“The mission team found clear and convincing information that some hostages taken to Gaza have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence and has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing,” the report also said.
I don’t understand, why is this interesting? I thought most assumed this was the case. I can’t help but think that killing innocent people is the more significant crime committed by Hamas and Israel.
It’s interesting primarily since there has been lot of controversy surrounding the claims that widespread rape and sexual assault were carried out by Hamas during the October 7th attacks, mostly due to an incendiary article that appeared in the NYT and was widely repeated across international media.
Since the release of that article, there has been quite a bit of pushback, even from certain journalists in the NYT itself, centred around the fact that the author of the article was a young Jewish filmmaker with ties to the Israeli military who was not even a professional journalist. (You can read more about the problems with that piece here.)
In any case, there has been a lot of back and forth over whether these stories of mass rape were credible, so this lastest UN investigation helps to clarity the extent to which sexual violence may have occured.
I’ve seen a fair number of people on Lemmy claim that Hamas didn’t rape women or even kill civilians, that’s it all lies, etc.
We just don’t have the facts, just like we don’t have the facts about claims of IDF rape. NPR did a really good article like a day or two ago about how unfortunately the evidence is gone now because they has to move so fast. And because the people doing the work aren’t trained in forensics, they were getting a bunch of false statements. There was one case where they said a woman was mutilated and raped, only to find out it was a bullet wound near the genitals.
I am going to guess there is raping happening, because that’s just what happens in the world, especially when war comes in play.