The determination with which Hamas apologists and "absolute" anti-zionists like Finkelstein dismiss allegations of rape and other forms of sexual violence on 7 October is sickening. Private Eye is best known as a satirical magazine, and is no friend of Israel, but it also carries well researched material about Hamas:
'Hamas Watch', Private Eye 12/06/26)
Based on 430 testimonies, 10,000 images, video footage, audio recordings, satellite images, text messages, media coverage and investigative reports, Israel’s Civil Commission on October 7, last month published its detailed report on sexual violence carried out by Hamas and its allies on and after 7 October 2023.
Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay of Canada’s Iranian Justice Collective said it “brings to light a devastating truth; the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war”.
But not everyone accepts the report’s findings. While testimonies describing sexual violence by Hamas attackers emerged soon after 7 October, Hamas supporters’ denials came just as quickly.
By March 2024, CyberWell, an antisemitism monitor, had recorded 135 posts (reaching 15m users) denying the claims, with Hamas insisting its operatives had attacked only Israeli military targets, blaming “unaffiliated civilians” for making “many mistakes”. Analysis by Human Rights Watch deemed this narrative false, finding that committing crimes against humanity had been Hamas policy, with the worst atrocities against civilians carried out by armed militants, rather than the Gazan civilians who accompanied them.
A June 2024 inquiry by the UN also found evidence of sexual violence across several locations. The new report gathers this and other evidence, including witness descriptions of murder-rape, footage of abuse of naked female corpses, forensic documentation of multiple bound naked female corpses, many with extreme genital mutilation, and accounts by surviving hostages.
The report, whilst produced in Israel, has been endorsed by numerous significant international leaders, including the president of the American Muslim Multi-Faith Women’s Empowerment Council, who states: “As the leader of the first Muslim women’s civil rights organization in America, I bear witness with absolute moral clarity: Hamas’s crimes were not an act of resistance, but acts of evil, sexual brutality, torture, humiliation and murder.”
Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to Barak Obama, said: “To those who denied the sexual violence on October 7 … facts are a stubborn thing.”
This is correct because the new report is based on evidence, not rhetoric. Predictably it has been greeted by further denials from Israel’s critics, with the website Electronic Intifada arguing that since no rape victim has publicly recounted her own rape it didn’t happen; that without published footage of a woman actually being raped it can’t be proved; that witnesses are lying; that senior politicians who say they have seen evidence of sexual violence are also lying; and – perhaps most crucially – that Hamas members, as observant Muslims, would not commit rape.
These arguments are not evidence, but rhetoric. Even after the Rwandan genocide, where rape was successfully prosecuted as a war crime, there was no footage of rape. Witness testimony is evidence, whilst accusing those who say things you don’t like of lying is not. The fact that it is now Israel that stands accused of ongoing war crimes in Gaza cannot justify letting Hamas deny it.
The question is what the Civil Commission report actually establishes and what kind of document it is. It is produced by the Israeli state. That is not a disqualification. It means it is one party’s account of events that party has a direct interest in characterising in a particular way, which is a reason to apply the same evidentiary standards you would apply to any state-produced report. The volume of material, 10,000 photographs, 1,800 hours of footage, 430 interviews, is presented as if scale settles the question. The Patten mission reviewed over 5,000 photographs and around 50 hours of footage and found, in its own words, “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.” More material does not automatically produce different findings unless the analysis of it is independent and verifiable.
The “calculated strategy” conclusion is precisely the claim under dispute, not the evidence for it. Presenting it as a key finding and then citing it as support for the organised-policy claim doesn’t work.
I agree that Hamas committed atrocities on 7 October, that sexual violence occurred. None of that is in dispute in the review. The dispute is narrower and more specific: whether the institutional reports that claimed to document systematic, organised rape as military policy met their own evidentiary standards. Finkelstein’s argument is that they did not. The Civil Commission report, produced after those reports and by the state under investigation, does not resolve that question. It restates one side of it at greater length.
One clarification on your NB, since it matters for the discussion. The genocide in this context is Israel’s assault on Gaza, not the Hamas attack of 7 October. Hamas committed atrocities, including sexual violence. That is not in dispute here. Genocide is a specific legal and political category, and the case for applying it rests on Israel’s conduct since October 2023, the deliberate destruction of the conditions of life for two million people, not on the nature of the Hamas attack that preceded it. Conflating the two does not strengthen the case against Hamas. It weakens the precision of the genocide charge against Israel, which is where the legal and political argument actually needs to hold.
