British Sunday Times publishes front-page investigation into Hamas rapes

 

The popular British Sunday Times magazine dedicated its front page today to Hamas' assaults on women, including shocking testimonies of rape and other brutality and cruelty perpetrated against young women, female soldiers, and others.

In the article, under the headline 'I saw Hamas rape women before killing them' some of the survivors of the massacre describe the acts of sexual assault against women before murdering them.

Yoni Saadon, one of the witnesses, recounts in the Times:“I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head. I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’."

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters, or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”

"I hid in the bushes and saw that they had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to... They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.

The article also quotes Shelly Harush, the police officer appointed to investigate sexual violence and crimes against women by Hamas.

"It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people. We gathered thousands of declarations, photos, and videos. As a Jewish mother, my soul and spirit cannot take this."

Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, a voluntary religious organisation that collects the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they can be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition, adds his testimony to the article.

“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said. “No one saw more than us. “It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

Among volunteers in an all-female team to prepare female corpses for burial was Shari, 60, an architect who lives in Jerusalem. Shari commented in the article on how some of the victims arrived:

"Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”