Israel’s leadership is pushing the allegations that Hamas fighters raped Israeli women during the October 7 attacks for its own political objectives while the government’s ongoing refusal to allow the United Nations to conduct a full investigation into the matter threatens to hinder any evidence, advocates have warned.
That’s actually a fairly reasonable question, which I know you asked a couple times already, which I haven’t addressed.
So, I’ll give a genuine answer: The report explicitly doesn’t deal with the question of who raped the Israeli women who were raped during the October 7th attack, because they were already dealing with enough evidentiary difficulties just trying to put together and say conclusively whether or not it had happened, and where, and dealing with a certain amount of dishonesty and fog-of-war among other issues that made it hard to even sort out the basics, especially with victims who are now deceased where they were dealing purely with forensic evidence. Trying to bring a standard of proof of which specific men had done it into the equation would have made their already pretty challenging task more difficult and more open to criticism, I think.
To me, that’s not automatically a bad thing. It means they’re being cautious and trying to have solid backing for things they are saying. I would contrast it for example with the abysmally low standard of proof that led your OP article to write things like “some reports have asserted that those acts and other reported atrocities were committed by civilians and those not affiliated with the group.” Of course, it’s easy to simply say that obviously it was probably unrelated civilians who raped all these women during the October 7th attack, and not Hamas, if you don’t feel bound by the need to produce evidence or even answer simple questions like, “What reports? Who are you saying did the rapes, then? What the fuck are you talking about?”
You are, of course, welcome to seize onto that pretty sensible decision by the report authors and shake it back and forth like a little bad-faith terrier, as if it somehow invalidated the whole report – for example, implying that the evidence it presents of hostages who were raped during captivity somehow leaves open the possibility that they were raped by some other, non-Hamas captors during their time as prisoners of Hamas.
Speaking of which, how’s that search for the report’s treatment of the prisoners who were raped in captivity coming? I can give you a couple other hints about where to find it, if you still can’t find it after I sent you a link to the report, and then gave you hints about where to look in the table of contents, which page of the TOC, and the general area on the page where you might be able to find the applicable entry.