Content Warning: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault
A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.
And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.
What Israel is doing is genocide. But I haven’t seen people saying Hamas was justified in their most heinous acts.
I don’t doubt there are war crimes being committed, but I don’t think I buy that it’s genocide. Genocide requires systemic intent, otherwise isn’t basically everything genocide?
If you haven’t seen systemic intent, you either haven’t paid attention or your news sources are very biased. That’s literally why Israel has been getting so much heat from other countries.
Announcing that over 1 million people have to flee south within 24 hours is already a humanitarian crisis, but then they bombed the evacuation routes, refugee camps, hospitals, indiscriminately leveled entire blocks, killed a record number of journalists, pushed the line farther south, and generally repeated all of the above. Not systematic enough?
There is undoubtedly systemic intent. You don’t just accidentally bomb entire neighborhoods and refugee camps and hospitals and homes and schools. You certainly don’t accidentally shoot videos of celebrating the destruction of said neighborhoods and then post it on Telegram for everyone to link and share. You don’t abduct civilians from another location to use as hostages.