"Atrocities do not begin with the machinery of killing."

"They begin with a failure to believe victims. In the months following October 7, that failure has repeated itself with alarming speed: the silencing of testimony, the politicization of sexual violence, the grotesque inversion in which perpetrators are valourized and survivors shamed into silence."

"As Elie Wiesel taught us, silence in the face of evil is complicity with evil itself." 

Irwin Cotler, human rights activist, former Canadian attorney-general 

 

"There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves."

"Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood."

"October 7, 2023 was such a moment."

Cochav Elkayam Levy, chairman/founder The Civil Commission 

 

"What emerges is not a collection of isolated incidents, but a coherent and repeated pattern of violence, carried out across multiple locations and phases, from the initial attacks, through abduction and transfer, to prolonged captivity and deliberate digital circulation of abuse." 

"Perpetrators recorded, livestreamed and distributed acts of abuse and torture through social media and victims' own digital accounts." 

"In many cases, families first learned of the fate of their loved ones through images and videos sent by perpetrators."

Silenced No More -- October 7, 2023 Report

Jehad Alshrafi  2024   AP

 

 A report on the thorough investigation of the horrific events of 7 October 2023 has now been released; its contents seek to 'prove' to an disbelieving world that the most unbelievably barbaric, planned sadistic violence took place in southern Israel on that fateful day, violence of a nature so savagely inhumane that it becomes difficult to comprehend how any but the most profanely psychopathic of sub-humans could possibly have taken part in the mass demonstration of hell-on-Earth. And even though many of the perpetrators used body cams to videotape the atrocities that they and others were gleefully engaged in while they committed gruesome acts of bestiality, soon afterward to make them publicly available on social media, the world turned away.

 

Women's groups gave short shrift to the reality of the mass atrocity. The United Nations special Human Rights commission eventually expressed its dismay at Israel's response in Gaza to the October 7 Palestinian terrorist invasion. Western media shifted to questioning the commission of such atrocities in lock-step with Muslim groups denying any such event had taken place where children and women and men were systematically raped and tortured, maimed and murdered. The world's indifference and preference to cite Palestinian propaganda of victimhood and oppression justifying violence left Jews stunned and abandoned.

 

Over 430 interviews were conducted by the commission where survivors, witnesses, returned hostages and family members told of their experiences. A vast total of 10,000 photographs and video segment of the attack were reviewed. Recurring patterns of sexual abuse were identified in the report to establish that "The repetitions of these patterns demonstrates that their crimes were not isolated acts of brutality but formed part of a broader operational method used during the attack and its aftermath". 

 

The site of the Nova music festival, where hundreds of revelers were killed and abducted in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, as Israel marked the annual Memorial Day, near Kibbutz Reim in southern Israel, April 21. (Ohad Zwigenberg/The Associated Press)

 

The 300-page report details rape, gang rape, sexual torture, intentional burning and mutilation, deliberate shots to the head, face, and genital area; killing and execution following or in conjunction with sexual and gender-based violence; post-mortem sexual abuse, humiliation, and desecration of bodies; forced nudity and exposure; handcuffing, binding, and restraint; public display and parading of women and children and the abduction of mothers and children; filming and digital dissemination of sexual and gender-based violence, including the use of social media to document, glorify and amplify the atrocities; threats of forced marriage and as well rape and other forms of sexual violence against boys and men. 

 

A new word made its presence in the report, a word whose meaning becomes clear in consideration of acts geared to destroying the family unit through torture and other associated means where the death of a grandmother appeared on her Facebook account, a picture of a murdered son was sent to his mother, and where relatives were forced under threat of death to sexually abuse one another. The appalling lack of conscience, of humanity in carrying out and delighting in these atrocities speaks volumes of the level of hatred consuming human souls, of people who felt triumphant and proud of their inhumanity, eager to demonstrate proof of their involvement in despicably degraded acts of vicious malice.

 

It took 1,800 hours of visual material where researchers found evidence of sexual torture and mutilation, executions linked to sexual violence, gang rape, and sexual assaults taking place in the presence of family members. From the initial pride of nightmarish acts of inhumanity, to turning around to claim that these horribly morbid acts were perpetrated by Israelis on Palestinians typifies Palestinian propaganda-craft so welcome to some Western news sources. And so, just as the Silenced No More report reached the public so too did a hideous 'opinion piece' see publication in The New York Times, alleging rapes of Palestinian prisoners by their Israeli captors. 

 

Moral shame is a civilizational virtue that has escaped the Palestinians and their supporters, along with much of Western legacy media, along with academic institutions and trade unions which allow their once-respected institutions to be turned into frenzied anti-Israel hotspots with accusations of 'genocide' against the world's favourite 'victims' of Israeli 'occupation' and genocidal intentions.

 

An Israeli soldier patrols one of the sites of the October 7 attacks.

Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images

 

In one particularly harrowing example, the report details three separate incidents of rape at the site of the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza perimeter, citing a survivor who was hiding in the immediate vicinity of the attack.

“I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams—screams you have never heard anywhere,” the survivor is quoted as saying. Their account is corroborated by another survivor, according to the report, who also spoke about hearing the rapes, as well as others who later saw the bodies of the victims, their clothes torn, legs spread and intimate areas mutilated.

At least six other incidents of people directly witnessing rapes and gang rapes are outlined in the report, with all of the witnesses describing victims being shot dead. In one case, a witness said she saw a young woman being raped by several men, mutilated and shot dead.

CNN Report Review 

Homes looted and destroyed during the October 7 Hamas attacks against Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel.   Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

 

"We cannot prevent future atrocities if we ignore, deny, question, or look away from them."

"Nor can we begin to prevent what we do not know -- or choose not to fully understand."

Cochav Elkayam-Levy, The Civil Commission