People would far rather believe that pigs can fly and Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners than that Hamas-led terrorists randomly mass raped and slaughtered women, children and some men on October 7. Here’s why:
By Marika Sboros
(Courtesy of Daily Friend in SA where first published)
There are moments when language fails, when violence outstrips the vocabulary available to describe it.
October 7, 2023, in southern Israel was one of those moments.
The unprecedented violence, mass rape and sexual savagery that the Hamas-led attack unleashed on that day was so deliberately, systematically calculated to destroy bodies and families that no existing legal framework had a word for it.
Until now.
A new, independent report released on May 12, 2026 is the most comprehensive documentation and analysis to date of that violence. It is the work of the Israel-based, internationally focused NGO, CCO7 (Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children).
Buried in it is a word the Commission’s investigators coined soon after October 7, for what they found in their early research: kinocide – from kin (family) and cide (the systematic nature of destruction).
World media have yet to embrace the word.
The Commission’s leader, Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an Israel Prize laureate and international law expert, developed the concept of the word with principal contributor, former Canadian justice minister Prof Irwin Cotler.
They did so after watching video after video of Hamas terrorists forcing parents and grandparents to watch their children and grandchildren be tortured, raped and murdered, and children to watch their parents and grandparents suffer the same fate.
Elkayam-Levy describes kinocide as:
“The deliberate, systematic torture of families and the weaponisation of familial bonds in order to maximise suffering.”
While looking and analysing the videos, they started seeing the pattern – moments that made them “understand that we were seeing something that needs to be defined,” Elkayam-Levy says in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
These moments made her move after October 7 to secure evidence before denial could take hold.
“We saw silence and denial .. very quick denial,” she told the Times of Israel. This made her “understand that we have to collect evidence as quickly as possible and establish an archive under stringent international standards.”
The Commission’s two-year investigation has done so. It has drawn on legal scholars, international jurists, researchers, archivists and trauma experts, conducted in collaboration with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
Prof David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone has endorsed the report. So have Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak and Anila Ali, president of the American Muslim and Multi-Faith Women’s Empowerment Council.
Their endorsement alone should silence those who would dismiss this as a partisan document.
Investigators documented 13 recurring forms of sexual violence across the Nova music festival, kibbutzim, roadside shelters, military bases, abduction routes and hostage captivity in Gaza. These were rape, gang rape, sexual torture, forced nudity, genital mutilation, executions linked to assault, post-mortem abuse and assaults in front of family members.
Some examples: a male survivor of the Nova musical festival slaughter, identified only as D, reportedly passed a polygraph after describing his gang rape:
“They laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll … They did whatever they wanted to me.”
A 17-year-old hostage called her mother from Gaza:
“Mum, they’re going to rape me.”
Two related minor children held hostage in Gaza were coerced into sexual acts against one another. Their captors stripped them, touched their genitalia and whipped them.
These are not isolated accounts. They are part of what the Commission documents over two years and 300 pages, in a report titled “Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled”: a “systematic, widespread and integral” use of sexual violence, designed, planned and organised to terrorise Israeli society as a whole.
The Commission’s legal conclusion is unequivocal – these are war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal acts under international law.
After reading the Commission’s report, Lord Zac Goldsmith, British peer and former Cabinet minister, took to X to ask questions that journalists globally haven’t asked
I include them in full, as a handy reference for journalists who might yet cover it:
- What kind of a depraved monster slices off a woman’s breast while she is being gang-raped, and throws it into the dust to be used as a plaything?
- What kind of a twisted pervert turns rape into necrophilia by shooting a woman in the head while he is still defiling her?
- What kind of ‘freedom fighters’ go into battle with a set of handy Arabic-to-Hebrew phrases, including ‘take off your pants’, ‘lie down’ and ‘spread your legs’?
- What self-respecting human being presses nails, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers and other household tools into a woman’s genitals?
- How hard do you have to rape someone, and with what, to shatter their pelvis?
- Who shoots a young girl in the face and then films her mutilated corpse on her brother’s mobile phone?
The answer is staring us all in the face: Hamas terrorists.
I call them terrorists while many in the media call them “militants”. Unlike “militant”, “terrorist” has a specific meaning – someone who deliberately targets civilians to create fear for political ends. It carries legal weight and moral condemnation.
The October 7 attack meets every legal and common-sense definition of terrorism. Hamas is formally designated a terrorist organisation by the US, the EU, the UK and Australia, among others.
