Jerusalem · Gaza Envelope · The Hague · July 2025 | ForensicTimes.com | War Crimes · Sexual Violence · International Law
Table of Contents
- October 7: What the Evidence Shows
- The Dinah Project: Who Built the Report and How
- The Pattern: Six Locations, One Method
- Forensic Analysis: Evidence Gathered in a War Zone
- Criminal Psychology: Sexual Violence as a Strategic Instrument
- Law and Legal Implications: The Path to Prosecution
- The UN Response: Too Little, Too Late and Still Contested
- Global Context: Sexual Violence in Conflict as a Crime Against Humanity
- Investigation: What Remains Unknown
- The Silence That Was Built Into the Crime
October 7: What the Evidence Shows
At approximately 6:30 a.m. on October 7, 2023, Hamas and affiliated militant groups broke through Israel’s border fence at multiple points, entering communities, military bases, and a music festival in the Gaza Envelope region of southern Israel. In the hours that followed, 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage into Gaza. The scale and speed of the attack overwhelmed every response system simultaneously — law enforcement, military, emergency medical services, and the forensic infrastructure that would normally be deployed to document a crime scene of this magnitude.
Among the crimes documented in the attack’s aftermath was a category that has proved exceptionally difficult to establish through conventional evidentiary means: sexual violence. From the earliest days after October 7, survivors, first responders, and forensic examiners began describing evidence of rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, and sexualised humiliation at multiple locations across the attack sites. The challenge — which would define the subsequent 21 months of investigative and legal work — was that the primary witnesses to those crimes were, in the majority of cases, dead. Killed during or immediately after the attacks, they could not testify. And the forensic evidence from sites where sexual violence may have occurred was, in many cases, contaminated, destroyed, or inadequately preserved in the chaos of an active conflict zone.
On July 8, 2025, the Dinah Project — a legal research initiative established after October 7 and operating under the auspices of the Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women at Bar-Ilan University — published its report, titled “A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond.” The report documented at least 15 specific cases of sexual assault, including at least four instances of gang rape, drawn from the testimonies of 15 returned hostages, one survivor of attempted rape at the Nova music festival, 17 eyewitness and earwitness accounts, and 27 first responders who attended the attack sites. It concluded that Hamas used sexual violence as a “tactical weapon of war” and proposed a new legal framework for prosecuting conflict-related sexual violence in cases where victims have been systematically silenced.
The Dinah Project: Who Built the Report and How
The Dinah Project was founded by three senior Israeli legal figures whose collective expertise spans gender law, military prosecution, and the judiciary. The lead author, Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, is a women’s rights scholar and law professor at Bar-Ilan University. She was joined by Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, a lawyer and former chief military prosecutor of the Israel Defense Forces, and Nava Ben-Or, a former judge and deputy attorney general of Israel. The team was partly funded by the British government and Jewish nonprofit organisations.
The report’s methodology was built on several distinct evidentiary streams. The research team conducted its own direct interviews with returned hostages and survivors — a process that required extensive trauma-informed protocols given the nature of what witnesses were being asked to recount. In other cases, the team relied on publicly available testimony or published accounts that had already been verified by other investigators. Forensic reports, photographs, and videos from the attack sites were reviewed. Audio evidence was analysed. Visual documentation — including footage filmed by Hamas militants themselves during the attack — was incorporated where it provided direct or corroborative evidence of sexual violence.
The report was presented to Israel’s first lady, Michal Herzog, in Jerusalem on July 8 in a ceremony that also included a briefing at the United Nations correspondents’ association in Geneva, where Israel’s Ambassador Daniel Meron called on the UN to act on the findings. The dual presentation — to an Israeli head of state and to the international press corps in Geneva — was a deliberate strategic choice, designed to force the report into both domestic political and international institutional discourse simultaneously.
The Pattern: Six Locations, One Method
One of the Dinah Project report’s most significant forensic contributions is its documentation of sexual violence not as isolated incidents but as a pattern repeated across geographically separate locations over the course of a single day. The report identifies at least six distinct locations where sexual violence was perpetrated: the Nova music festival site, Route 232, the Nahal Oz military base, Kibbutz Re’im, Kibbutz Nir Oz, and Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
The physical patterns documented across these locations are consistent enough to support the report’s central argument — that the sexual violence was not spontaneous, individual, or incidental to the broader attack, but formed part of a deliberate tactical approach. The documented patterns include victims found partially or fully naked with their hands tied, often to structures such as trees or poles; evidence of gang rape followed by execution; genital mutilation; and public sexualised humiliation. The report also documents cases of forced nudity of male hostages and physical abuse directed at male genitalia — evidence that the sexual violence was not exclusively directed at women.
