Israel

Horn Dogg · December 20, 2023

I admit, I haven’t been paying much attention to this fight other than I know it’s going on. At the risk of sounding like a total moron, I have to ask the question. Why should I (American) care about this Israel vs Hamas war? I recognize the tragedy in people losing their lives in both sides, but other than that I don’t understand why I should care who wins.

Anastasis · December 20, 2023

6 hours ago, Horn Dogg said:

I admit, I haven’t been paying much attention to this fight other than I know it’s going on. At the risk of sounding like a total moron, I have to ask the question. Why should I (American) care about this Israel vs Hamas war? I recognize the tragedy in people losing their lives in both sides, but other than that I don’t understand why I should care who wins.

At a minimum, I think you should care because we have been indirectly funding and running cover for the occupation for decades and in this particular recent exchange are sending one side planes full of bombs to execute a collective punishment program that intends to obliterate Gaza at best and genocide the people at worst. I think that we should all care about how our tax dollars are used overseas and the potential long term implications of our actions. We cannot control what anyone else involved does, but we can control the role that we play.

DDD Dad · December 20, 2023

9 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

At a minimum, I think you should care because we have been indirectly funding and running cover for the occupation for decades and in this particular recent exchange are sending one side planes full of bombs to execute a collective punishment program that intends to obliterate Gaza at best and genocide the people at worst. I think that we should all care about how our tax dollars are used overseas and the potential long term implications of our actions. We cannot control what anyone else involved does, but we can control the role that we play.

Israel has been occupying Gaza for decades?

Anastasis · December 20, 2023

27 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

Israel has been occupying Gaza for decades?

Have a cup of coffee, buddy.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Anastasis

'stache · December 20, 2023

On 12/17/2023 at 7:55 PM, Captainant said:

You do know that we are currently, in the name of the Lord your God, forcing women to carry dead fetuses to sepsis and cause the mother permanent damage right? And those same christofascists are marching through the streets with torches chanting how the "Jews will not replace" them? And the chosen leader of the modern evangelical movement, Donald J Trump, is just deadass stealing lines from Hitler?

He's confusing religion with theocracy. The theocrats in that region won, that's why it's the way it is currently. The theocrats are winning here and we'll be the same backwards shithole if they win nationwide.

Anastasis · December 23, 2023

US leadership on display. I guess the progressive caucus' influence really is shining through with the Biden administration. "Present".

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-security-council-acts-boost-aid-gaza-after-us-abstains-2023-12-22/

Amid global outrage over a rising Gaza death toll in 11 weeks of war between Israel and Hamas and a worsening humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave, the U.S. abstained to allow the 15-member council to adopt a resolution drafted by the United Arab Emirates.

MissingInAction · December 23, 2023

On 12/17/2023 at 11:03 PM, Thetexashammer said:

You guys need to be more careful. Excluding CaptainAnt, the rest of you are edgeing towards rational discussion. That kind of thing is haram around here.

Uhhh

Anastasis · December 24, 2023

bolverk · December 24, 2023

Did you have sense enough to delete the comment "BABIIIEEES!!!" to mock their deaths with the photo of a raging Sam Kinison, or did one of the mods take it out?

Merry Christmas, asshole.

There will be no musical festivities. No tree-lighting ceremony. No extravagant decorations that normally bedeck the West Bank city of Bethlehem at Christmas. With the war in Gaza raging, this is a city in mourning.

In perhaps the most overt display of how Israel’s war in Gaza has dampened Christmas celebrations in the city seen as the birthplace of Jesus, a Lutheran church put up its crèche, but with a sad and symbolic twist. The baby Jesus — wrapped in a keffiyeh, the black-and-white checkered scarf that has become a badge of Palestinian identity — is lying not in a makeshift cradle of hay and wood. Instead, he lies among the rubble of broken bricks, stones and tiles that represent so much of Gaza’s destruction.

“We’ve been glued to our screens, seeing children pulled from under the rubble day after day. We’re broken by these images,” said the Rev. Munther Isaac, the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church who created the crèche. “God is under the rubble in Gaza, this is where we find God right now.”

The war began on Oct. 7, in response to Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel that left about 1,200 dead. As the conflict enters its third month, some of the most ubiquitous images of the death and destruction have been of dead Palestinian children being pulled from the ruins of Israeli airstrikes. Nearly half of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million are children, and about 70 percent of those killed are women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations.

*****

Last month, the patriarchs and heads of various churches in Jerusalem in a statement urged their congregations to forgo “unnecessarily festive activities.” Instead, the statement said, priests and worshipers should “focus more on the spiritual meaning of Christmas in their pastoral activities and liturgical celebrations.”

*****

“We will avoid music, outside ceremonies and outside decorations,” said the Rev. Rami Asakrieh, a parish priest of the Latin church of Saint Catherine at the Church of the Nativity. But he added that inside the church, decorations were important.

The horror of war cannot be allowed to bury the spirit of Jesus, he said on a recent day, as church workers set up a small Christmas tree along one of the corridors. “Despite the circumstances, we must still show that Jesus is the source of happiness and peace in the church.”

*****

For Pastor Isaac, whose Lutheran church has gained some fame with his rubble-themed manger scene, the focus during this holy time needs to be on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, not on the cancellation of Christmas festivities.

“We don’t see this as a war against Hamas,” he said. “It’s a war against Palestinians.”

He came up with the idea of the altered manger scene as a way of both marking the birth of Jesus, but also acknowledging the death of so many children.

