Israeli Rights Advocate Accuses UN of Abandoning 7 October Sexual Assault Victims

Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, chair of the Civil Commission on Hamas Crimes on 7 October, addressed the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday and presented findings from her commission’s report on sexual violence committed by Hamas during the massacre and while captives were held. She came to the UN at the invitation of UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO that has been an observer at the UN since 1993.

Elkayam-Levy said her team had spent more than two years documenting crimes many had thought impossible. She said the commission identified 13 patterns of abuse, including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, deliberate burning, and the intentional mutilation of victims’ faces and genitals. The material, she said, showed crimes so brutal that existing legal frameworks cannot fully describe them. “Victims were filmed while being tortured and humiliated,” she said. “Families were forced to watch their loved ones suffer. This terror was meant to be seen. Women’s bodies became a spectacle of war.”

She ended with a sharp rebuke of the international response after the 7 October attack. Speaking personally as a lifelong human rights advocate and teacher, she said it had been “heartbreaking” to see the UN’s conduct. She accused the system of proving that compassion is not universal and that human rights depend on who the victims are and on political agendas. Israeli victims, she said, received neither compassion nor protection, but were left “to the hatred raging in the world and the system that fuels it.”

The commission said its report, distributed to conference participants, is based on a historical archive of testimony and evidence gathered since the massacre, and aims to provide a factual, evidentiary and legal basis against denial of the crimes. The Civil Commission, which Elkayam-Levy has led since October 2023, investigates and analyzes Hamas crimes against women, children and families. UN Watch chief executive Hillel Neuer said the speech underscored that “human rights cannot be selective,” and accused UN officials, including UN special envoy on violence against women Reem Alsalem, of denying, minimizing or ignoring Hamas crimes. He said the evidence can no longer be denied. The day before, hostage survivor Ilana Gritzewsky addressed the council in Geneva and told Alsalem, “No evidence? I am living proof of sexual violence!”