When the Civil Commission’s report landed in newsrooms, many mainstream editors may well have reached for a familiar refrain not to publish: the report is “not new”.
Technically, they are correct. The Civil Commission’s first detailed report was in November 2023. And accounts of mass rape and sexual violence began circulating online in the wake of October 7.
Yet there is not wide acknowledgement of why the full extent of that violence has never found its way into public consciousness – and the media’s role in that.
It’s not because the story is not new. It is because a sustained, organised, sophisticated global propaganda campaign has, over more than two years, successfully seeded doubt, denial and deliberate distraction into the information ecosystem.
This may arguably persuade those in positions of power and influence to give credence to claims that accusations of mass rape and massacre of innocents have been “exaggerated” and that Israel “doctored” all the evidence to make October 7 look worse than it was.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese lends ongoing institutional cover to this line of thinking. She regularly underplays the extent of the violence of October 7 – when she acknowledges it at all. She has opined that reports of Hamas’s sexual violence “may have been exaggerated.”
What is new about the “Silenced No More” report is the scope, rigour and forensic depth of its documentation – two years of painstaking evidence-gathering producing the most comprehensive war crimes archive ever assembled on these events.
It is designed to be undeniable.
Yet the denialism goes on, as does the global propaganda campaign.
A column in The New York Times on 11 May by the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof is relevant in that regard. The irony of its headline, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians”, is probably lost on Kristof
It mirrors the moral language condemning the silence around October 7 in the Civil Commission’s own report headline: Silenced No More”. It makes Kristof’s column look like a deliberate attempt to pre-empt precisely the rhetorical space the Civil Commission’s report deserves to occupy.
Kristof’s column is riddled with terminal weaknesses, not the least is its most sensational claim: that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners in its jails.
Kristof is careful not to make the claim himself. He leaves it to his sources.
The claim quickly went viral. It is not only unverified. It is old.
As Honest Reporting has noted, Euro-Med Monitor, Kristof’s chief source for his column, and a self-described “human rights” NGO, was pushing it in June 2024.
The claim is physiologically and biologically impossible. As veterinary experts could have told Kristof, if he’d bothered to ask
They could have told him that the canine sexual response is governed by species-specific pheromones that humans do not produce; that canine mounting behaviour is non-sexual; and that canine anatomy is incompatible with human anatomy for penetrative acts.
Veterinary scientists call the dog-rapist claim biologically implausible. It is also a fabrication of a fevered mind designed to overwhelm critical faculties before implausibility registers. In the context of the Middle East conflict, it helpfully contributes to demonising Israel and Jews.
It’s tempting to see that Kristof’s column as preparation for undermining the Civil Commission’s report that launched the next day.
The New York Times did run an extensive news report of the Civil Commission’s the next day, by its Jerusalem correspondent, Isabel Kershner.
Some analysts see that as giving due credence to the Commission’s report. Others have a more jaundiced view. Whether it constitutes balance, accountability or damage control remains to be seen.
Euro-Med’s record alone should have disqualified it entirely as Kristof’s source.
The NGO spread the debunked claim that Israel harvested organs from Palestinian prisoners. Israel has designated its founder, Ramy Abdu, as a Hamas operative in Europe. Abdu publicly declared on X (formerly Twitter) that Israel has “an insatiable appetite for drinking the blood of Palestinian children.”
(The tweet has since been deleted or made inaccessible, but not before Honest Reporting took a screen shot of it.)
Abdu was just spreading a modern “blood libel”, the word given to the first one that was weaponised in 12th-century England to trigger massacres and expulsions of Jewish communities across medieval Europe for centuries. In its original “glory”, the blood libel claimed Jews kill Christian children and drink their blood for religious ritual.
That The New York Times allowed Kristof to present Euro-Med as a credible watchdog over Israeli prisons without flagging any of this context is a notable editorial failure.
Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur gives his views of Kristof’s column in a YouTube video on May 12. He says that Kristof was not tasked with revealing sexual crimes but “covering for them. And it worked.”
Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger was more blunt on X:
“Utter depravity from (Kristof) for parroting such cartoonishly evil Hamas propaganda that would make Goebbels blush.”
The paper has stolidly defended the column.
In South Africa, the largest news platform, News24 and EWN were practically alone in covering the Commission’s report.
Contrast that with the considerable space and attention South African media gave to every procedural twist in the ongoing, ill-judged genocide case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel that South Africa launched following October 7.
