The Horror of the Civil Commission Report on Sexual Violence
[Reader Advisory: This article includes graphic descriptions of the sexual violence that took place on October 7th, drawn from the Civil Commission Report. Some readers may find the content distressing.]
Despite the clear evidence, many people denied, minimized or downplayed what happened on October 7th. In their minds, Hamas are and were misunderstood activists – as Jeremy Corbyn, ex leader of the Labour party in the UK, famously hailed them – “friends”, rather than bloodthirsty crazed murderers . Given the grotesque halo of kindness that so many progressives placed on them – after all how possibly could downtrodden “minority groups” like Hamas or the civilians who happily came over the fences with them ever do any wrong – it wasn’t really that surprising that the international feminist movement just shrugged and for so long commented little more than “nothing to see here”. But it was clear from when the first reports of the atrocities started coming through, that the agenda of Hamas on October 7th had been to commit some of the most awful carnage and sexualized violence ever seen in post medieval times. No, I think more accurately it came close to equalling any of the horrors seen in the medieval or ancient worlds. The Civil Commission on the October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children released their meticulous report on gender based violence during the attacks on May 12th 2026. This followed on from a number of prior reports by the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel (February 2024), the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (May 2024), Human Rights Watch (July 2024), and the Dinah Project (July 2025). The Civil Commission builds on those reports through its forensic analysis and cross referencing of survivor, first responder and other witness testimony, and sources of physical evidence. As well as the videos of their atrocities put online by Hamas; some sent to family members using the social media accounts of the victims, and the taunting messages sent by Hamas over weeks and months to torture the parents of the hostages.
Reading the report is terrifying. For me, and I do not wish to show any disrespect to the memory of the victims of the Shoah, it felt similar in its impact to when, as a teenager, I first became aware of the crimes of the Nazis. Its impact is to dislocate you from your grasp on reality – the overwhelming horror and pain of what happened tear away those foundations that you thought anchored you – most viscerally it tugs violently at your belief, the inner voice which gets us out of bed every day, that the world is fundamentally a good and safe place. If you are a Jew, as with the Shoah, this account of October 7th pulls that away for ever.
Some we already know.
That 41 children, ranging in age from four and a half months to 17 years who were violently abducted from their homes. That the perpetrators killed the parents of many of those before their eyes, moments before abducting them.
But the account of the Commission report as I said is terrifying, particularly in terms of its documentation of sexual violence. In what follows I use language largely directly drawn from the report itself, with some editing for space.
Female corpses being abused, mocked, or burned. Female hostages being tormented, abused, taunted, or humiliated on camera. Videos of female hostages showing their faces covered in plastic or cloth, preventing them from seeing or breathing properly. Hamas and Gazan civilians celebrating over abused female bodies. Beautiful young women shot in the eye whilst still alive, disfiguring their faces so that their families would suffer more. Male victims subjected to extreme forms of sexualized violence – their genital areas targeted, including through gunshots, intentional burning, mutilation, forced undressing, and post-mortem desecration. A young man whose groin was intentionally set on fire. Bodies of men found naked or partially naked or with their penises mutilated after death.
Bodies without hands. Without heads. Without legs. Some naked. Abused. Embracing each other. Things had penetrated their internal organs.
An eyewitness report describes how two Hamas fighters attacked a female victim who they had “caught near a car.” The eyewitness states that she was fighting back and not allowing them to strip her. Then they threw her on the ground and one of the fighters took a shovel and beheaded her, and her head rolled along the ground.
An eyewitness account recounts a scene involving a male and female victim that had been deliberately staged: the male victim’s genitals had been severed, and, in the witness’ words, it appeared that “someone had engineered it” so that the woman’s hand was placed holding the severed genitals.
In the video materials filmed by [a] witness and archived with the Civil Commission, a victim is seen lying on her back, without underwear, with her dress torn, her legs spread, and her genital area exposed. Her face and upper body show visible signs of burning. Three forensic pathologists who reviewed the materials together with the Civil Commission confirmed that it depicts a female body, genital area exposed without underwear, with open wounds on the right thigh, and that the body had been exposed to fire.
The report is clear that these incidents were not random or “just” excesses arising in the “heat of battle”. Their analysis of recovered Hamas guides and planning documents and other evidence shows that sexual violence and terrorization and murder of children and families was a clearly planned intentional and integral part of the attacks.
The planning and intention are also reflected in the way that the perpetrators were observed by eyewitnesses celebrating the massacres, filming scenes and chanting religious slogans.
