On the sexual atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7

We cannot ignore the depravity of these attacks, or what they mean for women

On Thursday, The New York Times recounted in awful detail the sexual atrocities the men of Gaza committed during Hamas’s October 7 raid into Israel.

I know Jeffrey Gettleman, who had the piece’s lead byline. He is a serious reporter who served with distinction for many years in Africa. He doesn’t exaggerate.

Which is good, because the Times’s descriptions of these crimes nearly beggar belief. They go beyond rape, or gang rape, or even the execution of prisoners. As described by witnesses who survived, and confirmed by video and forensic evidence, Hamas’s attackers turned murder and torture into can-you-top-this sport:

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.

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Every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

I had some experience as a war correspondent in Iraq. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but I had some. My John Wells novels contain plenty of violence. Probably too much. Prisoners poisoned with nerve gas and tortured until their minds break, bombs shattering bodies, deaths by knife and Taser and sniper’s bullet.

My professional opinion as a writer of fiction and non is that the depravity described in that sentence is unimaginable, in the most basic sense.

No one who had not seen it could make it up.

Let’s agree it happened.

Let’s agree everything the article reports - the soldiers shot in their vaginas, the gang-rapes, the mutilations - happened. (In truth, without looking too hard on Twitteer, one can find descriptions of even worse atrocities supposedly caught on video. I don’t know if Gettleman did not report those because it could not confirm them or because he believed he didn’t need to make readers’ stomachs turn any further.)

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Let’s agree it happened.

The question is why.

As Hamas apologists - and Hamas has so many, many apologists - like to point out, rapes happen in war. Sometimes they are even a weapon of war.

Yet, even so, the way the men of Palestine acted on Oct. 7 to the women they had taken stands out. These were not merely rapes, not merely torture, not merely executions; they were an almost sui generis combination of the three.

After all, rape and torture and the murder of prisoners are all war crimes. Yet, viewed amorally, they are not necessarily nonsensical.

Torturers, for example, may want to break prisoners quickly to extract tactically valuable information: where is the bomb? Or they may seek to break resistance forces by reminding them that if they are captured they will face extreme pain and humiliation before being killed: a fate worse than death.

As for rape, commanders may allow or encourage it as a reward for their soldiers or themselves. Historically, the victims did not even have to be female; the word “catamite” typically refers to young boys who were kept to be abused.

Rape can be a weapon of revenge; the Soviet Army famously raped its way across Germany in 1945, four years after Hitler and the Wehrmacht began a war in which they behaved with terrible brutality and roughly 25 million Soviet civilians and soldiers died.

Of course, rape can be also a simple if brutal way for a conquering army to spread its DNA, most famously in the case of the Mongols.

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But those drivers - even viewed together - do not begin to explain how Palestinian men acted on Oct. 7.

The women had no information and weren’t part of any resistance, so torturing them made no tactical sense. They were attacked within the first hours of the Hamas attack, so wartime revenge doesn’t hold much weight as a motive. (And despite the problems with living conditions in Gaza, it has a per-capita gross domestic product comparable to Egypt or Jordan, and a population density one-third of that of Paris.)

Further, the women were killed immediately - sometimes during the rapes themselves. They could not have been not intended to be “comfort women” (the Imperial Japanese Army’s euphemism for sex slaves), much less bred for genetic advantage.

The attacks, then, might seem to be merely random, expressions of individual psychopathy that happened independently.

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Yet that theory cannot be true either.

Far too many men participated, and none faced punishment from Hamas commanders for what they had done. To the contrary, the attacks were clearly approved, and perhaps orchestrated, by low- to mid-level leaders, as this description shows:

It was like an assembly point.

Assembly points don’t happen at random, and they don’t happen without planning. With 100 men present, this group was roughly the equivalent of an American army company, with a command element present.

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And the puzzle has one more piece.

As far as we know, these attacks mainly spared Israeli men. Of course, many men were killed in the attacks; but the mass torture and sexual crimes focused on women. Why spare the men?

The answer cannot simply be Muslim prohibitions on homosexuality. Southern Afghanistan is among the most conservative Muslim societies in the world, but many Afghan tribal leaders have open sexual relationships with young boys.

Further, raping male Israeli prisoners could easily be justified not as homosexual behavior but as a way to humiliate them further before executing them.

Hamas fighters appear to have intended the rapes of women mostly as physical degradation, a form of torture before execution. Raping men could have served the same purpose, or been excused that way.

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So. Why? Why single out women for this special abuse?

And the answer appears to be that the men of Gaza bore a particular rage for these women who lived free and secular lives - in particular the teens and twenty- and thirty-something women they captured at the Nova rave.

The freedom of these women, in particular their sexual freedom, became worthy of the most hellish punishment (un)imaginable. They were unworthy even of being vessels for children. And so they weren’t bred. Instead their sexual organs were mutilated and their bodies desecrated even as they were raped - and sometimes further after they had been killed.

That radical Islamist culture is incompatible with Western society is not a surprise, not to anyone who was awake for the atrocities ISIS committed. Yet even by those standards Oct. 7 must serve as a warning.

And women’s groups globally, including Muslim groups, are fools to ignore it - as they largely have. By failing to speak out and press less radical Muslim leaders to condemn the violence, they are setting the stage for their own degradation tomorrow.

For these were Jewish women, yes.

But Jewish is the adjective. Women is the noun.