Documenting its rape, torture and mutilation on Oct. 7 and after, even as many choose to deny what happened.
By The Editorial Board – May 13, 2026 5:42 pm ET – Wall Street Journal
Reading “Silenced No More,” the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.
The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.
“I saw them raping her,” says Raz Cohen, who escaped the Nova Music Festival where 396 people were slaughtered. “Then they murdered her. And then they raped her again.”
Eden Wessely, who came to Nova to rescue a friend, found and filmed a naked, burned body. “Her dress was pulled up, and she wasn’t wearing underwear, not because it burned, because there was no trace. . . . Her legs were spread. Her genitals were exposed.” A review by forensic pathologists confirmed these details.
Yoni Saadon recounts another horror: “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. . . . I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’” Later he saw “a beautiful woman with the face of an angel and 8 or 10 fighters beating and raping her.” The last one shot her in the head. Each example here is of a civilian non-combatant.
A male says he was gang-raped at the Nova site, providing medical records and a detailed account: “They laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll.” The Hamas invaders had been given operational materials including Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists such as “take off your pants/take your clothes off,” “lie down” and “spread your legs.” The planned sexual degradation speaks to years of Palestinian propaganda that treats Jews as sub-human.
Sexual abuse continued for hostages, who are on video being groped and humiliated during abductions. In one video, a female hostage begs for her life while the narrator says, “This is one of the Jewish dogs.”
Former hostage Ilana Gritzewsky says, “one terrorist started touching me; he put his hand under my shirt and started sliding it down my leg. That’s when I fainted.” On waking, she was “surrounded by Hamas people, my shirt up here, my pants down here.” After being freed, she learned they had broken her pelvis.
Romi Gonen tells of 16 days of assault. Arbel Yehud says she was assaulted throughout her 482 days as a hostage. Two former hostages, minors who are family members, “reported that they were forced to perform ‘sexual acts on one another.’”
We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an antisemitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.
People visit the site of the Nova music festival where hundreds were killed and abducted in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack in southern Israel on April 21 Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
Appeared in the May 14, 2026, print edition as ‘The Truth About Hamas’.
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