“This is what Christmas looks like now in Palestine, children being killed, houses destroyed and families displaced,” he said of his crèche. “We see the image of Jesus in every child that is killed in Gaza.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-bethlehem-christmas.html

statsman · December 25, 2023

In Isaiah 11, the prophet, his heart expressing utmost yearnings from God, speaks of the wolf laying down with the lamb. Yes, 2700 years ago, in that region, there were plenty of wolves and lambs. I scoffed when Hamas was called “sub-human”; what they did was all too human. Israel, Palestine, the Levant, the ME, whatever you wish to call it, has been a rough area for a long time.

Isaiah, if you were to meet him, would resemble nothing more closely, in our modern world, than one of those scary clerics from the Afghan mountains. Dour, grim, and trained to worship by ritually slaughtering living animals and rendering them into pieces per a learned ancient ritual. That he could write and express himself in terms that would resonate for centuries was a bonus.

This man, when communing with God, seeking out God’s utmost will, expressing humanity’s utmost desire, wrote a prophecy of peace, of the predators and prey coexisting.

We have four advent candles- hope, peace, love and joy. We all need to hope for peace, so we can get to the other two.

Brisketexan · December 25, 2023

In Isaiah 11, the prophet, his heart expressing utmost yearnings from God, speaks of the wolf laying down with the lamb. Yes, 2700 years ago, in that region, there were plenty of wolves and lambs. I scoffed when Hamas was called “sub-human”; what they did was all too human. Israel, Palestine, the Levant, the ME, whatever you wish to call it, has been a rough area for a long time.

Isaiah, if you were to meet him, would resemble nothing more closely, in our modern world, than one of those scary clerics from the Afghan mountains. Dour, grim, and trained to worship by ritually slaughtering living animals and rendering them into pieces per a learned ancient ritual. That he could write and express himself in terms that would resonate for centuries was a bonus.

This man, when communing with God, seeking out God’s utmost will, expressing humanity’s utmost desire, wrote a prophecy of peace, of the predators and prey coexisting.

We have four advent candles- hope, peace, love and joy. We all need to hope for peace, so we can get to the other two.

Meh. Humanity long ago, and repeatedly, melted down all of those candles into one big “hate and war” candle. Its burns bright, and long.
There is no hope for peace in the levant. One side or another will eventually succeed in its genocidal ambitions, meaning that one side is functionally extinct and the other is a bunch of victorious murderous genocidal psychopaths. They knew this 3,000 years ago, we know it today.

Brian Fantana · December 26, 2023

On 12/24/2023 at 9:35 AM, bolverk said:

Did you have sense enough to delete the comment "BABIIIEEES!!!" to mock their deaths with the photo of a raging Sam Kinison, or did one of the mods take it out?

Merry Christmas, asshole.

And people wonder why I've been so touchy on this subject.

Merry Christmas, you boisterous bunch of boorish baboons.

Edited December 26, 2023 by Brian Fantana

tx 3 putt · December 26, 2023

Bullneck · December 26, 2023

1 minute ago, tx 3 putt said:

Yeah, but they released all the remaining hostages.

Oh, wait. They haven't done that. Hmm. Seems like if they did that would be a step in the right direction. Too much to ask, though.

I heard they were planning on attacking synagogues in Europe now. Fine people on both side.

Anastasis · December 26, 2023

Cool cool.

Edited December 26, 2023 by Anastasis

InkaUtexas · December 27, 2023

Said it earlier. Israel is going to make it an Arab problem.

Brian Fantana · December 27, 2023

17 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Israel is going to continue to do ethnic cleansing.

FTFY

Neonmoon · December 27, 2023

9 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

FTFY

#bothsides

bolverk · December 27, 2023

Israel should've never let the illegal settlements take place in the West Bank. These people are their version of our shit-stirring "sovereign citizen" and QAnon-types, but likely much more dangerous.

This is the shit that I wish people in the US would understand. There is a dangerous movement in Israel that's taking over their politics with very illiberal ideals and who want to eventually ethnically cleanse the "Holy Land" of all Palestinians.

What's worse, we have Americans and ostensibly educated posters on this very site who are openly supportive of this war crime. I don't think I've seen a single poster that supports terrorism and war crimes committed by Hamas.

Quote

Extremist settler group threatens life of the IDF Central Command's general for trying to tamp down settler violence in the West Bank.

“The steps that the Central Command chief has led have caused a real escalation in the criticism against him, which is presented as him having Jewish blood on his hands, to the point of deciding on a din rodef against him,” Bar reportedly added, referring to a Jewish religious principle allowing the extrajudicial killing of individuals who pose a danger to others. A similar decree was allegedly issued regarding former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the months before his assassination by a Jewish extremist in 1995.

*****

The right-wing Israel National News outlet, which backs the settler movement, reported at the time that a small number of “Wanted” posters about Fox had been put up across the West Bank by a group calling itself the “Freedom Fighters of Israel.”

The posters declared that Fox was wanted for “abandoning” the [Jewish] residents of the West Bank, “the murder of 1,400 Jews in the south of our holy country, and abuse of Jews by handing out administrative detention orders.” They further said that as a result, din rodef applied to Fox.

*****

Last month Channel 12 reported that Fox was given close security protection due to the extremist right-wing campaign against him.

Since the start of the war, there has also been an uptick in violent attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has been noted by human rights groups in Israel and abroad.

Israel has come under increasing pressure from its allies to rein in settler violence, which has soared since the Hamas terror group’s October 7 massacre. Last week France joined the US and Britain in sanctioning Jewish extremist settlers.

Meanwhile, Likud member and former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who's positioning himself to head the party, along with Smotrich, is advocating for the "voluntary migration" of Palestinian refugees to other countries for cash under the guise of humanitarian aid.

