Oct. 7 sexual violence was patterned, documented, prosecutable, new report argues

A two-year independent investigation into the sexual and gender-based crimes committed during the October 7 massacre and against hostages in Hamas captivity argues that the next stage is no longer only documenting that the crimes occurred, but determining how they can be prosecuted. 

The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, led by Israel Prize laureate and international law expert Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, on Tuesday published its report, “Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity,” presenting what it describes as the most extensive evidentiary record compiled to date on the sexual atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the captivity in Gaza.

The report’s central contribution is not only its conclusion that sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the attack, but its attempt to move from recognition to prosecution – a question that has shadowed the issue since the earliest days after the massacre, when many victims were murdered, scenes were burned or destroyed, forensic documentation was partial, and surviving witnesses were often traumatized, saw only fragments, or were unable to testify.

The answer offered by the report is an evidentiary model built not on a single witness, video, or forensic finding, but on cumulative proof: preserved materials, cross-referenced accounts, recurring patterns, and the legal connection between specific proven crimes and the wider machinery of October 7.

That model rests on what the Commission calls a dedicated war crimes archive comprising more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, amounting to well over 1,800 hours of visual analysis, alongside more than 430 testimonies, interviews, and meetings with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts, and family members. Victims represented in the data analysis, the report said, included 52 nationalities.

The material was logged, coded, cross-referenced, mapped across time and geography, and integrated into a database focused specifically on sexual and gender-based crimes. The investigation also used open-source material, geolocation-supported datasets, site visits, expert consultations, and trauma-informed documentation practices.

Because the Commission began collecting evidence immediately after the attacks, the report said, it preserved early and perishable material, including original footage, communications, and testimonies that were later removed or lost.

This is where the report seeks to answer the prosecutorial problem.

In ordinary criminal cases, investigators often work backward from a victim, a scene, a suspect, and a body of forensic evidence, but October 7 did not present ordinary crime scenes: Many victims did not survive, some bodies were burned, first responders were working under mass-casualty conditions, witnesses often saw only fragments of what happened, and some of the most direct evidence came from perpetrators’ own footage, victims’ phones, family testimony, body-identification sites, and released-hostage accounts.

The legal analysis argues that such fragmentation does not make prosecution impossible but requires a different method: preserving the available evidence, testing it against other sources, identifying repeated conduct across locations and phases of the attack, and determining whether specific incidents can be placed inside the broader criminal context.

That broader context is critical because the report argues that prosecutors would not necessarily have to prove every sexual crime committed on October 7, or prove that sexual violence, as a category, was independently widespread or systematic. Under international criminal law, even a smaller number of proven incidents can carry legal weight if they are tied to the wider criminal context: the massacre, the abductions, captivity in Gaza, and the broader attack on civilians.

That distinction is what gives the archive its legal significance.

A single piece of evidence may help establish one crime, but a cross-referenced archive shows how that crime fits into a broader system of violence.

The report identifies 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence across attack sites. These include rape and gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, forced nudity, executions linked to sexual violence, postmortem sexual abuse, sexual assaults carried out in the presence of family members, filming and digital dissemination, threats of forced marriage, and sexual violence against boys and men.

The examples themselves serve as the factual basis for the report’s argument that the crimes were not isolated episodes but conduct that appeared repeatedly and in recognizable forms across different settings.

The report concludes, as the Commission’s legal position, that these acts constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocidal acts, torture, and terrorism-linked sexual and gender-based violence under international law.

Former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, in a foreword to the report, wrote that evidence in atrocity cases, particularly those involving sexual violence, is often fragmented, that victims are frequently unable to testify, and that many of those who could have testified are no longer alive.

Under such conditions, he wrote, the construction of a reliable evidentiary archive becomes indispensable. Its function, he said, is “not judicial in the formal sense,” but it preserves the factual foundation on which legal, historical, and moral judgment depends.

One of the report’s most difficult arguments concerns the targeting of families. It says some sexual violence was not directed only at the immediate victim, but at the family surrounding that victim. In documented cases, victims were sexually abused in front of relatives. In at least one case, the report says, family members were coerced into acts of sexual abuse against one another.

The report calls this “kinocidal sexual violence,” referring to sexual violence that exploits family bonds – between parents and children, spouses, siblings, and relatives – as part of the harm itself, so that the assault is not only on the victim’s body, but also on the family relationships turned into another instrument of terror.

The report also treats digital dissemination as part of the crime. Perpetrators filmed, livestreamed, circulated images and videos, and used victims’ own digital accounts to reach families and communities. Visibility was not incidental documentation, the report argues, but a method of humiliation, intimidation, and psychological warfare that extended the harm beyond the original act.

The factual findings also note the ethical dilemma in documenting such material: preserving evidence without further circulating footage created to humiliate victims and traumatize families. For that reason, the report said, most archived material is kept confidential to protect victims’ privacy.

The report further extends the factual scope of sexual violence beyond the day of the massacre, documenting sexual assault, sexual humiliation, sexualized torture, and threats during abduction, transfer, and prolonged captivity. The investigation says such abuse affected women and men, and in some cases continued for months.

This matters legally because it shifts the inquiry from October 7 as a single day of atrocities to a continuum of crimes: the attack, the abductions, the transfer into Gaza, the conditions of captivity, the filming of hostages, and the public display of their suffering.

Captivity, according to the report, was not a separate chapter but a continuation of the same coercive violence.

The report also argues that evidence of sexual violence against boys and men does not weaken the gendered character of the crimes. Rather, it reflects how sexual violence can be used to dominate, degrade, and humiliate victims across gender lines.

The proposed prosecution path is therefore not limited to ordinary criminal indictments, but calls for a specialized framework for October 7 sexual and gender-based crimes: investigators and prosecutors trained in conflict-related sexual violence, judges or panels equipped to handle such cases, trauma-informed procedures for survivors and witnesses, and international cooperation to pursue suspects and evidence beyond Israel.

The framework is not aimed only at the individuals who physically carried out sexual crimes. The report maps potential responsibility across several layers: direct perpetrators; those who planned, ordered, facilitated, or aided the crimes; Hamas and affiliated leadership in Gaza and abroad; suspects who returned to Gaza or fled to third countries; and those allegedly involved through incitement, financing, facilitation, amplification, or other forms of material support.

Such a framework, the report suggests, would allow Israel to use its proximity to victims, witnesses, families, and evidence, while drawing on legal experience developed in international prosecutions of sexual violence in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and other mass-atrocity cases.

It also calls for victims to be treated not only as sources of evidence, but as participants in the process, with access to information, representation, protection, and the ability to be heard at key stages, including sentencing and reparations.

Beyond trials, the report recommends targeted sanctions, asset freezes, travel bans, financial restrictions, international evidence-sharing, legal aid, psychosocial support, community recovery programs, and active measures against denial or minimization of the crimes.

Hamas has denied allegations of sexual violence by its members during the October 7 attack, despite documentation cited or reflected in the report from Israeli officials, international bodies, journalists, civil society investigators, survivors, and witnesses.

For the report’s authors, however, the question is no longer only whether the world will acknowledge the crimes. It is whether the archive can become a legal foundation.

“For two years, we have listened to survivors, painstakingly examined the evidence, and confronted material that is often beyond comprehension,” Elkayam-Levy said. “This report is the result of that work. It establishes that sexual violence was not incidental; it was systematic, deliberate, and embedded in the attack itself.”

The report does not replace a criminal trial, nor does it purport to make final judicial findings. But it presents itself as a bridge between documentation and prosecution: a record meant to preserve evidence, withstand denial, and give courts a framework for pursuing accountability.