Among the mutilated and butchered bodies of young women slaughtered on October 7, it was their colorful, polished nails that many of the morgue staff remember.
Bright, beautiful, shiny, pink manicures glistening amid the pervasive 'grey and green' of death were often the only reminder of who these girls had been just hours earlier.
Because Hamas-led terrorists had not just executed these women. They had 'deliberately and systematically' defiled them, as the most comprehensive account of the atrocity released by The Civil Commission today shows.
The terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.
Women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. They were executed both during and after rape amid an orgy of violence in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
Heads were decapitated. Pelvic bones shattered. Even after death, sexual assault continued.
A grotesque, medieval obsession with sexual organs pervaded the crime scenes at the Nova Festival and in the Kibbutzim near Gaza.
At Kibbutz Be'eri, nails, sharp objects, and pieces of metal and plastic were similarly embedded in a woman whose body was discovered naked and bound. On another victim, grenades were used.
While ordinarily newspapers censor the full horrors of such accounts, today, as hard as it is, over 430 witnesses, survivors, experts and medical staff ask that you do not look away.
For over two years they have given evidence to The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women's rights NGO established in the wake of October 7, 2023, in response to the failure of international institutions to address the sexual violence committed that day.
The Daily Mail was the first British newspaper granted advance access to the report, fittingly titled 'Silenced No More', which is released today.
It shows it was not just women who were degraded as a 'deliberate tool of terror, humiliation, and control'. Men were also sexually abused and in at least one case gang raped.
Victims were mutilated, with body parts cut off used to create depraved scenes gleefully concocted to traumatize those who discovered them.
‘The purpose was humiliation, not victory,' first responder Eran Masas, who came across one such barbaric arrangement, told The Civil Commission.
Those taken hostage were assaulted in front of loved ones and young relatives forced to commit sex acts on each other, an intentional, premeditated strategy of kinocide to destroy family units even after release from captivity.
The report runs to over 180 pages of utterly harrowing evidence, which collates and corroborates previous testimonies - as well as revealing disturbing new accounts.
The extensive, graphic testimonies are unflinching and seriously distressing.
But, sadly, it is also necessary that they are published in full to finally extinguish perverse doubts that remain over what happened that day.
As Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder of The Civil Commission and lead author of the report, says, it must 'shift the conversation from the question of whether it happened – to what are the consequences and what can we do to prevent such atrocities in the future'.
Because, unbelievably, some still question the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Indeed, even certain sections of the established media have suggested that the extent of sexual violence committed by the terrorists may have been exaggerated.
The UN, too, dragged its heels in recognizing the atrocities committed. It seems 'believe all women' did not apply in this instance.
And so The Civil Commission, funded by philanthropic organizations and its archive supported by the German Embassy in Israel, has examined over 10,000 photographs and videos of the attack totaling more than 1,800 hours of visual analysis.
Testimonies, geolocation imagery, text messages, media reports and open source intelligence have been painstakingly scrutinized.
Crucially, the report finds that the abuse was not isolated.
There was a recurring pattern of rape and gang rape; sexual torture; mutilation; targeted shooting to the face, head and genital area; forced nudity; binding and restraint; genital burning; objects inserted into intimate areas; post-mortem sexual humiliation; and execution during or after sexual assault.
Indeed, when Hamas led other terror groups into Israel they carried Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists commanding victims to 'take off your pants', 'lie down', and 'spread your legs'.
For Israeli first responders arriving at Nova hours later, it was clear extreme violence, sexual humiliation and mutilation was an intentional, widespread tactic deployed that day.
Mr Masas remembers first coming across a bonfire of five or six bodies.
'Every three meters, another body,' he said. 'Gradually: skeletons, then body parts, heads, hands, a severed leg.'
'When you kill, you kill,' he said. 'But when you start doing other things to the person, especially after the person is already dead, what they did… the abuses… the torture… this is something else.'
Such sadism was widespread, with first responders finding 'aluminum cans, grenades, nails, blunt objects, rods, household tools and spike-like instruments, inserted into genitals and other parts of the body'.
Nova survivor Darin Komarov hid in a caravan, where she heard at least three separate rapes.
She said: ‘I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams - screams you have never heard anywhere…
'It’s between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die… And after they finished, they shot her… You hear a bang - and silence.'
She continued: 'This is not rape as it is usually understood…
'There was laughter. There were jokes. They were passing them from one to another… It was done for fun.'
After being rescued, she said she saw their bodies. ‘There wasn’t a single body that just “died normally”,' she said. 'Every single one had gone through torture.’
Volunteer Nachman Shai Revivo remembers the body of a naked man who appeared to have been sexually abused.
His hands were 'clenched' and there was grass and mud still in them as if 'he had been on his stomach and was desperately looking for a hole to crawl into'.
Another Nova survivor, using the pseudonym Sapir, told how a woman was gang raped by terrorists during which one cut her breast off.
'He throws it on the road, and they are playing with it,' she said. A terrorist then 'shot her in the head' while still assaulting her.