I think we all know about Smotrich at this point, but here's more on some of Danon's views:

RomaVicta · December 27, 2023

The below is from the Atlantic, a magazine I subscribe and respect.

Naive at best. Disappointing to say the least.

Comparing Gaza to our own personal fiasco in Iraq in remarkably inapt. The US at least had a goal in Iraq to depose the leader of an organized nation state in hopes of creating wildfire of liberal democracy in the MidEast. (More cynical reasoning was to allow certain commercial entities to exploit a conquered Iraq while the tight-with-taxpayer-money GOP administration sent billions in cash on pallets with intentionally incompetent accounting services hired to track it...okay, I'll stop.) Oh, and of course, all the WMDs pointed at us.

The US intention was not to level every structure in that country. We killed tons of civilians which amounts pretty much to murder in an unworthy cause, but even I won't say we really intended to do that. It was just a consequence of a disastrous policy choice.

The top paragraph describing Israels destruction of Gaza as a "war" is frightfully dishonest. It's an obliteration of all shelter and sustenance that would support the indigenous people. It's brutal conquest defended by a bloody attack that responded to a bloody oppressive regime.

Israeli leaders aren't wringing their hands in worry of getting bogged down or how they'll make a good end to this. They are attaining their ends. They are Sherman marching to the sea inflicting as much pain and death and damage as they can to completely demoralize and crush the citizen Palestinians of Gaza.

Someone asks why should we as Americans care? Anastasis gives a broader answer than I would, but I agree in the important main point: we're attached to this. We've stayed attached to this. We rolled up the carrier and pledged support. We're being incredibly weak and wishy-washy in the face of these atrocities.

The silly pearl-clutching in the passage I quote above is part of the problem. We don't need to draw an inapt parallel to make the whole thing appear to be more digestible. It's not chocolate; it's a maggot-infested soggy sticky turd that I don't want in my mouth, on my clothes, or on my hands.

The US should only be operating to provide humanitarian assistance to the people Israel is putting to the sword. I would have us announce that intention and give the warning to anyone who might interfere that we would see that as an act of war. Nobody wants to play the slaughter game with us.

Bullneck · December 27, 2023

This ain't going to get you where you want go. "I'll break the rules and inconvenience total strangers who have paid money for tickets, parking, hotels, etc."

This adds to the confirmation bias.

Edited December 28, 2023 by Bullneck

GW Hayduke · December 28, 2023

1 hour ago, bolverk said:

Israel should've never let the illegal settlements take place in the West Bank. These people are their version of our shit-stirring "sovereign citizen" and QAnon-types, but likely much more dangerous.

This is the shit that I wish people in the US would understand. There is a dangerous movement in Israel that's taking over their politics with very illiberal ideals and who want to eventually ethnically cleanse the "Holy Land" of all Palestinians.

What's worse, we have Americans and ostensibly educated posters on this very site who are openly supportive of this war crime. I don't think I've seen a single poster that supports terrorism and war crimes committed by Hamas.

Meanwhile, Likud member and former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who's positioning himself to head the party, along with Smotrich, is advocating for the "voluntary migration" of Palestinian refugees to other countries for cash under the guise of humanitarian aid.

I think we all know about Smotrich at this point, but here's more on some of Danon's views:

Great post. I think one way we have so many Americans being ok with supporting and financing war crimes is through the use of atrocity porn to dehumanize Palestinians and through random Twitter video clips of protestors to frame Palestinian supporters as “others.”

bolverk · December 28, 2023

23 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

This ain't going to get you where you want go. "I'll break the rules and inconvenience total strangers who have paid money for tickets, parking, hotels, etc."

This adds to the confirmation bias.

Yeah, that's going to win over no one. Hell, I support "the cause," allowing Palestinians full autonomy over the West Bank and Gaza as a truly independent country, but even I'd be pissed about trying to catch a flight. It's one thing to march and chant slogans, but don't make me get stranded in fucking Queens.

5 minutes ago, GW Hayduke said:

Great post. I think one way we have so many Americans being ok with supporting and financing war crimes is through the use of atrocity porn to dehumanize Palestinians and through random Twitter video clips of protestors to frame Palestinian supporters as “others.”

In fairness, some of the protestors have been idiots and absolutely give ammunition to those who have defended the blockade (and now destruction) of Gaza and also the occupation of the West Bank. While I understand the impulse to support an ally, I don't understand turning a blind eye to documented war crimes as defined by international law established by Western democracies.

My not supporting terrorism by Hamas and other radical Islamic groups doesn't mean I have to support war crimes by Israel's government and extremist settlers. Still, injustice is unjust, and non-Jewish people from the "Holy Land" deserve their freedoms too.

Brian Fantana · December 28, 2023

10 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

#bothsides

Yeah, both sides are definitely doing ethnic cleansing, I guess.

bolverk · December 28, 2023

Israel’s wartime unity faces a challenge in a looming court decision.

Israel’s fragile political unity in wartime faced a threat on Thursday after an Israeli television channel reported on what it said was a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision to strike down a key part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s divisive plan to overhaul the judiciary.

The looming ruling by Israel’s top court — expected no later than mid-January — could upend the emergency government formed by Mr. Netanyahu and some of his opponents after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks. It could also set off a constitutional crisis should Mr. Netanyahu’s government defy the court’s decision.

Israel’s Channel 12 broadcaster reported on Wednesday night that a slim majority of the court — eight of 15 judges — are set to overturn a law passed in July that stripped Israel’s Supreme Court of the power to overturn government actions and appointments it deems “unreasonable.” Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing governing coalition had passed the law in an effort to remove what it said was the court’s ability to overrule the will of the majority.

