When the feminist historian Rochelle Saidel goes to a Holocaust museum or exhibit, she doesn’t expect to see mention of sexual violence against women—even though, as she and others have extensively documented, gender-based crimes by the Nazis were legion. 

So Saidel was not all that surprised at the widespread silence—in news reports, official inquiries and, most searingly, from women’s organizations—that persisted for nearly two months around the brutal rapes carried out by Hamas during its October 7 terror attacks in southern Israel. 

“Just as during the Holocaust, a lot of people haven’t wanted to talk about it,” said Saidel, the founder and executive director of the Remember the Women Institute and an editor of the landmark 2010 anthology Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust. “But their reasons for not wanting to talk about it this time are very different.”  

She noted that almost a century ago, when female sexuality was far more stigmatized, women did not feel empowered to speak out about sexual violation. Today, however, many attribute the global community’s failure to muster outrage about wartime rape to a toxic mix of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias—the idea that Israelis, as the region’s stronger power, can never be victims. 

Jewish feminists from Texas to Tel Aviv were plenty outraged, though, and their persistence began to pay off nearly two months after the terror attacks, with belated statements from the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and from its women’s rights division, UN Women.

Guterres called out Hamas by name in a November 29 post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “There are numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted,” Guterres wrote. “Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere.”  

Citing “alarm” over “the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks,” UN Women on December 1 urged “all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted”—a sentiment Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan called “too little, too late.” 

But Jewish groups have continued to pressure the United Nations to move beyond what many viewed as tepid acknowledgment of sexual crimes and calls for more evidence—despite abundant testimonies—to full-throated condemnation of Hamas and advocacy on behalf of Israeli victims. The outrage is intensifying amid reports that women and men taken hostages have been subject to sexual abuse. 

Dr. Dvora Bauman, who directs the Bat Ami Center for Victims of Sexual Abuse at the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, said that in more than 20 years as a gynecologist working with rape victims, she had never seen—or even imagined—the kinds of violations that occurred on October 7. “Young women were raped in front of their parents or grandparents, and in front of their children,” she said.

Given the available evidence, Dr. Bauman concurred that any calls for further survivor testimony are inappropriate—especially in light of crimes that are literally unspeakable. “We know that according to the literature, more than 80 percent will not talk to authorities,” she said of typical survivors of rape.

On December 4, Erdan and Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations hosted nearly 800 activists, politicians, physicians, rape survivors and reporters for a special United Nations session that was co-sponsored by Hadassah and a coalition of Zionist and Jewish feminist organizations. It was the highest-profile forum to address the topic, with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking via recorded video. Within hours, President Joe Biden weighed in with support in remarks at a Boston fundraiser.  

The long, brutal shadow of World War II—the event that led to the formation of the United Nations—hung heavily over the December 4 gathering, where numerous speakers drew a trajectory between Nazi violations and those of Hamas.  

“During the Holocaust, women and children were sexually abused. During the pogroms of the early 20th century, rape was used as an instrument of war,” said New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who serves on the Senate Women’s Caucus and earned a national platform for her support of the #MeToo movement. Her voice shaking with emotion, the senator added: “For centuries, sexual mutilation and sexual violence have played a grotesque role in the subjugation of the Jewish people.” 

In her keynote address to the gathering, former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg placed recognition of Hamas’s sexual violations in a chronology of progress toward acknowledging war crimes targeting women—progress, she said, that was imperiled by the politicization of Israeli victims. 

“Throughout history, until recently, women’s bodies were considered part of the spoils of war,” said Sandberg, who now heads Lean In, an organization devoted to women’s empowerment that grew out of her best-selling book of the same title. “But within these halls where we are today, change happened.”  

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Read more: Sheryl Sandberg’s Inherited Jewish Activism

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She noted that in response to atrocities against women, the United Nations Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1993 “with an unprecedented commitment to prosecute rape as a crime against humanity. 

