A new report details how the perpetrators of the Hamas-led massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, had a “systematic and premeditated” plan for the brutal sexual assault of Israeli women.
The report from the aptly-named Dinah Project — in the Bible, the Biblical patriarch Jacob’s daughter was raped by a prince of a nearby region — delineates the savage treatment in the rape and murder of the Israeli women by the Palestinians who were either members of Hamas or the Gazan population.
Rape. Genital Mutilation.
Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon of war – on October 7 and well after.
This was not random. It was systematic. An intentional tactic of terror. A war crime.
The July 8 Dinah Report demands accountability.
We will not stop fighting for… pic.twitter.com/YXpesuK9aH
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) July 8, 2025
“This report represents a call to action: to acknowledge the sexual violence that occurred on October 7 as crimes against humanity, to hold the perpetrators responsible, and to ensure that the tactical use of sexual violence by Hamas as a weapon of war receives the international condemnation and response it demands,” the report states.
According to the report, the sexual assaults themselves were systematic and premeditated, thus attesting to the weaponization of sexual violence and its utilization as a tool of war. A report from the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) of the UN had already noted, “across multiple locations of the Gaza periphery, a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked from the waist down, with their hands tied behind their back and/or tied to structures such as trees and poles, and shot. … There are further accounts of individuals who witnessed at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women.”
“One should bear in mind that the vast majority of those who were sexually assaulted were among the 1,166 who were murdered in the attack and therefore silenced forever,” the report reminds its readers. “Many of those who did survive are likely to be too traumatized to be able to recount their experience.”
“The threat of forcibly marrying the female hostages is a recurring theme,” the report explains. “The intention to marry off the female hostages, which was reported by six of the returned hostages, reveals a plan to engage in an act of raping and possibly impregnating them.”
“Five witnesses reported four or five separate cases of gang rapes; two witnesses reported one possible case of gang rape,” the report notes. “Thus, in total, there are at least four accounts of gang rapes, and possibly six such accounts, all occurring during the October 7 attack. … In most cases, the rape victims were murdered during or immediately following the assault. … The accounts of mutilations are corroborated by the descriptions of first and second responders.”
The report noted the following actions taken by the perpetrators: Bodies with objects inserted into their private parts; bodies with signs of shooting or other mutilations in the area of the genitalia, and bodies of naked women cuffed to trees.
“All of the first responders who were at the Nova festival site described the same scenes: Dozens of female bodies naked or partially naked from the waist down, many of them bleeding from the genitalia as a result of gunshots,” the report states.