The law was part of Mr. Netanyahu’s wider plan to weaken the country’s judiciary, which divided the country and led hundreds of thousands of Israelis to stage months of street protests. Opponents, including Israel’s chief justice and attorney general, said the plan — if fully carried out — would deal a fatal blow to the country’s separation of powers.

The dispute posed one of the gravest domestic political crises Israel had faced in the 75 years since the nation’s founding. But it faded to the background after the Hamas attacks, in which roughly 1,200 people were killed and more than 240 were taken hostage to Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities.

Four days after the attack, Mr. Netanyahu formed a wartime government with opponents including Benny Gantz, one of his chief rivals and the leader of the opposition National Unity alliance, who opposed the judicial overhaul.

The crisis over the judicial changes was a proxy for deeper rifts over Israel’s future. Secular and liberal Israelis view the Supreme Court as a bulwark in a country that is becoming more conservative and religious.

The New York Times has not obtained a copy of the leaked decision, and Channel 12 did not publish the full document. At a hearing on the matter in September, questions and statements by the judges indicated that several had concerns about the law.

News of the leak prompted a furor from Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-line coalition allies, who assailed any effort by the justices to strike down the legislation while the country is at war.

“I call on the Supreme Court and its judges to come to their senses,” said Simcha Rothman, one of the architects of the judicial overhaul in Parliament, adding that the justices should “avoid creating unnecessary discord among the people.”

Nivek · December 28, 2023

Israel should've never let the illegal settlements take place in the West Bank. These people are their version of our shit-stirring "sovereign citizen" and QAnon-types, but likely much more dangerous.
This is the shit that I wish people in the US would understand. There is a dangerous movement in Israel that's taking over their politics with very illiberal ideals and who want to eventually ethnically cleanse the "Holy Land" of all Palestinians.
What's worse, we have Americans and ostensibly educated posters on this very site who are openly supportive of this war crime. I don't think I've seen a single poster that supports terrorism and war crimes committed by Hamas.

Extremist settler group threatens life of the IDF Central Command's general for trying to tamp down settler violence in the West Bank.
“The steps that the Central Command chief has led have caused a real escalation in the criticism against him, which is presented as him having Jewish blood on his hands, to the point of deciding on a din rodef against him,” Bar reportedly added, referring to a Jewish religious principle allowing the extrajudicial killing of individuals who pose a danger to others. A similar decree was allegedly issued regarding former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the months before his assassination by a Jewish extremist in 1995.
*****

The right-wing Israel National News outlet, which backs the settler movement, reported at the time that a small number of “Wanted” posters about Fox had been put up across the West Bank by a group calling itself the “Freedom Fighters of Israel.”
The posters declared that Fox was wanted for “abandoning” the [Jewish] residents of the West Bank, “the murder of 1,400 Jews in the south of our holy country, and abuse of Jews by handing out administrative detention orders.” They further said that as a result, din rodef applied to Fox.
*****
Last month Channel 12 reported that Fox was given close security protection due to the extremist right-wing campaign against him.
Since the start of the war, there has also been an uptick in violent attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has been noted by human rights groups in Israel and abroad.
Israel has come under increasing pressure from its allies to rein in settler violence, which has soared since the Hamas terror group’s October 7 massacre. Last week France joined the US and Britain in sanctioning Jewish extremist settlers.

Meanwhile, Likud member and former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who's positioning himself to head the party, along with Smotrich, is advocating for the "voluntary migration" of Palestinian refugees to other countries for cash under the guise of humanitarian aid.
I think we all know about Smotrich at this point, but here's more on some of Danon's views:

I think the settler issues is a bit more complicated than some make it out to be. And there is a tendency to lump them as a monolith as well.

totallynotabuttpirate · December 28, 2023

In the ultimate "both sides" conflict of our generation, it's comforting to know that Analstasis can always be counted on to stan away.

Anastasis · December 28, 2023

1 hour ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:

In the ultimate "both sides" conflict of our generation, it's comforting to know that Analstasis can always be counted on to stan away.

I am apparently occupying your dome space harder than Israel occupies the West Bank.

Anastasis · December 28, 2023

1 hour ago, Nivek said:

I think the settler issues is a bit more complicated than some make it out to be.

I’d love to see this perspective unpacked for us to discuss. Seriously.

nbmishoid · December 28, 2023

The settlers have been terrible since at least the 80’s. Roth had a good take of it in one of his novels back then.

Brian Fantana · December 29, 2023

11 hours ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:

In the ultimate "both sides" conflict of our generation, it's comforting to know that Analstasis can always be counted on to stan away.

Great contribution to the thread, you shit posting hack.

11 hours ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:

In the ultimate "both sides" conflict of our generation, it's comforting to know that Analstasis can always be counted on to stan away.

Great contribution to the thread, you shit posting hack.

Brian Fantana · December 29, 2023

So nice it had to post twice

totallynotabuttpirate · December 29, 2023

14 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

Great contribution to the thread, you shit posting hack.

Great contribution to the thread, you shit posting hack.

Oh Hi! Stupid Tech cunt. Here's a good read you might enjoy. Maybe imagine it was one of your mother/sister/wife etc. But cool cool, I'm sure the IDF is doing the same thing right?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html

Spoiler

‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.

Dec. 28, 2023

Israel-Hamas War

liveUpdates

8m ago
Maps
Displacement of Gazans
Israel’s Most Destructive Bombs
Hamas Gal Abdush’s parents, center, and her sisters. The photograph on the wall shows Gal and her husband, Nagi. The couple had been together since they were teenagers.

By Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella

Photographs by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella reported from across Israel and interviewed more than 150 people.

At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”

In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.

The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.

The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.

One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.

As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”

Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.

A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.

Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.

And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

A camp area on Oct. 11 at the rave site in southern Israel.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.

Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.

Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.

The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.

Ms. Abdush’s sister showing one of the last messages Ms. Abdush sent on Oct. 7.

A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.

That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.

In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.

“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”

Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.

“The eyewitness might not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify as, ‘I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,’ that can be enough.”

‘Screams without words’

Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.

She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.

She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.

Volunteerwith an emergency response team at the Kfar Aza kibbutz this month. The kibbutz was among the places attacked on Oct. 7.

About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.

“It was like an assembly point,” she said.

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.

Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot, and he can be seen in one of Sapir’s photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.

Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso, and she can barely sleep, waking up at night, heart pounding, covered in sweat.

“That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”

That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.

Raz Cohen, a security consultant, survived the Oct. 7 attacks by hiding in a dried-up streambed.

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”

Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.

Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.

“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”

Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in an elite unit.

Many of the dead were brought to the Shura military base, in central Israel, for identification. Here, too, witnesses said they saw signs of sexual violence.

Shari Mendes, an architect called up as a reserve soldier to help prepare the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said she had seen four with signs of sexual violence, including some with “a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.”

Shari Mendes, an architect who was called up as a reserve soldier to help handle the bodies of female troops, in a container used to hold bodies before their removal to a morgue at the Shura military base in central Israel.

A dentist, Captain Maayan, who worked at the same identification center, said that she had seen at least 10 bodies of female soldiers from Gaza observation posts with signs of sexual violence.

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

The investigation

The Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence from the Oct. 7 attacks. They have gathered hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dashcams, security cameras and mobile phones showing Hamas terrorists killing civilians and many images of mutilated bodies.

But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman of Israel’s national police, said, “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.

In the aftermath of the attack, police officials said, forensic examiners were dispatched to the Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies — Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.

The examiners worked quickly to give the agonized families of the missing a sense of closure and to determine, by a process of elimination, who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.

According to Jewish tradition, funerals are held promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were put to rest without medical examinations, meaning that potential evidence now lies buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that it would be possible to recover some evidence from the corpses, but that it would be difficult.

Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized. Sitting at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he swiped open his phone, tapped and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vagina, which he said was recorded by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.

A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”

Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.

Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.

“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

Yossi Landau, a volunteer with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he had not taken pictures of the bodies because it was not allowed. “In retrospect, I regret it,” he added.

The trauma from sexual assault can be so heavy that sometimes survivors do not speak about it for years, several rape counselors said.

“Many people are looking for the golden evidence, of a woman who will testify about what happened to her. But don’t look for that, don’t put this pressure on this woman,” said Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. “The corpses tell the story.”

The woman in the black dress

One of the last images of Ms. Abdush alive — captured by a security camera mounted on her front door — shows her leaving home with her husband, Nagi, at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 for the rave.

He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. She was dressed in a short black dress, a black shawl tied around her waist and combat boots. As she struts out, she takes a swig from a glass (her brother-in-law remembers it was Red Bull and vodka) and laughs.

You’ve got to live life like it’s your last moments. That was her motto, her sisters said.

At daybreak, hundreds of terrorists closed in on the party from several directions, blocking the highways leading out. The couple jumped into their Audi, dashing off a string of messages as they moved.

“We’re on the border,” Ms. Abdush wrote to her family. “We’re leaving.”

“Explosions.”

Her husband made his own calls to his family, leaving a final audio message for his brother, Nissim, at 7:44 a.m. “Take care of the kids,” he said. “I love you.”

Gunshots rang out, and the message stopped.

That night, Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site with three friends and found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car, about nine miles north of the site. She did not see the body of Mr. Abdush.

Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site looking for a missing friend but instead found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car.

She saw other burned cars and other bodies, and shot videos of several — hoping that they would help people to identify missing relatives. When she posted the video of the woman in the black dress on her Instagram story, she was deluged with messages.

“Hi, based on your description of the woman in the black dress, did she have blonde hair?” one message read.

“Eden, the woman you described with the black dress, do you remember the color of her eyes?” another said.

Some members of the Abdush family saw that video and another version of it filmed by one of Ms. Wessely’s friends. They immediately suspected that the body was Ms. Abdush, and based on the way her body was found, they feared that she might have been raped.

But they kept alive a flicker of hope that somehow, it wasn’t true.

The videos caught the eye of Israeli officials as well — very quickly after Oct. 7 they began gathering evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Ms. Abdush’s body in a presentation made to foreign governments and media organizations, using Ms. Abdush as a representation of violence committed against women that day.

A screenshot from a video showing Ms. Abdush’s body.Eden Wessely

A week after her body was found, three government social workers appeared at the gate of the family’s home in Kiryat Ekron, a small town in central Israel. They broke the news that Ms. Abdush, 34, had been found dead.

But the only document the family received was a one-page form letter from Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, expressing his condolences and sending a hug. The body of Mr. Abdush, 35, was identified two days after his wife’s. It was badly burned and investigators determined who he was based on a DNA sample and his wedding ring.

The couple had been together since they were teenagers. To the family, it seems only yesterday that Mr. Abdush was heading off to work to fix water heaters, a bag of tools slung over his shoulder, and Ms. Abdush was cooking up mashed potatoes and schnitzel for their two sons, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7.

The boys are now orphans. They were sleeping over at an aunt’s the night their parents were killed. Ms. Abdush’s mother and father have applied for permanent custody, and everyone is chipping in to help.

Night after night, Ms. Abdush’s mother, Eti Bracha, lies in bed with the boys until they drift off. A few weeks ago, she said she tried to quietly leave their bedroom when the younger boy stopped her.

“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Honey,” she said, “you can ask anything.”

