Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
US President Joe Biden has castigated Hamas for “appalling” sexual violence during the October 7 attacks on Israel and blamed the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations on the militants’ refusal to release the remaining female hostages.
“Over the past few weeks, survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty,” Biden said at a campaign event in Boston on Tuesday.
He cited “appalling” reports of women “repeatedly raped and their bodies being mutilated while still alive . . . and Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering . . . on women and girls as possible and then murdering them.”
His remarks come as Israel lays out evidence that Hamas fighters raped and mutilated an unknown number of women before murdering them during their assault on southern Israel two months ago, where militants killed 1,200 people and took about 240 into Gaza as hostages.
Hamas has repeatedly denied the allegations of sexual violence, including those made by the US president on Tuesday.
While 110 mainly women and children were released from captivity during a temporary ceasefire, negotiations to free more hostages, in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, broke down late last week.
Biden said Hamas refused to free all the female non-combatants, which “broke this deal and ended the pause in the fighting”. Hamas has said the remaining women were soldiers.
The Biden administration has extended its maintain to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war against Hamas in Gaza. But it has increasingly lobbied Israel to reduce the number of civilians being killed in its bombardment of the enclave. Health officials in the Hamas-run enclave say about 16,000 people have been killed in the two-month war.
As more evidence of atrocities on October 7 has become public, Israel has urged international organisations to more forcefully condemn Hamas’s use of sexual violence, depicting the response as inadequate.
Separately, Israeli women’s rights groups and police officials have stepped up a campaign to shed light on the incidents of violence against women during the Hamas assault.
During an event at the UN in New York over the weekend, volunteer morgue workers and rescuers described corpses maimed in ways that suggested gender-based violence, including mutilated genitals.
In one especially harrowing testimony, Simcha Greinman, a volunteer with emergency response organisation Zaka, described finding the naked body of a woman with “nails and different objects in her female organs”.
Israeli police also showed blurred video of one survivor’s witness testimony, who testified that she saw militants raping a woman before cutting her breasts.
Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive who co-organised the New York conference, asked if Hamas’s denials are to be believed, or “do we believe the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last minutes of their lives?”