“Across all sites of the attacks reviewed by the Commission, perpetrators were observed celebrating the massacres, chanting religious slogans, and filming scenes of violence and humiliation. In many cases, perpetrators invoked religious phrases framing the atrocities as acts of divine victory or fulfilment. Civilian property in the kibbutzim was also defaced with religious graffiti glorifying the attacks. For example, the Civil Commission documented several homes in Be’eri bearing inscriptions in Arabic, including phrases such as ‘This is one of God’s days’ and ‘God is great.’ ”
Yes, some of the stories in the report we sadly already knew, like the story of the Taasa family, but it bears giving witness to again. As Hamas stormed the village of Netiv Haasara, where the family lived, they entered their home and threw in a grenade. The father, Gil (z’l), threw himself over it to protect his children. Gil was killed and the two boys Koren (12) and Shay (8) were severely injured – Shay’s eye was hanging out of his socket and he had pieces of grenade in his chest. One of the boys asks the other “Why am I alive?. The terrorists live streamed the murder on social media which was seen by friends of the family. Mercifully, the boys survived the ordeal and made it to their mother Sabine’s home.
Yes, we know the story in all its awfulness. But it becomes somehow even more awful when we see it in the wider context of the avalanche of rape, extreme sexual violence, carnage, child murder, and child abduction that was planned and executed by Hamas, as detailed in the Report. Planned by the friends of Jeremy Corbyn.
Being subject to sexual violence is something Jews are used to. Religiously inspired rape and murder of Jews has been a feature of Jewish life through the ages. Just as Hamas cried that God is great, the Crusaders screamed to avenge Christ’s death as they rampaged through the Rhineland raping and murdering thousands of Jews. They did so as well as they murdered and raped Jews in England in 1189 and 1190 as the Crusades got underway.
Sexual violence was also a feature of the Shoah, with the Nazis using it to terrorize, control and dehumanize Jews. For a variety of reasons, including the media’s framing, much of this was underreported in the years after and with echoes to October 7th, some alleged that it had not happened. Yet the reality was one that included rape, forced prostitution and sexual slavery.
There is no scale of human mass murder and rape, where we can easily rank one instance of evil depravity against another. For me though, the full account of the Civil Commission is as unimaginably awful as anything I have ever heard or conceived of.
But of course, the progressive left jumped and continues to jump to deny that anything happened, or that if it did, then to justify or minimize it, or both. As we saw before October 7th, and after, Hamas is normalized by the academics. That luminary of feminist sociology at Berkeley, the home of social justice, Judith Butler makes her awful argument that Hamas did not come from “nowhere”. It is normalized as well by those who marched in the streets chanting from the river to the sea, and by the police and governments who let them. It was this normalization that gave permission to women’s rights groups across the world to ignore or deny the sexual and family based violence of October 7th for so long.
I recently came across a shocking post by an academic I know from late 2023 defending another post by Owen Jones, a left-wing Guardian columnist. Jones, after viewing the harrowing footage of October 7th shown by the Israeli Government to journalists in November 2023, whilst nominally condemning any acts of violence against civilians, notes that yes the bodies of children are seen, and yes attempts to murder are seen, but strangely concludes that we don’t actually see footage of the actual act of killing. As argued by Chaim Dragelof in the London Jewish News at the time, Owen’s aim was of course to engage in an act of crass equivocation, and, to as far as he possibly could, undermine the severity and impact of the footage that he had seen. Undermining the message of October 7th was of course what my academic acquaintance wanted to do too, as did so many across the left, and thousands and thousands of other academics and activists.
The same academics and activists who carelessly and viciously throw the accusation of genocide at Israel. Well, I challenge them to read the Civil Commission Report and not to follow the logic of the Israeli Government and people after October 7th. That Hamas was not only committed to the violent medieval destruction of the people of Israel, to the rape and torture of Israeli men and women, to the murder of their children, but that it had shown that it could and it would execute that commitment. I challenge them to say what they really think the response of the UK or the United States would be to similar events. I guarantee that response, just as in the second World War, would be far worse and far far more indiscriminate and uncaring for civilian life than Israel’s just and measured response to Hamas has been.
The real genocide and the real sexual and family based violence was that of the Jews by Hamas. It was that of the Yazidis by ISIS in 2014. It was that of the Jews by the Nazis.
Of course, the academics and progressive left know this. They didn’t really need the Civil Commission report or all the other reports to “prove” it to them. Just as Owen Jones did not of course need to see any more pictures. The intention of the terrorists and the broad scope of what had happened was clear the moment the GoPro footage started being streamed. It was clear to Jones, to the women’s rights movement, to that academic I know, and to everyone. But when you are as sure of your righteousness as the social justice warriors of the academy and the elites it trained across the professions are, then it doesn’t matter what the evidence is if it doesn’t fit your narrative.
But we have seen. The Jewish people and their right-thinking allies have seen. And we will remember.