Some even treated it as a matter of national pride. They also later falsely reported (many journalists still do) that the ICJ found “a plausible case of genocide” against Israel in its ruling in January 2024.
The ICJ did nothing of the sort.
Former ICJ president Judge Joan Donoghue explicitly corrected this publicly in a BBC interview in April 2024: the court “did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.” The court did decide that the Palestinians had a “plausible right to be protected from genocide.”
Many Jewish legal and historical scholars consider the genocide claim to rival the original blood libel about Jews killing kids to drink their blood as the worst modern-day libel against Israel and Jews.
Many journalists still make the false claim about the ICJ’s ruling. Many South African media have yet to correct their record.
That’s not incidental. It is an editorial choice that amplifies allegations against Israel and suppresses documented evidence of atrocities against Israelis. It has a cost – paid by the women, children and men whose suffering is erased from public consciousness when false claims are not debunked.
Silence and denialism from journalists on the full extent of the Hamas-led mass rape and other sexual violence of October 7 is one thing; the ongoing silence from feminists globally is another.
Women’s rights organisations built on the principle of believing survivors have still not found their voices. The slogan “Believe Women” turned out to have a gross political limit:
“Believe Women, Except Jewish Women.”
UN Women took weeks to issue even a hedged statement. The UN’s own special rapporteur on sexual violence in conflict reportedly labelled survivor accounts “disinformation”.
When former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg took to the UN podium in December 2023, two months after October 7, to demand that the world acknowledge Hamas’s sexual violence, she was not addressing a hostile audience. She was addressing a silent one.
“The silence on these war crimes is deafening,” Sandberg told the assembly. “Silence is complicity.”
She later added: “I never thought that politics could make any group or feminist leader turn a blind eye to just such clear documentation of sexual violence.”
Her contribution to breaking that silence was to produce a film, titled Screams Before Silence, to give voice to the silenced.
The Civil Commission’s report, which Elkayam-Levy, herself a feminist scholar of international law, built in direct response to that silence, is in part a rebuke to her own field.
The deafening silence still ongoing from feminists over the sexual violence of October 7 is troubling enough. Compounding it with an ironic veneer of respectability is Jewish voices among the loudest dismissing or minimising it.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the American antizionist organisation, blamed Israel for the attack on the day it happened. It has e cast doubt on the sexual violence documentation.
The Antidefamation League (ADL) has noted that JVP “uses its Jewish identity to shield some in the anti-Israel movement from allegations of antisemitism and provide a veneer of legitimacy.” That veneer gives the denialism of October 7 sexual violence a halo it would not otherwise have.
In South Africa, the halo hangs over the quaintly named South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) and the non-profit Jewish Democratic Initiative (JDI) when it comes to Israel’s war against Hamas.
The implicit message is insidious: if Jews themselves say something didn’t happen or was exaggerated, how could doubting it be antisemitic or antizionist?
When people with professional credentials in women’s advocacy, or the perceived moral righteousness and authority of being Jewish, line up to cast doubt, the propaganda campaign need not argue its case. It simply points at them.
This is the ecosystem in which the Civil Commission’s report lands in 2026.
Of course, none of the above justifies ignoring credible accounts of abuse in Israeli detention facilities. Confirmed abuse allegations demand accountability, no matter the perpetrators or victims.
Rettig Gur is among Jews prepared to acknowledge the existence of documented cases of Palestinian prisoner abuse. These are “real”, he says, but “far smaller” than alleged and mostly not sexual. He identifies Israeli government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as responsible for treating prisoner welfare as a political liability rather than a legal obligation.
He also stresses that “the vast majority of (IDF) soldiers are honourable men (and women) who walked into fire so our families may live.”
Israel’s government has served notice that it will sue The New York Times for Kristof’s article. An announcement that it was addressing and investigating concerns about abuse of Palestinian prisoners would have been more helpful.
Rettig Gur posits the way forward: the failures of a minority must be fixed from within and must never be weaponised to erase what Hamas did.
The denialism goes on. As the Civil Commission’s CEO, Merav Israeli-Amarant, told Kershner in The New York Times, sexual crimes are “the easiest crimes to deny.” This is especially true of the October 7 attack “because most of the victims were murdered and are unable to testify.”
History has its own power.
It will not remember the perpetrators of kinocide kindly. It will be equally unkind to those who had all the evidence and chose to stay silent.
About the Writer:
Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.
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