By Ivana Kottasová, CNN
(CNN) — Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023 terror attack on southern Israel “to maximize pain and suffering,” a landmark new report has concluded.
Shared first with CNN, the report presents the most comprehensive body of evidence yet of sexual and gender-based violence against women, men and children, which it describes as “systematic, widespread, and integral to” the assault.
“The most important finding is the fact that the sexual violence on October 7 and against hostages in captivity has been a calculated strategy by Hamas,” lead author and human rights expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy told CNN.
The report includes firsthand testimonies from more than 10 survivors who endured extreme sexual violence and sexual abuse during the attack, their abduction or while held in captivity in Gaza.
Some of them, including former hostages Romi Gonen, Rom Braslavski, Arbel Yehud, Amit Soussana, Ilana Gritzewsky and others, have spoken publicly about their ordeal. Other victims have only shared their experiences confidentially with experts, investigators and medical staff.
But the report also includes previously unknown allegations, including a case of two minors who, while held hostage in Gaza, say they were sexually abused and forced by their captors to perform sexual acts on each other.
Some of these details only emerged after some of the previous reports were published, including after the release of hostages from Gaza. Some came from testimonies provided directly to the researchers, while others were gathered in numerous meetings with medical experts, lawyers representing some of the victims, and others.
In one particularly harrowing example, the report details three separate incidents of rape at the site of the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza perimeter, citing a survivor who was hiding in the immediate vicinity of the attack.
“I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams—screams you have never heard anywhere,” the survivor is quoted as saying. Their account is corroborated by another survivor, according to the report, who also spoke about hearing the rapes, as well as others who later saw the bodies of the victims, their clothes torn, legs spread and intimate areas mutilated.
At least six other incidents of people directly witnessing rapes and gang rapes are outlined in the report, with all of the witnesses describing victims being shot dead. In one case, a witness said she saw a young woman being raped by several men, mutilated and shot dead.
Elkayam-Levy said the goal of the report – and a digital archive that contains all the evidence the team collected – is making sure that the suffering endured by the victims could not be “denied, erased, or forgotten.” Like other archives of this kind, the material will not be accessible to the public for a set period of time to protect the privacy of the victims. CNN has not been able to verify all of the contents of the archive, but it has seen many of the visual materials included in it.
The report was publicly endorsed by a number of high-profile experts and campaigners, including Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton.
The team has spent more than two years painstakingly gathering, reviewing and cataloguing evidence from the attack. They say they conducted hundreds of interviews and meetings with survivors, first responders, forensic examiners and medical experts, a