Editor’s note: This story contains graphic and disturbing accounts of sexual violence.
(CNN) — Israeli police are using forensic evidence, videos, witness testimonies and interrogations of suspects to document rape cases during the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7.
Women and girls caught up in the attacks were victims of sexual brutality, physical torture and murder, witnesses say.
Police Superintendent Dudi Katz said officers have collected more than 1,000 statements and more than 60,000 videos related to the attacks, including accounts from people who reported seeing women being raped. She added that investigators do not have firsthand testimony and it is unclear whether any of the rape victims survived.
About 1,200 Israelis were killed and more wounded that day in towns and farms near Gaza when Hamas fighters crossed the border in coordinated attacks, taking more than 240 hostages and precipitating the current war. More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Police Commissioner Shabtai Yaakov stated that the investigation could lead to prosecutions, but for now, documentation is the main mission.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a human rights law expert at Hebrew University, has formed a civil commission with her colleagues to document evidence of atrocities, fearing that as the war devastates Gaza and the lives of thousands of Palestinians, the world seems willing to overlook violence against Israeli women and girls. “We will never know everything that has happened to them,” Elkayam-Levy told CNN. “We know that most of the women who were raped and sexually assaulted were also murdered.”
He pointed to a United Nations statement just a week after the terrorist attacks that made no mention of sexual violence.
“It is much worse than mere silence or an insult to us as Israeli women, to our children and to our people,” she said, referring to the UN. “When they don’t recognize us, when they don’t recognize what has happened here, they are failing humanity.”
Shocking reports
The accounts provided to CNN detail horrible, almost inhumane crimes.
A paramedic with the elite 669 Special Tactics Rescue Unit said he had encountered all types of victims before, but the violence on Oct. 7 was unimaginable.
At Kibbutz Be’eri, he went house to house looking for anyone still alive after the massacre and found the bodies of two young teenagers in a bedroom.
“One was lying on the bed. Another was on the floor,” he told CNN.
The combat paramedic, who did not want his name published, said the girl on the ground was face down. He had no doubt that the teenager had been raped, but he did not know if she had died before.
“His pants are pulled down towards his knees and he has a gunshot wound in the back of his neck, near his head,” he said, “there is a pool of blood around his head and traces of semen on his lower back.”
The girl in the bed had bruises all over her body and a gunshot wound to the chest, he said.
“These are two girls who have just been murdered, executed, maybe raped in their own room,” he told CNN.
Others reported similar horrors at the Nova music festival, where hundreds of young people were murdered by terrorists.
Festival organizer Rami Shmuel said he saw unclothed female victims while escaping, and has no doubts about what happened.
“They had their legs spread and some of them were dismembered,” he told CNN.
She added that it appeared that women were specifically targeted for sexual violence.
“Why not [quitaron] clothing to men?” he asked. “Only to women, only to young girls, to pretty girls, why?”
A long investigation ahead
Israeli police acknowledge that the investigation could take months, and Elkayam-Levy said it is not yet clear how or where potential prosecutions will be handled, although he noted that some families of dual citizens could seek justice in countries other than Israel, as well as how to file lawsuits before international courts.
However, at a news conference, officials offered a stark view of the evidence they have been gathering, which included the testimony of a woman who witnessed the attack at the Nova festival from her hiding place on October 7.
“They bent someone over and I understood that he was raping her, and then he was passing her on to someone else,” the woman, who was not identified, said of what she saw.
“She was alive, she was standing and she was bleeding from her back. I saw him pulling her hair. She had long brown hair. I saw him cutting her chest and then throwing it onto the road, throwing it at someone else and they started to play with him.”
The witness added: “I remember seeing another person raping her, and while I was still inside her he shot her in the head.”