“Grandma, how did mom die?”

Edited December 29, 2023 by totallynotabuttpirate

Brian Fantana · December 29, 2023

6 minutes ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:

Oh Hi! Stupid Tech cunt. Here's a good ready you might enjoy. Maybe imagine it was one of your mother/sister/wife etc. But cool cool I'm sure the IDF is doing the same thing right?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html

Reveal hidden contents

‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.

Dec. 28, 2023

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Hamas Gal Abdush’s parents, center, and her sisters. The photograph on the wall shows Gal and her husband, Nagi. The couple had been together since they were teenagers.

By Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella

Photographs by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella reported from across Israel and interviewed more than 150 people.

At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”

In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.

The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.

The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.

One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.

As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”

Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.

A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.

Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.

And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

A camp area on Oct. 11 at the rave site in southern Israel.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.

Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.

Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.

The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.

Ms. Abdush’s sister showing one of the last messages Ms. Abdush sent on Oct. 7.

A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.

That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.

In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.

“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”

Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.

“The eyewitness might not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify as, ‘I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,’ that can be enough.”

‘Screams without words’

Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.

She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.

She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.

Volunteerwith an emergency response team at the Kfar Aza kibbutz this month. The kibbutz was among the places attacked on Oct. 7.

About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.

“It was like an assembly point,” she said.

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.

Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot, and he can be seen in one of Sapir’s photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.

Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso, and she can barely sleep, waking up at night, heart pounding, covered in sweat.

“That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”

That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.

Raz Cohen, a security consultant, survived the Oct. 7 attacks by hiding in a dried-up streambed.

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”

Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.

Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.

“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”

Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in an elite unit.

Many of the dead were brought to the Shura military base, in central Israel, for identification. Here, too, witnesses said they saw signs of sexual violence.

Shari Mendes, an architect called up as a reserve soldier to help prepare the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said she had seen four with signs of sexual violence, including some with “a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.”

Shari Mendes, an architect who was called up as a reserve soldier to help handle the bodies of female troops, in a container used to hold bodies before their removal to a morgue at the Shura military base in central Israel.

A dentist, Captain Maayan, who worked at the same identification center, said that she had seen at least 10 bodies of female soldiers from Gaza observation posts with signs of sexual violence.

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

The investigation

The Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence from the Oct. 7 attacks. They have gathered hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dashcams, security cameras and mobile phones showing Hamas terrorists killing civilians and many images of mutilated bodies.

But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman of Israel’s national police, said, “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.

In the aftermath of the attack, police officials said, forensic examiners were dispatched to the Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies — Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.

The examiners worked quickly to give the agonized families of the missing a sense of closure and to determine, by a process of elimination, who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.

According to Jewish tradition, funerals are held promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were put to rest without medical examinations, meaning that potential evidence now lies buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that it would be possible to recover some evidence from the corpses, but that it would be difficult.

Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized. Sitting at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he swiped open his phone, tapped and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vagina, which he said was recorded by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.

A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”

Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.

Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.

“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

Yossi Landau, a volunteer with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he had not taken pictures of the bodies because it was not allowed. “In retrospect, I regret it,” he added.

The trauma from sexual assault can be so heavy that sometimes survivors do not speak about it for years, several rape counselors said.

“Many people are looking for the golden evidence, of a woman who will testify about what happened to her. But don’t look for that, don’t put this pressure on this woman,” said Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. “The corpses tell the story.”

The woman in the black dress

One of the last images of Ms. Abdush alive — captured by a security camera mounted on her front door — shows her leaving home with her husband, Nagi, at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 for the rave.

He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. She was dressed in a short black dress, a black shawl tied around her waist and combat boots. As she struts out, she takes a swig from a glass (her brother-in-law remembers it was Red Bull and vodka) and laughs.

You’ve got to live life like it’s your last moments. That was her motto, her sisters said.

At daybreak, hundreds of terrorists closed in on the party from several directions, blocking the highways leading out. The couple jumped into their Audi, dashing off a string of messages as they moved.

“We’re on the border,” Ms. Abdush wrote to her family. “We’re leaving.”

“Explosions.”

Her husband made his own calls to his family, leaving a final audio message for his brother, Nissim, at 7:44 a.m. “Take care of the kids,” he said. “I love you.”

Gunshots rang out, and the message stopped.

That night, Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site with three friends and found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car, about nine miles north of the site. She did not see the body of Mr. Abdush.

Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site looking for a missing friend but instead found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car.

She saw other burned cars and other bodies, and shot videos of several — hoping that they would help people to identify missing relatives. When she posted the video of the woman in the black dress on her Instagram story, she was deluged with messages.

“Hi, based on your description of the woman in the black dress, did she have blonde hair?” one message read.

“Eden, the woman you described with the black dress, do you remember the color of her eyes?” another said.

Some members of the Abdush family saw that video and another version of it filmed by one of Ms. Wessely’s friends. They immediately suspected that the body was Ms. Abdush, and based on the way her body was found, they feared that she might have been raped.

But they kept alive a flicker of hope that somehow, it wasn’t true.

The videos caught the eye of Israeli officials as well — very quickly after Oct. 7 they began gathering evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Ms. Abdush’s body in a presentation made to foreign governments and media organizations, using Ms. Abdush as a representation of violence committed against women that day.

A screenshot from a video showing Ms. Abdush’s body.Eden Wessely

A week after her body was found, three government social workers appeared at the gate of the family’s home in Kiryat Ekron, a small town in central Israel. They broke the news that Ms. Abdush, 34, had been found dead.