You say "Hamas committed atrocities, including sexual violence." But where is the proof of that sexual violence? To date, there is none. Why are you accepting this frame?
An atrocity, yes. But where is the supposed sexual violence? That's what's being weaponized, playing on all the historic tropes of third-world brutes raping white women.
And speaking of atrocities, Israeli helicopter pilots ordered launch hellfire missiles at every car (never mind the cars were full of Israeli Jews taken hostage and or prisoner (since there were Israeli soldiers among them.) Then we have the Israeli tank commanders ordered to fire tank shells at houses, knowing full well everyone inside would be killed, Palestinian fighters and Jewish Israeli civilians alike. The Israeli military killed hundreds of Israeli Jews on October 7th, rather than face the necessity of negotiating with Palestinians. They've covered it up as best they could burying mountains of cars before any forensic evidence could be gathered. Atrocities abound. There's no need, no reason to lather on evidence-free rape claims.
What Finkelstein documents, and what the review takes seriously, is the specific claim: that Hamas systematically weaponised rape as military policy. The Patten mission, which produced the report that became the evidentiary foundation for that claim, stated in its own press release that it was “neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature.” It then proceeded to issue findings and claim to have verified acts of rape. That is not a rhetorical point. It is a contradiction sitting inside the document itself.
The Civil Commission report is produced by the Israeli state. That does not make it false. It does mean that presenting it as independent corroboration rather than as one party’s account requires work the Private Eye piece has not done. Political endorsements from Rahm Emanuel and from an American Muslim women’s organisation tell us how people feel about the report. They do not tell us what it proves.
The Rwanda comparison is the strongest point you raise, and it deserves a straight answer. Rwanda prosecutions succeeded on witness testimony without footage of rape. Correct. But the Rwanda process did not claim to have verified rape while simultaneously stating it was not mandated to investigate. The evidentiary problem with Patten is not the absence of footage. It is the gap between the mandate and the finding.
Human Rights Watch, which you cite, documented no corroborated rape, while finding other crimes against humanity. That distinction is precisely what the review is about.
Are all these people lying? "No corroborated rape"?
The evidence in the Civil Commission’s report:
10,000+ photographs and video segments.
1,800 hours of visual material.
430+ formal and informal interviews with survivors, witnesses, returned hostages, and families.
Key findings:
Calculated Strategy: The commission found that the sexual violence was not incidental or random, but an organized tactic designed to maximize pain, humiliation, and terror within Israeli society.
Key findings:
Recurring Patterns: Investigators identified 13 distinct forms of abuse across multiple sites (including homes, roads, the Nova music festival, and military bases). These included rape, gang rape, sexual torture, mutilation, and forced nudity.
“Kinocidal” Violence: The report documents instances where victims were abused in front of relatives, or family members were coerced into acts of sexual violence against each other, a tactic defined as deliberately weaponizing familial bonds to destroy family structures.
Abuse in Captivity: The investigation details continuous, prolonged sexual abuse, humiliation, and the threat of rape against hostages held in Gaza.
Digital Warfare: Perpetrators deliberately recorded, livestreamed, and distributed media of the abuse to inflict psychological warfare on the victims' families and society. [
NB: I have repeatedly denounced Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and its war crimes in Gaza (which in my opinion can be described as genocide): unlike much of the left, however, I do not use that as an excuse to deny the genocidal nature of Hamas and its atrocities, including overwhelming evidence of sexual violence and rape, on 7 October and afterwards.
Stop with this bullshit about the "genocidal nature of Hamas and its atrocities." What happened on October 7th was a concentration camp breakout, a slave revolt. The idea that the intention was to annihilate all of Israeli Jews is a fevered dream used as a shield to excuse the very real, actual genocidal policy of Israel against the Palestinians.
Re Hamas being genocidal: I do not base this claim simply on the 7 October attack (though I think it was) but upon Article 7 of the 1988 Hamas Charter, which contains a hadith that is pretty clear: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
This hadith appears in both Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari — the two most authoritative hadith collections in Sunni Islam.