Among the most widely cited visual evidence is footage of the kidnapping of Shani Louk, an Israeli-German woman killed during the attack, whose body was transported into Gaza almost fully naked on the back of a van, surrounded by cheering militants. The footage was posted to Telegram and distributed widely. The report treats this footage not merely as an atrocity record but as forensic documentation of the sexualised dehumanisation that characterised the attack’s treatment of victims’ bodies — evidence, in the report’s legal framework, of the systematic nature of the sexual violence.
Ilana Gritzewsky, a hostage released after 55 days in captivity, spoke at the report’s presentation ceremony. “I remember that they hit me and I screamed, and then there was darkness. When I woke up, I was half-naked surrounded by terrorists,” she said. “They beat me. I went through hell. My bones were broken, but that didn’t compare to the psychological pain I was put through. Nobody should experience what I did.”
Forensic Analysis: Evidence Gathered in a War Zone
The forensic dimensions of the October 7 investigation are among the most complex in the documented history of post-conflict sexual violence evidence collection, and the challenges the Dinah Project describes are not rhetorical — they are structural features of a crime scene that was simultaneously a battlefield, a mass casualty event, and a religious observance site.
Jewish religious law requires that bodies be buried as quickly as possible after death. The first responders at the October 7 sites were, in many cases, Orthodox Jewish volunteers from organisations such as ZAKA, whose primary mandate was the recovery and dignified treatment of remains rather than forensic preservation. The tension between religious obligation and evidentiary preservation meant that forensic evidence from many sites was collected under conditions that would not meet the standards expected in a conventional criminal investigation. The inadvertent destruction of evidence was, in many cases, an unavoidable consequence of acting in accordance with deeply held religious requirements.
The investigation was further complicated by the active conflict environment. Israeli police, Shin Bet, and military investigators began collecting evidence and witness statements in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but the ongoing conflict — and the fact that many of the attack sites remained in areas of military activity — limited the thoroughness of initial scene examination. Autopsies of victims corroborated accounts of sexual assault in several cases, according to Israeli police, but the number of cases in which detailed forensic examination was possible before burial was limited.
The Dinah Project’s report identifies several categories of evidence that survived these collection challenges and form the evidentiary basis of its findings: direct testimony from returned hostages and survivors; eyewitness and earwitness testimony from individuals who were present at or near attack sites; forensic reports from autopsies and medical examinations; and audio-visual documentation including Hamas’s own footage of the attack. The report also notes, with specific forensic significance, the physical findings from scenes — the binding of victims, the positioning of bodies, the patterns of injury — that, while not constituting direct testimony of sexual violence, provide the “inferential framework” necessary to establish that sexual violence occurred as a matter of reasonable legal conclusion.
Criminal Psychology: Sexual Violence as a Strategic Instrument
The use of sexual violence as a deliberate tactic in armed conflict is not new. The systematic rape of women during the Bosnian War in the 1990s — which led to the first international criminal convictions for rape as a war crime — established the legal and psychological template that subsequent conflicts have repeatedly replicated. The pattern is consistent across contexts: sexual violence in war serves functions that go beyond individual perpetrator motivation and operate at the level of collective terror, community destruction, and the long-term destabilisation of the targeted population.
The Dinah Project’s characterisation of Hamas’s sexual violence as “tactical” is psychologically precise. The term implies deliberateness — that the violence was not simply the product of individual perpetrators acting on personal impulse but was functionally integrated into the broader objectives of the attack. Those objectives, the report argues, included the terrorisation of Israeli society, the dehumanisation of Israeli victims, and — through the filming and distribution of footage — the amplification of psychological impact on the Israeli public watching from a distance.
The killing of victims after sexual assault — documented in multiple cases — serves a distinct strategic function: it permanently eliminates the primary witness. Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas described this at the Geneva briefing as making sexual crimes during war “the perfect crime.” The perpetrator can rely on the silence of the victim, either through death or through the severe trauma that prevents survivors from testifying. The combination of killing after assault and the destruction or contamination of physical evidence creates evidentiary conditions that conventional prosecution frameworks are not designed to overcome.
