A team of United Nations experts tasked with gathering information on sexual violence linked to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel found “reasonable grounds to believe” that some victims were sexually assaulted, including rape and gang rape, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
“In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed,” a press release announcing the report’s findings said. “The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations.”
The 23-page report said the team also found “clear and convincing information” that some of the women and children taken back to Gaza that day by Hamas as hostages were subjected to “rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” There were “reasonable grounds to believe,” it said, “that this violence may be ongoing.”
If you mean the Palestinian deaths, I could’ve bought that argument when they were 2K, 5K maybe 10K. When there was some semblance of proportionality. When we are where we are, when hunger is used as a weapon for so long… I can’t personally. At this point I don’t think anything could wash the Israelis’ hands. What’s worse, the people who remain alive, the images of emaciated kids with missing limbs that will be broadcast worldwide once the media blockade loosens will keep reminding the whole world what went down. Parallels will be drawn to Nazi Germany, because it will look similar, even if the scale and details are different. I don’t think any amount of human shields arguments can recover them from this. Personally I think this shit show is gonna break Israeli society long term.
Oh and the political blowback can’t be contained to the region because there are Palestinian immigrants all over the world and many if not most have lost family and they won’t stay silent, just like Jews didn’t stay silent. You can’t argue them into accepting that loss just like you can’t argue Jews into accepting theirs. Except the numbers are way larger on one side. Expect Palestinian political activism across the West to continue and perhaps intensify as the full scale of death comes to light over the years.