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More than two and a half years after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, a specially appointed Civil Commission on Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children published on Tuesday the most comprehensive report to date documenting the terror group’s systematic use of sexual violence, rape, and “kinocide” during the assault.
Among the key findings of the 300-page report are examples of gang-rape, sexual violence to terrorize families, and even some cases where relatives and victims were forced to perform sexual acts on each other.
“I see this report as a watershed moment, a moment of before and after, because once it is released, it will no longer be a question of whether this happened, but of what the consequences are,” Cochav Elkayam-Levy, chair of the commission, told The Jerusalem Post in a special interview ahead of the report’s release.
She said that her team, composed of lawyers, researchers, and medical and forensic professionals, worked tirelessly to “ensure that they [the victims] will be questioned no more, that they will be silenced no more.”
Titled Silenced No More, the report, which will form the basis of a historical archive of images and testimonies of the brutal offensive, comes amid ongoing denial or downplaying by top human rights and women’s rights officials and activists, who continue to refute that Hamas terrorists carried out a well-planned and systematic attack, using sexual violence to terrorize their victims.
“They filmed the victims to make sure that the world knew what was happening,” noted Elkayam-Levy, pointing out that the digital documentation shared by the terrorists themselves on October 7, forms the basis of the report.
“We felt deeply obligated to expose everything,” she said. “This was sexual terror in the most exceptional cruelty, and I think one important aspect of it was the digital documentation, the fact that the crimes were glorified.”
Elkayam-Levy points to the video of 22-year-old Shani Louk, who was kidnapped from the Nova Festival, lying semi-naked and twisted on the flatbed of a pick-up truck surrounded by armed terrorists beating and spitting on her dead body as one example.
Yet, despite such early evidence, as well as compelling testimonies from eye-witnesses and first responders, many so-called professionals around the world refused to recognize that sexual violence had taken place or that it had been used as a tool of terror.
“That was the moment that broke us all,” Elkayam-Levy said. “It wasn’t just denied by social media trolls. It was denied by people like Professor Judith Butler, who said, ‘I’m not sure; I haven’t seen the evidence of the rape.’ When is a rape victim ever questioned in that way by a feminist scholar? When do we ever ask, ‘I haven’t seen the evidence of your rape?’”
'Sexual violence is always the most denied crime'
Elkayam-Levy admitted that “sexual violence is always the most denied crime… but [in this instance] we saw another level of denial by those who are supposed to believe, and that made us understand that we have to create something completely different.”
The legal scholar and human rights advocate said that the commission has worked to make sure to collect and document all the materials “in the most meticulous way.”
“We used reports that were written previously [for guidance] for reference on how to show the evidence we had accumulation and we put everything together, archived and preserved each and every piece of information, in such a way that those crimes will never be denied,” she said.
“We cannot start fighting this [denial] if we don’t expose what happened,” said Elkayam-Levy, adding that among the most disturbing findings were cases where “family members were sexually abused or threatened in front of one another… forced to commit sexual acts on each other.”
Alongside the systematic sexual violence that became painfully apparent through their research, the civil commission experts also coined a totally new concept: kinocide.
Elkayam-Levy describes it as the “systematic torture and violence against families… kin, as a familial relation, and cide, as in the systematicity of it.”
“While we were looking and analyzing the videos, we started seeing the pattern,” she said. “You start seeing videos of families and the moments when the terrorists entered the houses… sometimes, they took the phones of the victim themselves and started broadcasting their torture… when you see the father or the mother devastated, screaming, the children screaming or begging for their life … these moments made us understand that we’re seeing something that needs to be defined.”
After recognizing this phenomenon, Elkayam-Levy said she began calling other legal experts and scholars around the world to ask them if a term for this kind of torture already existed. She found that, while it had taken place in multiple other conflict zones, including by the Islamic State against the Yazidi population in Iraq and Syria, no formal definition of such terror existed.
Labeling such crimes, she explained, has helped the victims, not just in Israel, to find the right language to express themselves.
“We’re now actually helping them as expert witnesses in cases being litigated here in Israel for the families themselves to be recognized as victims of terror, because this was a unique terror targeting families,” Elkayam-Levy said.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that systematic sexual violence, rape, and kinocide took place on October 7, Elkayam-Levy said there continues to be denial, including from some officials in the United Nations, who refuse to accept that such atrocities took place.
She believes that such denials have helped to fuel antisemitism globally but, she said, she is hopeful that exposing these crimes will aid in supporting victims of rape everywhere, who, even in 2026, are not automatically believed.
Elkayam-Levy also said it was such denials that allowed the Civil Commission to keep on going even as it uncovered some extremely gruesome and disturbing testimonies, including from those who were kidnapped and held hostage for many months.
“The fact that scholars continue to cast doubt and say, ‘show me the evidence,’ is why we continued collecting the testimonies and creating an archive of what happened under the most compelling international standards,” she said, adding that their goal was to make sure that “it cannot be denied anymore.”
“We cannot prevent what is not known, right?” Elkayam-Levy said. “We cannot even begin to prevent future atrocities if we ignore the truth of what happened, if we don’t know what was the nature and dynamics of these crimes.”
Elkayam-Levy is hopeful that the report – with its comprehensive, meticulously documented archive – will be adopted and used by international organizations and parliaments around the world to recognize the extent of Hamas’s crimes on October 7, and in the two years afterwards, while the hostages were in Gaza.
“What we want to see is formal recognition and adoption of the report and its findings,” she said, adding that “we are saving our energy now for that battle now.”