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Full horror of Hamas festival massacre is revealed - Survivors describe gang....

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12829811/Survivors-Nova-Festival-massacre-saw-woman-mutilated-Hamas-terrorist-shot-head-raping-harrowing-accounts-sexual-violence-October-7-attacks-released.html

Full horror of Hamas festival massacre is revealed - Survivors describe gang rape and mutilations, with the terrorists deriving sick pleasure from targeting men and women's genitals: 'They had a thing for sexual organs, breast amputation'

By Eirian Jane Prosser and Chris Jewers

Published: 01:41, 6 December 2023 | Updated: 10:58, 6 December 2023

Survivors of the Hamas festival massacre have recounted incidents of gang rape, torture, mutilations and the targeting of both men and women's genitals in shocking witness testimony that further reveals the horror of the October 7 attack on Israel.  One witness told Israeli police that they saw a woman mutilated by Hamas gunmen before a terrorist shot her in the head during a gang rape.  Others described hearing the screams of women as they were attacked, as well as seeing the gunmen amputate breasts and toss them to the side of the road.  Several people involved in the collecting and identifying of the bodies found in the aftermath have also recounted harrowing evidence of torture and murder to officials, describing how festivalgoers' genitals were shot, and how elsewhere they found victims murdered, tied to beds, and their genitals mutilated with knives.  While few victims of the atrocities are thought to have survived the attack, a selection of these recorded eyewitness accounts have been released by Israeli police, and seen by several news organisations.  Meanwhile, some of the few that did survive the attack are said to have been left suicidal, struggling to come to terms with what they saw.  With the release of the testimonies, Israel is calling on the international community to recognise Hamas's October 7 attack as a crime against humanity, with one senior official investigating sexual violence saying the terrorists came across the border from Gaza with a 'clear order' to use 'rape as genocide.'  One woman at the horrific scene said: 'There was one body of a woman that had a blood stain on her genitals, at first I thought she might have had a mishap out of fear. When we picked her up we knew for sure that it was blood.'

Another told officers in a recorded clip: 'Mainly there were a lot of gunshot wounds, also targeted shooting in the male genital area and we saw that a lot. They had a thing with sexual organs, both for women and men.  The women we received, they were civilians, we mainly saw either breast amputation or shooting just to the breast, simply shooting from one side of the breast to the other.  They were conscious when they got to us. For the men it was their genitalia, shooting genitals, they had a thing with that, or amputation.'

In one of the horrific statements recorded on video, a witness known only as Witness S described seeing a female victim being passed from one attacker to another as they raped her, while she 'bled from her back'.  The terror group went on to 'cut her breasts' before 'throwing it onto the road' and 'playing with it', the witness recalled.

She continues to say the victim was passed to another man in uniform.  'He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished,' she said, according to the BBC who saw the video testimony. 'He didn't even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.'

The woman in the video described watching the militants as she pretended to be dead. 'I couldn't understand what I saw,' she said.

Another man who was at the festival as the bloody incursion unfolded, told the BBC he could hear the 'noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated'.

When asked by the broadcaster how he could be sure that the screams he heard indicated a sexual assault, he said he believed when listening at the time that the shouts could only have been as a result of rape.  In a statement the same man made through a support organisation, he described the attack carried out by the Hamas terror group as 'inhuman'.  'Some women were raped before they were dead, some raped while injured, and some were already dead when the terrorists raped their lifeless bodies,' his statement says. 'I desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do.' 

Another witness, Ron Freger, fled the music festival when Hamas attacked and said he heard women screaming for help.  'I was lying in a pit and I hard a girl yelling 'they're raping me, they're raping me', he told Associated Press.

Several minutes later, he heard gunshots close by and she fell silent, he said.  'The feeling in that moment is one of complete powerlessness. I'm lying in this hole and I have no ability to do anything,' the 23-year-old explained.  I have no weapon, I have nothing, I'm surrounded by other people who are hiding with me and we're completely powerless.' 

Israel's Women's Empowerment Minister May Golan told the BBC that very few victims of rape or sexual assault had survived the attacks. Those that did are undergoing psychiatric treatment.  'But very, very few (survived). The majority were brutally murdered,' she said. 'They aren't able to talk not with me, and not to anyone from the government [or] from the media.'