“The ground we have gained in protecting women was hard fought,” she added. “It needs to be built upon. We call upon the entire U.N. to formally condemn Hamas for these rapes and to make sure there is a full and fair investigation and hold the terrorists accountable.” 

UN Women’s call for further investigation into the Hamas violence is a particular thorn in the side of Jewish feminists who, in the decades since the Holocaust, have seen a groundswell of support for taking the word of survivors seriously. #BelieveAllWomen was a catchphrase of the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse, yet the sidelining and skepticism of Israeli claims has led to hashtags like #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew, part of an online campaign calling out the double standard. 

Assembling traditional evidence like rape kits for the victims of October 7 was mostly impossible given that an overwhelming majority of the victims were either murdered or taken hostage and, therefore, unable to testify. There was, however, eyewitness testimony of those under brutal attacks at the Nova music festival and elsewhere and other targets who saw the rapes.  

And the United Nations event left witnesses with no doubt as to what took place that dark day: gang rapes of women alive and dead, amputations of limbs and breasts, victims burned alive, bodies recovered with broken pelvises and heads bashed in beyond recognition.  

There were video testimonials as well as eyewitness accounts from first responders like Simcha Greiniman, a volunteer with the ZAKA search and rescue service, who choked up as he recounted finding nails embedded in victims and one dead, half-naked woman whose body had been booby-trapped with a grenade. 

“As a child of a Holocaust survivor, I understand the importance of bearing witness,” reflected Shari Mendes, an American-born architect who lives in Jerusalem and serves with an Israeli reserve team that prepares female soldiers’ bodies for burial. “Our unit has seen bodies that were beheaded. One young woman came in with no legs. We saw several severed heads, one with a large kitchen knife embedded in her neck. Victims were often shot several places in the body and then many times in the head, in the eyes. It seems as if mutilation of these women’s faces was an objective. Several female soldiers were shot in the crotch, the vagina, in the breasts.”  

Among those there to witness the testimony was a delegation of more than a dozen Hadassah and Hadassah Foundation representatives.   

“Today and all other tomorrows, I will speak along with others for those women and girls whose voices have been silenced,” said Frieda Unger Rosenberg, Hadassah’s education and advocacy coordinator. “These monsters must be held accountable.”  

Many Jews view the widespread reluctance of the non-Jewish world to address Israeli suffering as a feature of the contemporary political framing of Israelis as aggressors and Palestinians as underdogs. 

 Mandana Dayani, an Iranian-born human rights activist, told the assembly of the betrayal she and other Jewish women have felt when, after years of standing up for the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community, those allies have been conspicuously silent about Israeli rape victims.  

“Why is it that you cannot find your voice to speak up? What is it about these women and goals that makes them unworthy of your otherwise limitless capacity for outrage, solidarity and justice?” Dayani asked rhetorically to a rapt crowd. 

“I’m afraid the reason is quite simple: Because they are Jews. And if that is not the case, then now’s the time to prove it,” she said. 

Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former vice president of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, said the sidelining of Israeli victims likely “has to do with broader world politics that unfortunately influence practically everything that takes place at the U.N.” Human rights organizations, she explained, are “hesitant of being perceived as siding with Israel and justifying the onslaught of Gaza.  

“This is just more proof that U.N. mechanisms cannot rise above conventional geopolitics,” added Halperin-Kaddari, the founding academic director of The Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women in Israel, a grantee of the Hadassah Foundation. “It’s a case study of failure of the international human rights system, which undermines the very reasons for which this system was built.” 

Erdan, the Israeli ambassador, emphasized that UN Women spent nearly two months ignoring Israel’s abundant photo and video evidence.  

“The investigation that truly must be carried out is an investigation of UN Women’s indifference to these heinous crimes,” he said. “If the U.N. chooses to remain silent in the face of evil, that doesn’t mean the world follows suit. We know the truth, and we will make the truth heard. The stories of Israeli women will not be silenced.” 

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Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.