Israel’s response to Hamas attacks on October 7, 2009: “Measurement of sexual violence against women and girls” vs. “discrimination and justice will be served”
The State Department said that they don’t want women to talk about what happened to them during their time in captivity because they don’t want the women to know what happened to them.
A weeklong cease-fire between Israel and Hamas allowed the release of more than 100 hostages, including women and children, in return for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody.
Health officials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip say that about 16,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since Oct. 7. They only break out the number of Hamas fighters but claim most of the dead are women and children.
In a Wednesday letter, the Secretary-General acknowledged the dangers faced by civilians in Gaza. He wrote that the accounts of sexual violence during the attacks are appalling.
“Atrocious forms of sexual violence need to be thoroughly investigated. We need to make sure that justice is served because that’s what we owe the victims,” Türk said.
Israel claims the U.N. was slow to act on the allegations of sexual violence against women. Israel says it collected more than 1,500 eyewitness accounts of rape or evidence of sexual violence from Hamas attacks. Hamas denies its fighters were involved in sexual violence.
“These were serious decisions to brutalize and destroy Israeli women and girls,” said Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN. This was planned. This was planned. This was told.
Israel said that the evidence of sexual violence on October 7 is overwhelming, with witness accounts of raping women, bodies of women found with their clothes off, and others shot through the head and breast.
Many young women arrived in bloody, shredded rags, and their underwear was often very bloody. Several female soldiers were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast and it appeared to be a systematic genital cutting of a group of victims, said the leader of her unit.
For weeks after Oct. 7, staff members worked through hundreds of bodies, many of them charred, injured or mutilated beyond recognition, she said. Some arrived at the base with limbs removed.
A first responder at a kibbutz told Israeli officials that they encountered the body of a woman in the shower of a home with her hands tied, Reichert said. In a video shown to the United Nations audience, one first responders described how he saw gunshot wounds to the breasts and genitals of men and women. In another video, a woman described as a survivor of the rave attack said she witnessed multiple men rape the same woman, then mutilate her.
A survivor from the Nova rave, a music festival where hundreds of young people were killed, told responders that “everything was an apocalypse of corpses,” with dead women who were missing clothes, Reichert said.
Firsthand accounts of injuries suffered by a first-responder in an Israeli home involving a woman who was killed in Oct. 7 attacks
Yael Reichert, a superintendent of an Israeli national police unit, recounted testimony from survivors of the attacks and first responders who witnessed the immediate aftermath.
“I’m standing in front of you to make sure that you hear the voices of those women that are no longer here to scream out what happened to them,” Greiniman said.
She wasn’t wearing clothes. He said that she had different objects in her female organs. We couldn’t comprehend how she was Abused in a way we could not deal with.
Simcha Greiniman, a volunteer rescue worker who helped collect bodies on Oct. 7, recounted discovering the body of a woman laying on the floor of her home.
Israel’s case was detailed in testimony from three Israelis at the U.N. on Monday.
This week, the pressure on United Nations officials rose after a remarkable session on Monday that included firsthand accounts form Israeli responders of injuries they saw on the bodies of victims.
Up First Briefing: Key GOP Debate Takeaways; Israel Alleges Sexual Violence by Hamas, aka The Checkered Scarf
If you listen closely during Ridley Scott’s latest biopic film Napoleon, you’ll hear the delicate sounds of a piano that once belonged to the French emperor himself. Napoleon’s second wife, Marie-Louise, received the instrument that was more than 200 years old. It was used in two introspective moments in the film’s score.
Two recent incidents of violence against people wearing keffiyeh in the U.S. have drawn attention to the checkered scarf, which has become a symbol for Palestinians. The British man at the playground in Brooklyn was involved in one of the other ones. Three students from the Palestinian community were shot in Vermont. Who wears the keffiyeh, and what is it?
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Source: Up First briefing: Key GOP debate takeaways; Israel alleges sexual violence by Hamas
Five Anatomy of Haley’s Debatbate with the U.N. Observator General Relativity in the Light of Kevin McCarthy’s Retirement
Haley, a former U.N. ambassador, was the leading Republican in last night’s debate. Donald Trump is still the leader in the polls, even though he has not participated in the debates. The five took from last night are listed here.
Kevin McCarthy decided to retire at the end of the year, after making history as the only speaker removed by a vote of his colleagues.
Senate Republicans voted yesterday to prevent debate on a security funding bill that would include money for Ukraine and Israel. President Biden warned Congress that it needed to approve funding for Ukraine before the holiday break, or it would strengthen Russian President Vladimir Putin’s position. Republican lawmakers want to see U.S. border security and immigration policy measures added to the package.