The filming and distribution of the attacks — including sexual violence against victims — represents a further layer of tactical intent. Research on conflict-related sexual violence consistently identifies the public nature of violence, and its documentation and distribution, as a deliberate mechanism for maximising collective psychological impact. The victims in these filmed sequences were not simply individuals subjected to violence. They were instruments of a message directed at the watching community — that no one was safe, that even the bodies of the dead were not protected, and that the perpetrators were beyond deterrence.
Law and Legal Implications: The Path to Prosecution
The Dinah Project report’s most significant legal contribution is not its documentation of what occurred on October 7 — that work had largely been done in prior reports — but its proposed framework for how perpetrators can be held criminally accountable in conditions where the conventional evidentiary requirements of sexual violence prosecution cannot be met.
The core legal innovation the report proposes is the application of joint criminal responsibility to all participants in the October 7 attack, regardless of whether they personally committed acts of sexual violence. Under this doctrine, rooted in the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, an individual who participates in a joint criminal enterprise is criminally responsible for all foreseeable crimes committed by other participants in furtherance of that enterprise. The report argues that every person who crossed Israel’s border on October 7 — having agreed to participate in the attack — could foresee that sexual violence would be committed, making them liable for those crimes even if they did not personally perpetrate them.
The International Criminal Court had already taken a significant step in this direction. In issuing arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders — all of whom were subsequently killed by Israel — the ICC prosecutor found they bore responsibility for “rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity” during the October 7 attack. Those warrants established the ICC’s jurisdiction and the prosecutorial theory. The Dinah Project report builds on that foundation and provides the evidentiary architecture that a future ICC prosecution would require.
The report also addresses the admissibility of non-testimonial evidence in conflict-related sexual violence cases. In domestic criminal proceedings, physical and circumstantial evidence of sexual violence — positioning of bodies, patterns of injury, binding of victims — would typically be corroborative of direct testimony rather than independently sufficient. The report argues that in conflict contexts where direct testimony has been systematically eliminated, these physical findings must be permitted to carry greater evidentiary weight, and proposes a modified standard of proof specifically calibrated to the conditions of conflict-related sexual violence.
Under the Rome Statute, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation, and any other form of comparable gravity constitute crimes against humanity when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. The Dinah Project report argues that the October 7 evidence satisfies both the “widespread” and “systematic” thresholds — widespread because the violence occurred across six geographically separated locations involving hundreds of perpetrators, and systematic because the consistent patterns of victimisation indicate planning and coordination rather than spontaneous individual conduct.
The report calls on the Israeli government and judiciary to apply joint criminal responsibility in domestic prosecutions of captured militants, and urges the UN Secretary-General to add Hamas to the UN blacklist of organisations credibly suspected of using sexual violence as a weapon of war — a designation under Security Council resolutions that triggers specific monitoring and accountability mechanisms.
The UN Response: Too Little, Too Late and Still Contested
The United Nations’ handling of the October 7 sexual violence allegations has been a persistent source of conflict between Israel and the international institutional community, and the Dinah Project report was released in a context of ongoing tension over what Israel characterises as the UN’s institutional failure to respond adequately.
The first official UN acknowledgment of sexual violence during the October 7 attacks did not come until March 2024 — nearly five months after the attack. At that point, Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, published a report concluding there were “reasonable grounds” to believe conflict-related sexual violence occurred at multiple locations, and that there was “clear and convincing” information that hostages in Gaza were subjected to sexual violence including rape and sexualised torture. The delay prompted sustained Israeli criticism and a public letter from Ambassador Meron noting: “It took far too long for the UN to even acknowledge that such violence took place.”
The debate has not resolved neatly since Patten’s report. Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, issued a statement asserting that “neither the Commission nor any other independent human rights mechanism established that sexual or gender-based violence was committed against Israelis on or since the 7th of October as a systematic tool of war or as a tool of genocide.” That position — directly contested by the Dinah Project and by the ICC’s prior findings — reflects a genuine evidential dispute within UN mechanisms about what the available evidence establishes.
In August 2025, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced his intention to add Hamas to the UN’s blacklist of parties credibly suspected of using sexual violence in conflict. In the same announcement, he warned that Israel could also be placed on the list the following year unless it took measures to ensure the cessation of all acts of sexual violence. The dual warning — directed simultaneously at Hamas and Israel — was interpreted differently by different parties: by some as a measure of institutional balance, by others as a false equivalence between documented wartime rape and ongoing conflict conduct.
Global Context: Sexual Violence in Conflict as a Crime Against Humanity
The Dinah Project’s legal framework does not exist in isolation. It draws on more than three decades of international legal development that began with the formal recognition of rape as a war crime and crime against humanity in the judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s.