Such accounts given to media organisations, along with the first assessments by an Israeli rights group, show that sexual assault was part of an atrocities-filled rampage by Hamas and other Gaza militants who killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 hostages that day.  Two months after the Hamas attacks on the music festival, farming communities and army posts across southern Israel and close to Gaza, police are still struggling to put together the pieces.   In the immediate aftermath of the attack, priority was given to identifying bodies and not preserving evidence, making the investigation more challenging.  Now Israeli police say they are combing through 60,000 videos seized from the body cameras of Hamas gunmen. Footage from social media and security cameras will also be looked at in a bid to bring the perpetrators to justice. It has been hard to find rape survivors, however, as many were killed by their attackers.  But police say they now have 'multiple' eye-witness accounts of sexual assault.  They have not said exactly how many, and are yet to interview any of the surviving victims of the attacks.  In videos released by Israel that were recorded by Hamas gunmen on October 7, one woman who was handcuffed and taken hostages by the terrorists can be seen handcuffed with a large patch of blood staining the seat of her trousers.  Other women carried away by Hamas appear naked or semi-clothed.  Multiple photographs taken by those who arrived in the aftermath show the bodies of women, naked from the waist down, the BBC reports. Some have ripped underwear, legs splayed, with signs of trauma to their genitals and legs.  Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a legal expert at the Davis Institute of International Relations at Hebrew University, told the British broadcaster that it looked as if Hamas had learned how to 'weaponise women's bodies from ISIS'.  Minister May Golan said she had spoken to at least three girls who were hospitalised, and in a 'very hard psychiatric situation because of the rapes they watched.'

Israel's police chief Yaacov Shabtai echoed her comments, saying many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to come to terms with what they had seen.  Some are understood to be suicidal. One person working with the teams supporting the survivors told the BBC some had already killed themselves.  A serving soldier, who only used her first name Avigayil, spoke of how it was difficult to define how many victims were sexually assaulted during the attacks.  The soldier told the BBC: 'I've dealt with more than a few burned bodies and I have no idea what they went through beforehand.  'And bodies that are missing the bottom half I also don't know if they were raped. But women that were clearly raped? There are enough. More than enough.'

In another testimony, a combat medic told the Associated Press that he came across half a dozen bodies of women and men with possible signs of sexual assault when he reached one of the attacked communities.  One girl had been shot in the head and was lying on the floor, her legs open and pants pulled down, with what looked like semen on her lower back, said the medic who spoke on condition of anonymity because his unit was classified.  Other bodies had bleeding around the groin with limbs at distorted angles, he said.  One of the people tasked with collecting bodies from the attack sites while working with the Zaka religious volunteer organisations told the BBC that they saw signs of torture and mutilation which, he said, included a pregnant woman whose womb had been ripped open before she was killed.  The Zaka group and other volunteer organisations that handled bodies at the scene and once they arrived at the Shura army base for identification have provided much of the evidence. The BBC said it had been unable to verify the Zaka volunteer's account, and pointed out that Israeli media reports have questioned some of the testimony of volunteers who worked in the aftermath of the attack.  Another, Nachman Dyksztejna, provided written testimony detailing how he saw the bodies of two women in kibbutz Be'eri with their hands and legs tied to the bed.  'One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed,' his statement says, according to the BBC.

A civil commission headed by Dr Elkayam-Levy, which has been tasked with collecting evidence and testimony of sexual crimes, is calling on the international community to recognise the October 7 attacks as being systematic abuse, constituting Crimes Against Humanity.  We see definite patterns,' she told the BBC in an interview. 'So it wasn't incidental, it wasn't random. They came with a clear order. It was […] rape as genocide.'   The has also IDF claimed that Hamas terrorists shot female Israeli soldiers 'in the crotch, intimate parts and breasts' as part of a 'systematic genital mutilation'.

Army reservist Shari Mendes said many bodies of female victims from October 7, both civilian and soldiers, arrived 'in bloody shredded rags or just in underwear'.

The soldier who had been working at Shura Army Base in central Israel where bodies were being identified was speaking at a UN event in New York on Monday titled 'Hear Our Voices: Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the October 7 Hamas terror attack'.

She said: 'Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast.  This seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.  These women arrived with their eyes opened, their mouths in grimaces, their fists clenched,' she added.

'The soldiers that we dealt with had expressions of agony on their faces still.  I remember one young woman whose arm was broken in so many places it was difficult for us to lay her arm in the burial shroud, her leg too.  In her case the entire left side of her body was shredded, torn apart, most likely by a grenade.'

Hours after the video footage of the most recent testimonies were released, US President Joe Biden spoke of how women had been repeatedly raped and mutilated at the music festival.  Speaking in Boston last night he said: 'Reports of women raped repeatedly raped and their bodies being mutilated while still alive, of women's corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling.'

While investigators are still trying to determine the scope of the sexual assaults, Israel's government has accused the international community particularly the United Nations of ignoring the pain of Israeli victims.  While investigators are still trying to determine the scope of the sexual assaults, Israel's government has accused the international community particularly the United Nations of ignoring the pain of Israeli victims.

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