According to The New York Times, Israel intelligence has concluded that 32 of the remaining 136 Israeli hostages held by Hamas are dead.
Families of the dead hostages have been informed by the Israeli government of their loved ones’ deaths. Israeli intelligence officials suspect at least 20 other hostages may have also been murdered. Over 240 hostages were taken by Hamas during their October 7 massacre of Israelis.
In late December, after interviewing over 150 people and conducting a two-month investigation that included evidence from video footage and GPS data, the Times published a report about the sexual atrocities committed against Israeli women by Hamas on October 7, and the stories were shocking and horrific.
The Times report highlighted photographs showing a woman’s corpse with “dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin,” as well as a video showing two dead Israeli women soldiers who were shot in their vaginas.
One barbaric incident the Times documented involved a 24-year-old female accountant who was shot in the back and who hid under the low branches of a tree and covered herself in dry grass. She said she saw roughly 100 men arrive on motorcycles, cars, and trucks. The first victim she saw was a young woman with blood streaming down her back and her pants around her knees. The accountant said a man yanked the victim by the hair and forced her to bend over. Another man began raping her and every time she flinched he stabbed her in the back.
The accountant said she witnessed another woman “shredded into pieces.” A Hamas terrorist raped her while another cut off one of her breasts with a box cutter. “One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” she recalled, adding that the men sliced the victim’s face and then the woman fell from view. She said she saw terrorists carrying three severed heads of other women.
The female accountant said she had become an insomniac, and when she did sleep she awakened covered in sweat. “That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”