But the only document the family received was a one-page form letter from Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, expressing his condolences and sending a hug. The body of Mr. Abdush, 35, was identified two days after his wife’s. It was badly burned and investigators determined who he was based on a DNA sample and his wedding ring.

The couple had been together since they were teenagers. To the family, it seems only yesterday that Mr. Abdush was heading off to work to fix water heaters, a bag of tools slung over his shoulder, and Ms. Abdush was cooking up mashed potatoes and schnitzel for their two sons, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7.

The boys are now orphans. They were sleeping over at an aunt’s the night their parents were killed. Ms. Abdush’s mother and father have applied for permanent custody, and everyone is chipping in to help.

Night after night, Ms. Abdush’s mother, Eti Bracha, lies in bed with the boys until they drift off. A few weeks ago, she said she tried to quietly leave their bedroom when the younger boy stopped her.

“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Honey,” she said, “you can ask anything.”

“Grandma, how did mom die?”

Oh we're playing this game again. Ok, here, I'll play along again:

I CONDEMN HAMAS AND THE OCT. 7TH ATTACKS, UNEQUIVICOLLY.

Now that that's out of the way, is it now ok for us to criticize anything Israel's leadership and/or the IDF does? I will await your judgment on the matter. I really need to know if you think criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu or anything his government does or has been doing is antisemitic or not. This hasn't been litigated and re-litigated in this thread 700 times already, I promise.

Thank you for your contribution, you're awesome!

956 Worldwide · December 29, 2023

On 12/27/2023 at 7:05 PM, GW Hayduke said:

Great post. I think one way we have so many Americans being ok with supporting and financing war crimes is through the use of atrocity porn to dehumanize Palestinians and through random Twitter video clips of protestors to frame Palestinian supporters as “others.”

It turns out that filming rapes and murders and bragging about them, and acting like assholes to people just going about their day is ineffective at garnering sympathy from lots of Americans. What I find fascinating is that you blame people for noticing.

Nivek · December 29, 2023

21 hours ago, Anastasis said:

I’d love to see this perspective unpacked for us to discuss. Seriously.

It is not as cut and dry as people present on here. Some of the settlements were on land that Jewish communities occupied but were driven off of in the early 1900s. I believe some of them were empty, but there were initially 4 main communities that this applies to.

From one source I read, the majority do so for economic reasons (cheaper to live there) however up to 1/3 of the settlers are right wing extremists.

The next issue is who governs that land? Who polices it when there are crimes against the settlers or crimes committed by them? Does Israel have the authority to remove the settlers? Do they have the authority to enforce laws and whose laws?

I have brought some of this up much earlier in the thread (or the DT thread) but emotions were too high.

statsman · December 29, 2023

Yeah, Hayduke has referred to “atrocity porn” a couple of times, as if pointing to what could be called “facts” or “evidence” is an unfair tactic.

I was thinking the other day…who cares the most for Palestinian civilians? In terms of giving them time, or treasure, for their true benefit? Of Hamas, Fatah, the UN, Iran, the U.S., Israel,…who cares the most for their well being?

I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that, of those groups, Israel and the U.S. are the most committed to the well being of the Palestinian civilians.

BrickHorn · December 29, 2023

18 minutes ago, statsman said:

I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that, of those groups, Israel and the U.S. are the most committed to the well being of the Palestinian civilians.

You’re a satire account, right?

956 Worldwide · December 29, 2023

15 minutes ago, statsman said:

Yeah, Hayduke has referred to “atrocity porn” a couple of times, as if pointing to what could be called “facts” or “evidence” is an unfair tactic.

I was thinking the other day…who cares the most for Palestinian civilians? In terms of giving them time, or treasure, for their true benefit? Of Hamas, Fatah, the UN, Iran, the U.S., Israel,…who cares the most for their well being?

I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that, of those groups, Israel and the U.S. are the most committed to the well being of the Palestinian civilians.

Atrocity propaganda is a thing but the difference here is that the first producers and distributors of the propaganda were the perps themselves. It’s just obfuscation in terms, trying to claim that being upset over real rapes and murders that Hamas filmed and circulated is equivalent to swallowing Great War stories about the ravaging Hun.

At most, you can get upset at people for believing Hamas’ own propaganda, which is kind of a self-defeating argument.

GW Hayduke · December 29, 2023

3 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

It turns out that filming rapes and murders and bragging about them, and acting like assholes to people just going about their day is ineffective at garnering sympathy from lots of Americans. What I find fascinating is that you blame people for noticing.

You are a propagandist and definitely one of the primary culprits in pushing twitter hot take atrocity porn here and in the DT, so I understand why you are triggered when I pull the curtains back. Maybe your next move should be to try and label me as the “other” and an antisemite.

I could plaster this thread with information on all the dead babies and children in Gaza and then label you as an “other” hoping to push some bullshit narrative. But I don’t because that is disingenuous commentary and I’m not a propagandist.

GW Hayduke · December 29, 2023

2 hours ago, statsman said:

I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that, of those groups, Israel and the U.S. are the most committed to the well being of the Palestinian civilians.

Your brain is fried. You should stop reading 956’s hot twitter takes

statsman · December 29, 2023

2 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

You’re a satire account, right?

Not at all.
Let’s talk through it.
The U.S. wants to see as few Palestinians killed as possible, while supporting Israel’s defense.
Israel wants to kill as few Palestinians as possible (I believe, and their actions support this belief), while destroying Hamas.
Iran is willing to spend every Palestinian life in support of its fight against Israel, and the U.S.

Hamas is willing to use Palestinian civilians as human shields as it pursues its fight to kill Jews.

Everyone is appealing to Israel and the U.S. for a ceasefire, and not Hamas and Iran, because everyone sees them as the best bet to stop fighting out of concern for loss of innocent life. Am I wrong?

