and that at multiple locations the mission found clear indications of rape and gang rape having occurred against victims who did not survive. The mission also documented that hostages who were later released described sexualized abuse, threats and forced nudity during captivity, and that this pattern was corroborated across accounts gathered independently of one another.

Premeditation, not chaos

The invasion itself was not improvised. Israeli intelligence had obtained a detailed Hamas battle plan, nicknamed the Jericho Wall, more than a year before the attack and did not act on its warnings, a failure later documented in the IDF’s own February 2025 inquiry into its pre-war intelligence lapses. French intelligence services separately intercepted phone calls made by attackers to family members inside Gaza during the assault itself, in which gunmen described in real time what they were doing to victims, a detail that undercuts the claim that the violence was a chaotic byproduct of a firefight rather than a deliberate feature of the operation. Attackers also filmed themselves, on body cameras and captured phones, killing and looting, an unusual choice for men committing crimes they intended to hide, and one that later supplied much of the raw forensic record investigators worked from.

Denial and the reception

Hamas’s political leadership has called every account of sexual violence on October 7 a fabrication, a position it has never supported with an investigation of its own and cannot square with the forensic and testimonial record independently assembled by Israeli and UN investigators. That denial found an echo well beyond Gaza: UN Women, the UN’s own agency for gender issues, said nothing publicly about the reports of rape for roughly seven weeks after the attack, a silence Israeli officials and a number of prominent feminists outside Israel called a glaring double standard given the same institutions’ rapid response to sexual violence allegations elsewhere. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, has repeatedly cast doubt on the extent of the documented sexual violence even after the UN’s own mission published its findings, a position that sits uneasily with her office’s mandate and that critics have noted she does not extend to allegations against Israel. Some of the same voices that dismissed the record as fabricated have also invoked the vocabulary of Pallywood, the older accusation that Palestinian suffering is staged, and turned it back on Israel’s own victims; the specific claim that the October 7 atrocities were invented or exaggerated is answered in full at were the October 7 rapes and atrocities fabricated.

The corrections, and why they don’t change the finding

Critics point to a handful of specific claims from the first weeks, drawn from single sources or secondhand accounts, that were later walked back or could not be independently corroborated, and argue those corrections put the whole record in doubt.

They don’t. The disputed details were narrow and never touched the finding, reached independently by Israeli investigators and the UN’s own mission, that rape and gang rape occurred at multiple sites. The record is also, by its nature, forensic rather than testimonial: because most victims of the worst sexual violence were killed, the case rests on physical and forensic evidence and on the accounts of first responders, which is exactly why the UN mission leaned on medical examination of hostages’ bodies and the statements of hostages who survived captivity. Investigators disclosed these limits instead of papering over them, and the finding held anyway: rape and gang rape occurred at multiple sites on October 7, and against hostages held in Gaza.

October 7 attacks · Who attacked first on October 7 · Were the October 7 rapes and atrocities fabricated · Francesca Albanese · The Record · Pallywood

Sources

The live Wikipedia article, for comparison