Mick Hartley

Further to that NYT piece yesterday, here's more on the horrific sexual violence carried out by Hamas on 7th October – and why the full details may never be known – from the Telegraph: 

Under the shade of an orange grove next to a deserted road, the body of a young woman lay face up with gunshot wounds to the head and left arm, piercing through to the chest.

The crotch area on her jean shorts was soaked blood red, and the shirt she was wearing was wide open.

Haim Otmazgin was not looking for evidence of sexual assault when he joined the desperate mission to recover the dead, the murdered, and the mutilated in the aftermath of the Hamas terror attacks.

But he believes he found it when his ambulance was waved down on its way to Be’eri, one of the worst-hit Kibbutzim.

“I typically don’t pay attention to details,” he said, chain smoking, as he showed video of the female victim, which zoomed in on her tattoos in the hope it would help identification later on.

“We work like machines to pick up the bodies… but something went through my mind.”

His suspicions would soon be confirmed, further down the road where he would be confronted by some of the most harrowing scenes in his 27-year career travelling the world as a first responder in disaster zones.

Some of the evidence he collected that day is only now reaching the public domain, due partly to the panicked initial response from authorities and volunteers.

When Mr Otmazgin arrived at Be’eri he was directed towards a house recently swept for possible mines.

“I see a safe room inside with two women shot in the head,” he said as he pulled up another photo on his phone of a white metal door riddled with bullets.

“In the room in front of it there is a young woman on the bed, with the trousers and the underwear down, lying on the bed with a bullet on her head.”

Another female body recovered from rubble was completely naked. One more had an object that looked like a knife thrust into her crotch.

While Mr Otmazgin was collecting the bodies in the field, the Israel Defence Force’s base receiving the corpses was already overflowing.

Shari Mendes, an architect in civilian life, was one of many called up as a reservist to the military base of Shura to help identify and prepare for burial at speed under Jewish tradition.

“Many young women arrived in bloody, shredded rags or just in underwear, and their underwear was often very bloody,” she said.

“Our commander saw several female soldiers shot in the crotch or the breast. There seemed to be systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.”

There was little time for investigation, and little expertise to formally identify the crimes Hamas had committed.

But forensic reviews of video footage of the aftermath of the attacks, and dozens of interviews clearly points to a pattern of gender-based violence on Oct 7.

There are believed to be at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted, or mutilated. […]

While evidence of pervasive sexual violence became known among therapy providers, gynaecologists and first responders, the details were not initially widely publicised.

Israeli officials were at first unwilling to publicise the allegations, Yifat Bitton, an Israeli law professor who has represented multiple rape victims in court, told The Telegraph.

Sexual violence remains a sensitive issue in Israel, a secular state that has seen a clear tilt to conservatism – powered in part by in increasingly influential Orthodox community – in recent years.

It took a few weeks before Israeli authorities started talking publicly about allegations of rape and sexual assault, and women’s rights activists in Israel promptly accused the UN and other international organisations of turning a blind eye to the reports.

“There was a strong denial among Israeli authorities against the notion that something like this could have happened to us,” Prof Bitton said.

She started campaigning when she saw the authorities “were not grasping this really is possible that something systematic happened here”. […]

Mr Otmazgin admitted that he and his colleagues had missed some of the evidence because he had covered the bodies or adjusted their clothing out of respect, as he put it, when he came across them.

But he also says he and his teams were overwhelmed.

He recounted how he used to train fellow volunteers on how to deal with the immediate trauma of mass casualties.

He would bring a piece of rotting meat into class and let the soldiers stand near the meat, smell it and listen to his jokes.

The idea was that the next time they have to deal with a corpse they will be reminded of jokes, to distract them from the horrors of their job.

But as the massacre unfolded on Oct 7 he received a call from a former student who had reached the festival site. He had noted 125 bodies before he lost count.

He transferred the call to a video chat and panned out the camera to show a tent with bodies stacked one next to the other.

“That was the first time I understood what happened,” Mr Otmazgin said, recalling how he was unable to process the killings.

He later described seeing more bodies mutilated when he arrived at the site, which left him in no doubt about recurrent cases of sexual violence.

Mr Otmazgin no longer cries when he speaks about the atrocities he witnesses but said he would have to spend half a day in bed to recover after this interview.

“I don’t get emotional when I see a dead body. I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” he sighed.

“I didn’t touch a cigarette in the past year – now I smoke three packs a day. I lost eight kilos.”

Will all those who celebrated the great anti-imperialist Hamas blow against the Zionist colonisers now reconsider their initial enthusiasm? I'm not holding my breath.