The charter calls for the killing of Jews as Jews, not merely Zionists or Israelis.
Hamas issued a revised charter in 2017 that dropped this language and reframed the conflict as being against "Zionists" rather than Jews — but without revoking the 1988 charter. So both documents remain in force.
For an organisation (or state) to be"genocidal" is not dependent upon their having the ability to carry out the genocide - just that it has the intention and wish to do so - as Hamas clearly has.
I am genuinely glad that you (and, you seem to suggest, Finkelstein) accept that "sexual violence occurred" on 7 October. Whether or not it was orgasnised as a matter of policy by Hams seems to me as specious and irrelevant as to ask whether the violence against settlers in the West Bank is Israeli/IDF policy, or just happens because of the settlers.
Yes, rape and sexual violence occurred on 7 October: all the rest is so much irrelevant chaff.
You can fulminate against a fantasized Hamas genocide, or you can look at the reality of an Israeli genocide against Palestinians. One is imaginary, the other is all too real. If you want to find incitement to genocide, and full-on statements of such intent, you'll find it in abundance on the Israeli side, from government officials. Combined with the overwhelming evidence of Israeli industrial scale slaughter, everyone from Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Gallant and many others would hang if brought to Nuremburg justice.
Where does Finkelstein accept that sexual violence occurred on October 7th? He points out that Patten and others claim to have verified this, without having the mission or authority to conduct actual investigations, all while failing to produce such verification. With hundreds of very angry young men breaking out of Gaza, it's possible that one or a few committed such acts. And yet, years later, there is NO PROOF! This alone completely demolishes the idea that any claimed rapes and sexual violence was systematic.
And what the hell is this supposed to mean: "Whether or not it was orgasnised as a matter of policy by Hams seems to me as specious and irrelevant as to ask whether the violence against settlers in the West Bank is Israeli/IDF policy, or just happens because of the settlers." "Settler" violence on a vast scale against the Palestinians in the West Bank is amply documented. The Israeli military aids and abets it, as a matter of policy!
A dispassionate, clinical analysis of the book!
A liberal digging for not in a pile of is, he finds some.
Have the names of the victims who were sexually violated on October 7th listed anywhere?
The determination with which Hamas apologists and "absolute" anti-zionists like Finkelstein dismiss allegations of rape and other forms of sexual violence on 7 October is sickening. Private Eye is best known as a satirical magazine, and is no friend of Israel, but it also carries well researched material about Hamas:
'Hamas Watch', Private Eye 12/06/26)
Based on 430 testimonies, 10,000 images, video footage, audio recordings, satellite images, text messages, media coverage and investigative reports, Israel’s Civil Commission on October 7, last month published its detailed report on sexual violence carried out by Hamas and its allies on and after 7 October 2023.
Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay of Canada’s Iranian Justice Collective said it “brings to light a devastating truth; the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war”.
But not everyone accepts the report’s findings. While testimonies describing sexual violence by Hamas attackers emerged soon after 7 October, Hamas supporters’ denials came just as quickly.
By March 2024, CyberWell, an antisemitism monitor, had recorded 135 posts (reaching 15m users) denying the claims, with Hamas insisting its operatives had attacked only Israeli military targets, blaming “unaffiliated civilians” for making “many mistakes”. Analysis by Human Rights Watch deemed this narrative false, finding that committing crimes against humanity had been Hamas policy, with the worst atrocities against civilians carried out by armed militants, rather than the Gazan civilians who accompanied them.
A June 2024 inquiry by the UN also found evidence of sexual violence across several locations. The new report gathers this and other evidence, including witness descriptions of murder-rape, footage of abuse of naked female corpses, forensic documentation of multiple bound naked female corpses, many with extreme genital mutilation, and accounts by surviving hostages.
The report, whilst produced in Israel, has been endorsed by numerous significant international leaders, including the president of the American Muslim Multi-Faith Women’s Empowerment Council, who states: “As the leader of the first Muslim women’s civil rights organization in America, I bear witness with absolute moral clarity: Hamas’s crimes were not an act of resistance, but acts of evil, sexual brutality, torture, humiliation and murder.”
Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to Barak Obama, said: “To those who denied the sexual violence on October 7 … facts are a stubborn thing.”