956 Worldwide · December 29, 2023

11 minutes ago, GW Hayduke said:

You are a propagandist and definitely one of the primary culprits in pushing twitter hot take atrocity porn here and in the DT, so I understand why you are triggered when I pull the curtains back. Maybe your next move should be to try and label me as the “other” and an antisemite.

I could plaster this thread with information on all the dead babies and children in Gaza and then label you as an “other” hoping to push some bullshit narrative. But I don’t because that is disingenuous commentary and I’m not a propagandist.

Where you keep tripping up is that the “atrocity porn” is just stuff that Hamas filmed and distributed themselves, because they get off on rapes and murders. And you just can’t stand that people notice.

It’s one of those magical things about Israel, it’s the only country devious enough to trick its enemies into producing propaganda on its behalf .

Edited December 29, 2023 by 956 Worldwide

GW Hayduke · December 29, 2023

1 minute ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Where you keep tripping up is that the “atrocity porn” is just stuff that Hamas filmed and distributed themselves, because they get off on rapes and murders. And you just can’t stand that people notice.

That isn’t a “gotcha” or an excuse to be a propagandist.

956 Worldwide · December 29, 2023

1 minute ago, GW Hayduke said:

That isn’t a “gotcha” or an excuse to be a propagandist.

It is not propaganda to talk about the things Hamas actually did, and filmed. You are confusing propaganda with “facts I don’t like.”

Was it propaganda to publish what happened in Bucha? Or just anti-Russian propaganda.

Edited December 29, 2023 by 956 Worldwide

statsman · December 29, 2023

8 minutes ago, GW Hayduke said:

You are a propagandist and definitely one of the primary culprits in pushing twitter hot take atrocity porn here and in the DT, so I understand why you are triggered when I pull the curtains back. Maybe your next move should be to try and label me as the “other” and an antisemite.

I could plaster this thread with information on all the dead babies and children in Gaza and then label you as an “other” hoping to push some bullshit narrative. But I don’t because that is disingenuous commentary and I’m not a propagandist.

“Atrocity porn”. You keep using that phrase.

Porn excites some, and offends others (and does both to some). Porn’s educational and informational qualities are usually lacking.

What do you suppose should be done with the info about these atrocities? They are certainly shocking. Yet, there is an informational aspect of knowing thousands of Hamas fighters actually planned to break barriers to get into habitats so that they could rape women and then cut up their vaginas. It certainly seems to have educated a lot of Israelis.

Somebody above, on this thread, posted that they want all of them hunted down and killed, and I can’t argue with that.

Side note- the news articles about ancient Nazis brought out of their assisted living centers and delivered to prison are getting rarer. I still cheer, inside, when they are printed, even though the Nazis were just teens as the war was ending. These men lived long decades and maybe thought they had outlived their crimes. Maybe they thought their longer life spent crime free absolved them. Ha-ha-ha! Not so!

Similarly, I look forward to decades of reading of random Palestinians, ex-Hamas fighters, living serene civilian lives in the future, pulled from their tranquil later lives and killed in punishment for their crimes of October 7.

956 Worldwide · December 29, 2023

6 minutes ago, statsman said:

“Atrocity porn”. You keep using that phrase.

Porn excites some, and offends others (and does both to some). Porn’s educational and informational qualities are usually lacking.

What do you suppose should be done with the info about these atrocities? They are certainly shocking. Yet, there is an informational aspect of knowing thousands of Hamas fighters actually planned to break barriers to get into habitats so that they could rape women and then cut up their vaginas. It certainly seems to have educated a lot of Israelis.

Somebody above, on this thread, posted that they want all of them hunted down and killed, and I can’t argue with that.

It’s just a dishonest tactic to avoid talking about things that are bad for your side. The first instinct was to deny the assaults happened, and then when the NYT reports they they did, you just have to change to say it shouldn’t be talked about. And no one says it’s propaganda to show footage of what is happening in Gaza.

Think of all the moments in history that are known, documented, and provoked change because of shocking, authentic reporting on them:

Abu Ghraib

“Terror of War” Photo

Bucha/Irpin

Rwanda

ISIS persecution of Yazidis and executions

Auschwitz and Dachau at liberation

On, and on, and on, and on. It’s only this instance that Hayduke objects to. It’s the exact same equivalent of neocons who say they stuff like Abu Ghraib shouldn’t be published because it undermines troop morale or the war effort.

GW Hayduke · December 29, 2023

1 minute ago, 956 Worldwide said:

It is not propaganda to talk about the things Hamas actually did, and filmed. You are confusing propaganda with “facts I don’t like.”

Propaganda doesn't have to be composed of non-facts. Your commentary is un-productive gish gallop. For others, I've pulled back the curtain.

Nivek · December 29, 2023

47 minutes ago, statsman said:

Side note- the news articles about ancient Nazis brought out of their assisted living centers and delivered to prison are getting rarer. I still cheer, inside, when they are printed, even though the Nazis were just teens as the war was ending. These men lived long decades and maybe thought they had outlived their crimes. Maybe they thought their longer life spent crime free absolved them. Ha-ha-ha! Not so!

Is incarceration about rehabilitation or punishment? Is there a real benefit to society with incarcerating geriatrics? If they are prosecuting 100 year olds, I think they need a lesson on the law of diminishing returns. That money would be better spent on cancer research or to create parks with swings on it.

Bullneck · December 29, 2023

On 12/28/2023 at 12:48 AM, Brian Fantana said:

Yeah, both sides are definitely doing ethnic cleansing, I guess.

Well, one side did some ethnic cleansing. The other side is just trying to root out those evil people.

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