Witness Raz Cohen saw a woman pulled out of a vehicle and raped. 'He stabbed her…. I saw her convulsing and fading away…
'And then they raped her again, even after she was no longer moving. I saw them raping her.'
Yoni Saadon hid under a stage at Nova and covered himself in the body of a woman executed in front of him, when he saw another being gang raped.
She screamed: 'Stop it, already, I am going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me.’
When the terrorists finished they laughed and shot her in the head, he added.
'One of the fighters took a shovel and beheaded her, and her head rolled along the ground,' the report states.
A male survivor, known only as D who previously spoke to the Mail, told how he was gang raped at Nova.
‘They laughed… as if I was their sex doll,' he said. ‘I was completely naked. They did whatever they wanted to me.’
On Route 232, the main highway where Nova survivors tried to flee, first responder Itzik Itach came across a female victim who had been sexually defiled.
He said: ‘She had two marks of binding on both hands. Completely naked… The entire groin area was completely damaged.’
Amit Ezra drove down the highway searching for his sister and witnessed burned cars, bodies hacked with tools, girls without clothes.
One dead woman was 'completely without clothes, missing an arm, shot in the head.’ He found his sister alive beneath bodies in a shelter.
Eden Wessely, driving to rescue a friend, found the body of a woman in a black dress who appeared to have been raped beside her husband.
'Half of her face was burned, half wasn’t,' she said of footage she passed to The Civil Commission. 'She had a bullet in her cheek, and she was frozen in that position.'
Similar scenes awaited those first on the scene in the kibbutzim. First responders in Be'eri found a naked woman, her ankle tied with a thick black cord.
Simcha Greinman said: ‘In parts of the body, in the intimate area, nails were embedded.’
A second body found headless and naked was 'mutilated to such an extent that it was impossible to determine whether it was male or female'.
In another house, Mr Greinman came across the body of a woman.
He said: 'In the room were knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers, tools, tools from the household. All of those were embedded in the body. The body was completely mutilated.'
Hamas also 'made strategic use' of videos and social media 'to exert and intensify harm and to perpetuate, glorify, and amplify the atrocities they committed'.
In the morgues, women's bodies arrived with shattered pelvises, bloodied underwear, and mutilated genitals including extensive, targeted burn injuries.
A forensic pathologist said: 'Adults and children were bound and burned with wire around them.' Another said a young man's groin had been 'intentionally set on fire'.
But Noa Lewis, who prepared the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said of all the injuries the worst was the deliberate shooting of their faces as 'it crushes their beauty'.
Shari Mendes, in the same unit, said it 'seemed as if mutilation of these women’s faces was an objective in their murders.'
When terrorists shot Yam Goldstein-Almog, 20, in the face they then filmed her body with her brother's phone in an 'evil staging' to boast they had 'disfigured her, a beautiful woman'.
Some women's heads 'had been bashed in, with their brains spilling out' while others were shot so many times 'their heads were almost blown off'.
The same pattern of genital mutilation was evident among the young female observers killed at the Nahal Oz base, she said, with some also beheaded and mutilated with legs chopped off.
Other female soldiers' bodies had been fitted with explosives. Survivors heard their comrades being assaulted.
For those captured, the violence inflicted on October 7 continued throughout their captivity.
'It seems there are no words to describe the prolonged sexual abuse that the hostages had to endure,' Dr Elkayam-Levy said.
Hostages were sexually assaulted, stripped, humiliated, threatened with forced marriage, forced to witness abuse, and in some cases sexually abused alongside or in front of family members.
While many of the returned hostages have already bravely told of what they endured, the report reveals further abuse.
Two related minors who were forced to perform sexual acts on each other in captivity, undressed, touched by captors and whipped on their genitalia.
Others reported being forced to watch sexual acts or sexual humiliation inflicted on other hostages, including family members.
Keith Siegel, a 66-year-old grandfather who was taken with his wife Aviva, 65, testified that he was made to undress in front of a terrorist who then shaved his pubic hair and made comments about his penis.
Mrs Siegel, who was separated from him, was nearly executed after she comforted a young girl who was sexually assaulted in captivity.
Freed hostage Guy Gilboa-Dalal, 24, told how a terrorist blindfolded him before asking if he wanted to 'make a porn film together' and assaulting him.
Many more stories from October 7 and its aftermath are still expected to emerge as some former hostages and witnesses have still not shared their accounts, such is their trauma.
For the authors of the report, though, the repetition and similarities of abuse indicate 'the organized nature of the sexual and gender based violence'.
It shows that this was 'systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath'.
That it continued through captivity is 'legally significant', they say, as it supports claims of 'preplanning, operational tolerance, repetition, and foreseeability across units and locations'.
Now they believe that this archive of war crimes, documenting crimes against humanity and genocidal acts can establish a clear roadmap for prosecution.
But beyond that, they hope it finally lays bare the absurdity of those who have denied or tried to erase the suffering of October 7 victims.
One can only hope that, as this report is titled, now those victims will be silenced no more.
