The United Nation’s envoy on sex crimes during conflict presented a 24 page report on Monday indicating that “clear and convincing information that sexual violence including rape [and] sexualized torture” took place during the October 7 Hamas massacre, that hostages were similarly tortured and raped while being held in Gaza, and that those currently held captive are still facing such abuse.
Here’s an excerpt from a summary of the report:
Based on the information it gathered, the mission team found clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment has been committed against hostages and has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing against those still held in captivity. In line with a survivor/victim-centered approach, findings are conveyed in generic terms and details are not revealed.
In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and other armed groups against civilian and military targets throughout the Gaza periphery, the mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses.
The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations. Although circumstantial, such a pattern may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The UN team based their report on interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, first responders and others. They also viewed 5,000 photographic images and “some 50 hours of footage” of the attacks.
While every major British media outlet we reviewed reported on the UN’s confirmation of the terror group’s use of sexual violence, Channel 4 News seemed to go out of its way to avoid covering it. In fact, not only were we unable to find any mention on their website of the UN report, they did find time to highlight claims by a former Palestinian security prisoner that he faced ‘abuse’ (though not sexual abuse) in Israeli prison.
Interestingly, while reporting on a different topic, Channel 4 News presenter Matt Frei was challenged by an Israeli guest, former MP Ruth Wasserman Lande, on this very fact: that the network reported on the alleged abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but didn’t say a word about the UN report documenting the sexual abuse of Israeli women and girls.
Channel 4 News’s failure to report on Hamas’s sadistic behavior represents a pattern of bias at the outlet, whose egregiously pro-Palestinian coverage, we’ve observed, renders it akin to the broadcast arm of the Guardian.
For instance, a March 3 segment allowed clearly false information by a guest, claiming that the IDF has killed half of all the hostages held in Gaza, to go unchallenged.
Additionally, as we noted in a post, during a four minute Feb. 29 broadcast by their international editor Lindsey Hilsum, viewers were twice told, as if it were a fact, that Israeli soldiers fired on Palestinians who swarmed an aid truck in Gaza City on Feb. 29, while failing to note the IDF’s emphatic denials of those accusations, which were leveled by the Hamas-run health ministry without evidence.
We also complained to Ofcom – the UK’s broadcast regulator – about a Feb. 20 report by another Channel 4 News presenter who erroneously stated that all the 29,000 Palestinians who Hamas claim have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7 have been civilians. As we noted in a post about that claim, not even the terror group alleges that all of those killed have been non-combatants.