This is correct because the new report is based on evidence, not rhetoric. Predictably it has been greeted by further denials from Israel’s critics, with the website Electronic Intifada arguing that since no rape victim has publicly recounted her own rape it didn’t happen; that without published footage of a woman actually being raped it can’t be proved; that witnesses are lying; that senior politicians who say they have seen evidence of sexual violence are also lying; and – perhaps most crucially – that Hamas members, as observant Muslims, would not commit rape.
These arguments are not evidence, but rhetoric. Even after the Rwandan genocide, where rape was successfully prosecuted as a war crime, there was no footage of rape. Witness testimony is evidence, whilst accusing those who say things you don’t like of lying is not. The fact that it is now Israel that stands accused of ongoing war crimes in Gaza cannot justify letting Hamas deny it.
Nobody is accusing any one of lying.
The question is what the Civil Commission report actually establishes and what kind of document it is. It is produced by the Israeli state. That is not a disqualification. It means it is one party’s account of events that party has a direct interest in characterising in a particular way, which is a reason to apply the same evidentiary standards you would apply to any state-produced report. The volume of material, 10,000 photographs, 1,800 hours of footage, 430 interviews, is presented as if scale settles the question. The Patten mission reviewed over 5,000 photographs and around 50 hours of footage and found, in its own words, “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.” More material does not automatically produce different findings unless the analysis of it is independent and verifiable.
The “calculated strategy” conclusion is precisely the claim under dispute, not the evidence for it. Presenting it as a key finding and then citing it as support for the organised-policy claim doesn’t work.
I agree that Hamas committed atrocities on 7 October, that sexual violence occurred. None of that is in dispute in the review. The dispute is narrower and more specific: whether the institutional reports that claimed to document systematic, organised rape as military policy met their own evidentiary standards. Finkelstein’s argument is that they did not. The Civil Commission report, produced after those reports and by the state under investigation, does not resolve that question. It restates one side of it at greater length.
One clarification on your NB, since it matters for the discussion. The genocide in this context is Israel’s assault on Gaza, not the Hamas attack of 7 October. Hamas committed atrocities, including sexual violence. That is not in dispute here. Genocide is a specific legal and political category, and the case for applying it rests on Israel’s conduct since October 2023, the deliberate destruction of the conditions of life for two million people, not on the nature of the Hamas attack that preceded it. Conflating the two does not strengthen the case against Hamas. It weakens the precision of the genocide charge against Israel, which is where the legal and political argument actually needs to hold.
You say "Hamas committed atrocities, including sexual violence." But where is the proof of that sexual violence? To date, there is none. Why are you accepting this frame?
I would have to suggest that lobbing hand grenades into a sealed room of unarmed people is an atrocity.
An atrocity, yes. But where is the supposed sexual violence? That's what's being weaponized, playing on all the historic tropes of third-world brutes raping white women.
And speaking of atrocities, Israeli helicopter pilots ordered launch hellfire missiles at every car (never mind the cars were full of Israeli Jews taken hostage and or prisoner (since there were Israeli soldiers among them.) Then we have the Israeli tank commanders ordered to fire tank shells at houses, knowing full well everyone inside would be killed, Palestinian fighters and Jewish Israeli civilians alike. The Israeli military killed hundreds of Israeli Jews on October 7th, rather than face the necessity of negotiating with Palestinians. They've covered it up as best they could burying mountains of cars before any forensic evidence could be gathered. Atrocities abound. There's no need, no reason to lather on evidence-free rape claims.
What Finkelstein documents, and what the review takes seriously, is the specific claim: that Hamas systematically weaponised rape as military policy. The Patten mission, which produced the report that became the evidentiary foundation for that claim, stated in its own press release that it was “neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature.” It then proceeded to issue findings and claim to have verified acts of rape. That is not a rhetorical point. It is a contradiction sitting inside the document itself.
The Civil Commission report is produced by the Israeli state. That does not make it false. It does mean that presenting it as independent corroboration rather than as one party’s account requires work the Private Eye piece has not done. Political endorsements from Rahm Emanuel and from an American Muslim women’s organisation tell us how people feel about the report. They do not tell us what it proves.
The Rwanda comparison is the strongest point you raise, and it deserves a straight answer. Rwanda prosecutions succeeded on witness testimony without footage of rape. Correct. But the Rwanda process did not claim to have verified rape while simultaneously stating it was not mandated to investigate. The evidentiary problem with Patten is not the absence of footage. It is the gap between the mandate and the finding.
