Mick Hartley

Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times:

She had, he says, the face of an angel. Night after night Yoni Saadon, 39, wakes in anguish to the faces of women. First, that of the young woman hiding next to him under the stage of the Supernova festival where he had been dancing to electronic music as the sun rose on October 7 and Hamas militants opened fire.

“She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,” he said. “I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”

After an hour, he peeked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.

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

The horror did not end there. Hiding in bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters. “They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says….

It took UN Women seven weeks before they could be bothered to make any kind of statement on the Hamas pogrom, and the brutal rape and slaughter of Israeli women. "We reiterate that all women, Israeli women, Palestinian women, as all others, are entitled to a life lived in safety and free from violence."

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who spent 12 years as a committee member on the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (Cedaw), said: “This is the statement they should have issued two months ago.

“It’s mindblowing. We were there for our sisters when terrible things happened across the ocean, when they took away abortion rights in US, the killing of women in Iran, the abduction of Yazidis … but with us they looked away and I can’t think of a reasonable answer.”

Oh I can.

Ayelet Razin Bet Or, the former director of Israel’s authority for the advancement of the status of women, does have an answer. “Israeli women have been betrayed,” she said. “What they are saying is MeToo except if you’re a Jew.”