By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 18 September 2025

The United Nations has been ostentatiously uncaring about Israeli rape victims, and this is to be expected since the anti-Israel disinformation network, of which the U.N. is such a crucial node, has engaged in a vast campaign of denialism about the sexual violence perpetrated on 7 October 2023 by HAMAS and the other units of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The same explanation applies to the silence of the women’s and “human rights” activist groups.

It took until 6 December 2023 for the U.N. to say anything about the sexual violence dimension of the HAMAS Einsatzgruppen’s savagery. When the U.N. did speak, it was not from a top official, nor was it even a formal statement, but a tweet from Catherine Russell, the executive director of UNICEF, which called for survivors to be “heard” and “allegations” to be “investigated”. HAMAS was not mentioned, and the Israeli government quite correctly pointed out that this pathetic, belated statement had only been issued as a PR move after months of criticism.

In March 2024, the U.N. put out a press release saying there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israelis were raped on 7 October, adding that there was “convincing information that sexual violence was committed against hostages, and [there were] reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may still be ongoing against those in captivity”. The statement was written in such a way that it rather obscures HAMAS’s responsibility for the listed crimes and studiously avoids the word “systematic”.

The March 2024 press release included a call for further investigation, and evidence had already been submitted to the U.N. by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel about HAMAS’s rape campaign. Unable to completely ignore the issue, the absurdly-named United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) published a report in June 2024 that admitted there was evidence “indicative” of HAMAS using sexual violence on 7 October and that the rapes “were not isolated incidents”, but in the report and even in the press release the UNHRC foregrounded hearsay claims that “sexual and gender-based violence constitute part of Israeli Security Forces’ operating procedures”.

That was the most interest the UNHRC ever took in HAMAS’s systematised sexual torture of Israelis, trying to relativise it away. The UNHRC “experts” then started putting together propaganda documents—that did use the word “systematic”—accusing Israel alone of sex crimes in an attempt to bury the memory entirely of what HAMAS had done.

Journalists, analysts, and other fact-finders in Israel after 7 October were able to speak to first-responders who had been at the massacre sites, to visit the massacre sites themselves, to see the pictures and videos gathered by the police, to visit morgues and talk to medical staff who had handled the bodies, and to meet pogrom survivors and other eyewitnesses. In due course, journalists were able to speak to some of the freed hostages, to view the confessions of captured terrorists, and the findings of the physical and forensic investigations became public. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Later comprehensive reports were released by the British Parliament and the Dinah Project.

All sources converged on the same conclusion: HAMAS and Iran’s other terrorist units invaded Israel on 7 October with a pre-planned intention to systematically rape women and girls, which had then been carried out with ferocious cruelty. Gazan civilians who followed the invaders into Israel took their cue from the Islamist death squads and got involved in the sexual violence. The women and children were almost always murdered after they had been violated and their bodies sadistically mutilated; the lack of surviving rape victims and the mutilations were among the factors that meant it took time to fully comprehend the scale of what had happened. Men were also been raped by HAMAS and the other IRGC units. Many of the hostages were raped before they were abducted and the sexual attacks have continued during the hostages’ captivity.