The ICTY’s conviction of Dragoljub Kunarac in 2001 established for the first time that rape could constitute a crime against humanity when committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack on a civilian population. That judgment, and subsequent ICTR and ICC jurisprudence, built the legal scaffolding on which the Dinah Project report is constructed. The report’s proposed evidentiary standards — greater weight for physical and circumstantial evidence in cases where direct testimony has been eliminated — are consistent with the direction in which international criminal law has been moving, driven in part by the practical lessons of prosecuting sexual violence in conflict contexts where victims are routinely killed, traumatised into silence, or threatened into non-cooperation.
The Dinah Project explicitly frames the October 7 prosecution framework as having implications beyond Israel and Hamas. The challenges it identifies — the systematic silencing of victims through killing, the contamination of evidence in active conflict zones, the difficulty of linking individual perpetrators to specific acts — are structural features of conflict-related sexual violence in virtually every armed conflict context. A legal framework that successfully navigates these challenges in the October 7 context would provide a template applicable to the prosecution of sexual violence in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, and any future conflict where similar patterns emerge.
Investigation: What Remains Unknown
Despite 21 months of investigation by Israeli authorities, the ICC, the UN, and independent research organisations, several critical dimensions of the October 7 sexual violence remain officially unresolved.
The total number of victims of sexual violence on October 7 is not known and may never be fully established. The Dinah Project documents at least 15 specific cases. Earlier reporting and investigation has suggested a significantly larger number across the attack sites. The combination of victim death, trauma-induced non-disclosure, and the forensic preservation failures described in the report means that the documented cases almost certainly represent a floor rather than a ceiling.
The question of whether sexual violence was formally directed by Hamas leadership — or whether it was predictable enough that leadership bears criminal responsibility under the joint enterprise doctrine — has not been resolved to a legal standard. The ICC’s arrest warrants for Hamas leaders established the prosecutorial theory, but those leaders are now dead, removing the most direct path to formal adjudication of command responsibility.
The ongoing Israeli investigation into the identities of individual perpetrators, opened by Israeli police and Shin Bet in the immediate aftermath of the attack, has not produced public results regarding sexual violence specifically. The investigation involves the interrogation of captured Hamas militants, but the extent to which those interrogations have generated usable evidence regarding specific perpetrators of sexual violence has not been publicly disclosed.
The status of sexual violence against hostages remaining in Gaza — which the UN’s 2024 Patten report noted “may be ongoing” — is entirely unknown. Of the 251 people taken hostage on October 7, more than half are believed to be dead. The conditions experienced by surviving hostages in the period since October 7 have not been independently verified, and the testimony of released hostages regarding sexual violence during captivity has not been subjected to the same level of systematic collection and verification as the October 7 attack evidence.
Finally, the ICC’s ability to prosecute any individual for the October 7 sexual violence crimes has been severely complicated by the deaths of the three leaders for whom arrest warrants were issued. The prosecution of lower-level perpetrators — captured militants against whom specific acts can be established — through Israeli domestic courts remains a theoretical possibility, but the evidentiary framework required to convert that possibility into actual convictions is precisely what the Dinah Project report is attempting to construct.
The Silence That Was Built Into the Crime
Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas called it “the perfect crime.” She meant the description forensically, not morally: sexual violence in war is designed, structurally, to resist accountability. The victims are killed. The evidence is destroyed. The survivors are traumatised into silence. The perpetrators dissolve back into a conflict environment where individual acts are lost in collective violence. The institutions that might document and respond are slow, underfunded, and politically contested.
The Dinah Project report is an attempt to break that structural design — to build, from fragmentary and imperfect evidence gathered in the most adverse conditions imaginable, a legal framework sufficient to hold perpetrators accountable for crimes they committed in the confident expectation that accountability would never come.
Whether it succeeds will depend on decisions made in institutions — the ICC, the Israeli judiciary, the UN Security Council — that are themselves embedded in the political dynamics of one of the most contested conflicts on earth. The report’s authors are under no illusions about the difficulty of what they have proposed. But they have also built their framework with the explicit intention that it be applicable beyond October 7 — that the legal architecture they have designed for this case become a template for prosecuting conflict-related sexual violence wherever the silence is built into the crime.
The victims of October 7 who were sexually violated and then killed cannot speak. The report speaks in their place. Whether the world listens — and acts — is a question that the next several years of international legal proceedings will answer.
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