Human Rights Watch, which you cite, documented no corroborated rape, while finding other crimes against humanity. That distinction is precisely what the review is about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSR93pnmtYw&t=7s
Are all these people lying? "No corroborated rape"?
The evidence in the Civil Commission’s report:
10,000+ photographs and video segments.
1,800 hours of visual material.
430+ formal and informal interviews with survivors, witnesses, returned hostages, and families.
Key findings:
Calculated Strategy: The commission found that the sexual violence was not incidental or random, but an organized tactic designed to maximize pain, humiliation, and terror within Israeli society.
Key findings:
Recurring Patterns: Investigators identified 13 distinct forms of abuse across multiple sites (including homes, roads, the Nova music festival, and military bases). These included rape, gang rape, sexual torture, mutilation, and forced nudity.
“Kinocidal” Violence: The report documents instances where victims were abused in front of relatives, or family members were coerced into acts of sexual violence against each other, a tactic defined as deliberately weaponizing familial bonds to destroy family structures.
Abuse in Captivity: The investigation details continuous, prolonged sexual abuse, humiliation, and the threat of rape against hostages held in Gaza.
Digital Warfare: Perpetrators deliberately recorded, livestreamed, and distributed media of the abuse to inflict psychological warfare on the victims' families and society. [
NB: I have repeatedly denounced Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and its war crimes in Gaza (which in my opinion can be described as genocide): unlike much of the left, however, I do not use that as an excuse to deny the genocidal nature of Hamas and its atrocities, including overwhelming evidence of sexual violence and rape, on 7 October and afterwards.
Stop with this bullshit about the "genocidal nature of Hamas and its atrocities." What happened on October 7th was a concentration camp breakout, a slave revolt. The idea that the intention was to annihilate all of Israeli Jews is a fevered dream used as a shield to excuse the very real, actual genocidal policy of Israel against the Palestinians.
Re Hamas being genocidal: I do not base this claim simply on the 7 October attack (though I think it was) but upon Article 7 of the 1988 Hamas Charter, which contains a hadith that is pretty clear: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
This hadith appears in both Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari — the two most authoritative hadith collections in Sunni Islam.
The charter calls for the killing of Jews as Jews, not merely Zionists or Israelis.
Hamas issued a revised charter in 2017 that dropped this language and reframed the conflict as being against "Zionists" rather than Jews — but without revoking the 1988 charter. So both documents remain in force.
For an organisation (or state) to be"genocidal" is not dependent upon their having the ability to carry out the genocide - just that it has the intention and wish to do so - as Hamas clearly has.
I am genuinely glad that you (and, you seem to suggest, Finkelstein) accept that "sexual violence occurred" on 7 October. Whether or not it was orgasnised as a matter of policy by Hams seems to me as specious and irrelevant as to ask whether the violence against settlers in the West Bank is Israeli/IDF policy, or just happens because of the settlers.
Yes, rape and sexual violence occurred on 7 October: all the rest is so much irrelevant chaff.
You can fulminate against a fantasized Hamas genocide, or you can look at the reality of an Israeli genocide against Palestinians. One is imaginary, the other is all too real. If you want to find incitement to genocide, and full-on statements of such intent, you'll find it in abundance on the Israeli side, from government officials. Combined with the overwhelming evidence of Israeli industrial scale slaughter, everyone from Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Gallant and many others would hang if brought to Nuremburg justice.
Where does Finkelstein accept that sexual violence occurred on October 7th? He points out that Patten and others claim to have verified this, without having the mission or authority to conduct actual investigations, all while failing to produce such verification. With hundreds of very angry young men breaking out of Gaza, it's possible that one or a few committed such acts. And yet, years later, there is NO PROOF! This alone completely demolishes the idea that any claimed rapes and sexual violence was systematic.
And what the hell is this supposed to mean: "Whether or not it was orgasnised as a matter of policy by Hams seems to me as specious and irrelevant as to ask whether the violence against settlers in the West Bank is Israeli/IDF policy, or just happens because of the settlers." "Settler" violence on a vast scale against the Palestinians in the West Bank is amply documented. The Israeli military aids and abets it, as a matter of policy!