Geenstijl

Vandaag even voor eens en altijd over het thema dat het slechtste in mensen naar boven haalt: Hamas' seksuele geweld tegen Israëlische burgers op 7 oktober

De lijn van het anti-Israëlische kamp is in z'n meest verfijnde vorm ongeveer als volgt: "The evidence that Hamas used mass rape as a weapon of war is paper thin. Her claim here that anyone testified to experiencing it is false: there are zero direct survivor testimonies - only ~2-3 from people who claim to have witnessed rapes that get recycled in every story." Minder verfijnde vormen - en die vormen de overgrote meerderheid - komen neer op: 'lul niet, nooit gebeurd, nul bewijs, is zionistische propaganada.' Maar dit lijkt dus een naargeestig patroon te zijn: Hamas lijkt nagenoeg alle vrouwen die verkracht zijn na hun verkrachting vermoord te hebben.

Dat er "geen bewijs" was, is overigens nooit waar geweest. In LIVEBLOG 47 las u bijvoorbeeld al verklaringen van een medewerkster van een speciale eenheid voor de identificatie van vrouwelijke soldaten: "I have seen that women have been raped. Children to elderly women have been raped - forcible entry -to the point where bones were broken, so...". In een vervolginterview met de Daily Mail licht ze toe dat dit de bekkenbotten betrof: "There is evidence of mass rape of so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis – women, grandmothers, children."

Maar nu worden getuigenissen en verklaringen van die aard dus inmiddels ook gezien en gehoord door de BBC, dat er gisteren een lang artikel over optekende. Het artikel opent met de waarschuwing "WARNING: CONTAINS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND RAPE". Hier een aantal van hun bevindingen:

"The BBC has seen and heard evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks.

Several people involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of those killed in the attack told us they had seen multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.

Video testimony of an eyewitness at the Nova music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.

Videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack, and photographs of bodies taken at the sites afterwards, suggest that women were sexually targeted by their attackers.

Few victims are thought to have survived to tell their own stories." De tekst gaat verder onder de afbeelding.

De BBC schrijft dat het meerdere foto's en video's heeft gezien "from the sites after the attack show the bodies of women naked from the waist down, or with their underwear ripped to one side, legs splayed, with signs of trauma to their genitals and legs." Dat betrof dus zeer waarschijnlijk o.a. de (bovenstaande) beelden die u bij ons natuurlijk al in LIVEBLOG 19 zag.

De BBC vervolgt:

""We see women of all ages," one of the reservists on the forensic team, Captain Maayan, told the BBC. "We see rape victims. We see women who have been through violation. We have pathologists and we see the bruises, we learn about the cuts and tears, and we know they have been sexually abused."

I ask her what proportion of the bodies she's handled show signs of this.

"Abundant," she said. "Abundant amount of women and girls of all ages.""

Het moeilijke van de kwestie is dus dat er zo weinig eerstehands getuigenissen zijn, omdat Hamas nagenoeg alle verkrachte vrouwen na hun verkrachting vermoord lijkt te hebben. De BBC tekent als volgt op hoe het met overlevende verkrachtings-slachtoffers gaat:

"Israel's Women's Empowerment Minister, May Golan, told the BBC that a few victims of rape or sexual assault had survived the attacks, and that they were all currently receiving psychiatric treatment.

"But very, very few. The majority were brutally murdered," she said. "They aren't able to talk - not with me, and not to anyone from the government [or] from the media."

(...) Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a legal expert at the Davis Institute of International Relations at Hebrew University: "I spoke with at least three girls who are now hospitalised for a very hard psychiatric situation because of the rapes they watched," Minister May Golan told me. "They pretended to be dead and they watched it, and heard everything. And they can't deal with it."

Israel's police chief Yaacov Shabtai said that many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to talk and that he thought some of them would never testify about what they saw or experienced.

"18 young men and women have been hospitalised in mental health hospitals because they could no longer function," he said. Others are reportedly suicidal. One of those working with the teams around survivors told the BBC that some had already killed themselves."

Over de forensische en daarmee juridische moeilijkheid van het waterdicht optekenen van seksueel geweld tijdens de dichte oorlogsmist van een 'mass casualty event' als 7 oktober schrijft de BBC:

"Investigators admit that in those first chaotic days after the attacks, with some areas still active combat zones, opportunities to carefully document the crime scenes, or take forensic evidence, were limited or missed.

"For the first five days, we still had terrorists on the ground in Israel," May Golan said. "And there were hundreds, hundreds of bodies everywhere. They were burned, they were without organs, they were butchered completely."

"This was a mass casualty event," police spokesman Dean Elsdunne told journalists at a briefing.

"The first thing was to work on identifying the victims, not necessarily on crime scene investigation. People were waiting to hear what happened to their loved ones.""

Kortom: het 101% waterdichte bewijs waarop een daadwerkelijke verkrachting daadwerkelijk gefilmd is ontbreekt inderdaad. Alle andere aanwijzingen in de vorm van forensische verslagen en getuigenissen stapelen zich al sinds 7 oktober tot het plafond.

Maar het betreft Israëlische vrouwen, voor hen geldt een andere standaard, en die luidt:

'Als je je verkrachting had willen bewijzen had je na je verkrachting maar niet vermoord moeten worden.'

En mocht er onverhoopt toch nog 101% waterdicht videobewijs opduiken, dan zal de wereld eindelijk zeggen wat het écht denkt:

'Okay, het is waar, maar ze verdienden het, want het zijn Israëlische joden.'