What They Refused to See: The Dinah Project

The Dinah Project is an initiative founded by three leading figures in Israeli law and human rights: Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, retired Judge Nava Ben-Or, and Col. (Res.) Adv. Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas. Established in the months following the October 7, 2023 attack, the project collected and rigorously analyzed hundreds of testimonies, forensic evidence, images, and medical reports to document the systematic use of sexual violence by Hamas as a weapon of war. The resulting report is now the most comprehensive ever produced on CRSV (Conflict-Related Sexual Violence) related to that day.

When Sexuality Is Turned Into a Weapon

According to the Dinah Project report, Hamas used sexual violence as a war tactic: a strategic tool to dehumanize, humiliate, and break the very fabric of Israeli society. This is not a generic accusation. The evidence gathered includes gang rapes, genital mutilation, forced nudity, and public humiliation. Some victims were killed during or after the assault; others, including released hostages, recounted experiences of sexual abuse, enforced nudity, and threats of rape disguised as “forced marriage.”

One of the most shocking images is that of Shani Louk, whose naked body was dragged publicly and displayed as a war trophy. But behind that viral image lie dozens of less visible testimonies: from rescuers who found naked bodies tied to trees, bearing clear signs of sexual violence; from forensic technicians who documented mutilations; from eyewitnesses and earwitnesses who heard screams, pleas for help, unmistakable sounds.

And yet, in 2024, that very image was awarded by an international photojournalism jury, as if the visual power could be separated from the horror it represents. This is not only erasure, but repeated humiliation: the awarded photo did not honor the pain but recoded it as aesthetic language, once again dehumanizing a Jewish woman already brutalized in life and in death. This is not just a misperception. It is an obscene act. A public celebration of the annihilation of the female body as artistic language, with a coldness reminiscent of the documentary tastes of 20th-century executioners. There is something profoundly disturbing, almost “Nazi-like,” in that cold detachment that turns a tortured body into a symbolic icon.

The Silence That Hurts

The silence surrounding these atrocities was deafening. Not only from international media and institutions, which hesitated to acknowledge the scale of the sexual violence. But above all from that Western feminism that built its power on denouncing patriarchy and male violence—and in this case, remained silent. It looked away. It denied, minimized, or worse: demanded more proof. “Non Una Di Meno,” university feminist collectives, European and international NGOs: all of them, faced with this violence, preferred silence over complexity, ideology over justice.

This selective silence is not just a moral failure. It is a betrayal. It shows that for a part of the Western left and feminist world, women’s bodies only matter when they fit the right narrative. That Israeli women, if raped, are not victims but collateral damage of geopolitics.

But there is more. The silence was accompanied by subtle—and no less serious—forms of cultural complicity:

• Iconographic and symbolic complicity: awarding the photo of Shani Louk as a powerful symbolic work, with no mention of the crime it depicts, transformed violence into artistic language. A sublimation of barbarity that humiliates a second time and legitimizes the voyeuristic gaze on annihilation.
• Academic complicity: in the months following October 7, research centers, gender studies departments, and postcolonial intellectuals avoided any analysis on the issue. As if CRSV did not exist when the victims belong to the “wrong” side of the map.
• Media complicity: many reports referred to “Israeli allegations,” avoiding the word “rape.” Others demanded proof as if they were in a courtroom, not facing a tragedy documented by doctors, witnesses, videos, audio recordings, and survivors.
• Activist complicity: feminist squares and demonstrations continued waving slogans about liberation, completely ignoring the sexual enslavement inflicted on Israeli women, on hostages, on tortured, humiliated, and violated bodies. As if sisterhood had political borders, and women’s bodies only mattered when useful to the cause.

The Dinah Project responded to all this with a powerful tool: a legal and evidentiary model that breaks with traditional paradigms. Instead of relying solely on direct victim testimonies—often impossible to obtain, due to murder or trauma—the report recognizes the value of alternative sources: eyewitnesses and earwitnesses, real-time statements, forensic evidence, visual and audio elements, contextual analysis.

Redefining Justice

The report’s innovative core lies in proposing a new paradigm: conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is not just an individual crime, but an attack on the community, a collective harm aimed at destroying the social and cultural identity of the targeted group. Therefore, the Dinah Project argues, new legal categories, investigative strategies, and tools are needed to break the silence.

The idea of joint criminal responsibility—already adopted in other war crimes contexts—is reasserted here as a key to prosecuting not only those who physically committed the acts, but also those who participated in a collective assault driven by indoctrination, brutality, and the annihilation of the other.

What This Report Asks of Us

The Dinah Project is not just a collection of evidence. It is a political, cultural, and legal act. It asks us to stop ignoring sexual violence when the victims do not fit the dominant narratives. It asks us to recognize that Israeli women can also be victims. That men, when stripped, tortured, humiliated, can also suffer sexual crimes. That the war on bodies is also a war of narratives, and silencing certain stories is a way of perpetuating violence.

And above all, it asks us not to let sexual violence be normalized, relativized, or instrumentalized. Not anymore. Not again. Never Again.