Mick Hartley

Camilla Long in today’s Sunday Times on that report – Hamas’s sexual terrorism is laid bare and still the world looks away:

To read any one of the 298 pages of the Civil Commission’s report, published last week, on the rapes carried out by Hamas on October 7 is to be plunged back into hell. There is not only the graphic horror of it — the maimings, the torture, the shocking sexual violence — but the knowledge that, in the days, months and years after it happened, many people pretended it hadn’t.

There were no outcries, no populist movements. Few feminists spoke about what had happened to Jewish women, even though sexual terrorism was, as the report now shows, central to Hamas’s plan.

UN Women waited months to concede, in a tweet, there may have been some “gender-based violence”. In this country feminists warned against being “Islamophobic” and “racist”. In 2024 the Jewish-American writer Phyllis Chesler was amazed to note a “shameful, even unbearable, silence” among her feminist colleagues, while watching feminists, lesbians, queers and gays flocking to the streets and “marching for Hamas”.

Reading the report now, I share her horror: how was this even possible?

Because Jews. But also because Palestine and Hamas have been set up as the great progressive cause of the moment, and such brutality can be hard to justify – though, god knows, many tried. Also, because it’s almost impossible to believe that anyone could behave with such mindless sadistic violence – though, tragically, history gives us enough examples.

In every paragraph there are descriptions of women being stripped, raped and then killed. Sometimes, after they are killed, they are raped again.

They are mutilated: one witness at the Nova music festival said she saw Hamas fighters cut off a woman’s breast while they molested her. They threw it in the dirt and then played with it. She was then shot in the head while still being gang-raped.

Kibbutz Be’eri, three miles from the border, was found littered with dead women, often tied up, often naked. One victim had “knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers, tools, tools from the household” embedded in her body. “The body was completely mutilated.” Then there were the women who lay dead, blood surrounding their genitals. At a military base female soldiers were “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina”. And when all that was over, and these criminals still hadn’t had enough, they would destroy the women’s faces.

Yes, they hate Jews. They really really hate Jews. It’s what they’re taught, from infancy – mostly, disgracefully, in UNRWA schools. Also, I think, we need to remember that these young men were fired up, not only by Jew hatred, but also by drugs – captagon, most likely, the nasty amphetamine-style drug that bank-rolled Assad’s Syria, and possibly cocaine too. This isn’t normal human behaviour.