UN rape report confirms the worst of Hamas

The blighted United Nations rarely, if ever, so much as acknowledges – much less takes any action over – atrocities committed against Israel. That is why the sickening report it has just published on the appalling sexual violence, including even necrophilia, committed by Hamas’s “heroic” terrorists when they launched their October 7 pogrom – and, the UN says, are still perpetrating against the hostages they seized – is of such immense significance.

It should be read, cover to cover, by leaders of every UN member state, especially those that pusillanimously believe every claim, however outlandish, made against Israel and trip over each other in their empty-headed rush to pass resolutions condemning the Jewish state. It may be that the UN report, the result of a forensic, on-the-ground investigation led by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, a Mauritian barrister, comes late in the day. More than 150 days have passed since October 7.

But that does nothing to diminish the significance of the report and the dreadful insight it provides into the unspeakable barbarity of what Hamas did on that day, according to investigators from a world body that has long made known its unbridled hostility towards Israel and support for the Palestinian cause. What the UN investigators have produced is evidence that should bring shame to supporters of the Palestinian cause. Eyewitness accounts of the “extreme acts of sexual violence” that were perpetrated make a nonsense of denials by Hamas’s leaders living in luxury in Qatar. Multiple women and some men were found to have been murdered with their hands tied behind their backs or to trees. Some had gunshot wounds to their heads and were either completely naked or naked from the waist down. Violations, the UN report said, included “sexual violence, abduction of hostages and corpses, the public display of captives, both dead and alive, the mutilation of corpses, including decapitation, and the looting and destruction of property”.

At the Nova music festival that was taking place at the time, the report says, there were “multiple incidents of sexual violence with victims being subjected to rape and/or gang rape and then killed, or killed while being raped”. There was evidence, too, of savage, not always successful attempts to decapitate victims. As horrifying as the report is, it is made even worse by the UN’s barely disguised belief that what happened on October 7 is “ongoing”. As it puts it, there is “clear evidence of sexual violence, including rape, sexualised torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment against some women and children held in Gaza”.

Similar horrifying accounts of what happened, made by Israel in January, did not do much to stir the world’s conscience. It is imperative the report by Ms Patten and her UN colleagues does not suffer the same fate and that, given it carries the imprimatur of the UN, it stirs the world into action to ensure October 7 never happens again. Women’s organisations across the world must be in the vanguard of taking action. The horrifying detail uncovered by the UN puts into perspective the nature and determination of Israel’s response to the pogrom and the Jewish state’s belief that what it is doing is more than justified by what Hamas did and is still doing.

The report should be a wake-up call to countries everywhere, especially those in the anti-Israel majority at the UN, about the realities of what the Jewish state faces.