Israel is bracing for the return of the 20 remaining living hostages after over 730 days spent in captivity in underground tunnels in Gaza. 

When freed, they will doubtless tell the world of the hardship they endured, with former captives having already spoken about Hamas subjecting them to starvation, psychological games and physical torture.

One of the most sinister aspects of hostage testimony has been details of sexual violence, including rape, forced nudity, and day-to-day humiliation.

While women, such as Amit Soussana and Ilana Gritzewwsky, have been the main victims, Hamas does not discriminate when it comes to the routine degradation of the hostages, and men testified to suffering sexual violence in captivity too.

Such treatment is part of the terror group’s wider ‘genocidal strategy’, according to an all-women group of Israeli legal experts, who argue that Hamas used raped and sexual humiliation during its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and after, to inflict the ultimate damage on the nation.

On that Saturday – the single deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust – armed militants stormed the border and engaged in gang rape and genital mutilation, often tying up naked victims to trees and executing most of them afterwards by gunfire. Some 1,200 people, mainly civilians, were slaughtered.

The sexual violence only continued for some of the 250 hostages who spent hundreds of days trapped in the Strip’s underground fortress, where Israeli women were threatened with forced marriage and even forced pregnancy by the militants who had murdered their families. 

Now, the lawyers of the Dinah Project – an independent group which operates from the Rackman Centre at Bar-Ilan University – are battling to bring the sex attackers to justice, after claiming the world turned a blind eye to the depths of Hamas’ depraved crimes.

Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, the former chief military prosecutor of the IDF, has convicted countless rapists over the years in several complex and high-profile cases.

Sexual violence shouldn’t shock her after 24 years of experience, but two years after the cross-border incursion she still struggles to find the words to summarise the depravity. 

‘The aim of the attack was to dehumanise the civilian population,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘The sanctity of human life was not important to the attackers – they didn’t care about it.

‘They were part of a lynch mob, and entered a void in which everything was permitted, including rape, sexual assault, mutilation and execution.’ 

Sexual violence was ‘systematic and widespread’ across at least six different locations on October 7, according to the findings of the Dinah Project, including the Nova music festival, Route 232, Nahal Oz military base, and Kibbutzim Re’im, Nir Oz, and Kfar Aza.

Such abuse wasn’t just confined to attack, but became part of the daily lives of some of those captured to languish in Gaza.

In the group’s landmark report in July, they compiled testimony from 15 former hostages who returned from Hamas captivity – including two men. 

In the tunnels, a spectrum of violence occurred, ‘from rape and severe sexual assault to the threat of forced marriage with [men in] Gaza or to the terrorists themselves,’ Zagagi-Pinhas says.

‘There is also the forced nudity, with hostages being made to strip and take showers while guards watch them naked.’

Any numerical figure the lawyers have for how much sexual assault occurred, on October 7 and afterwards in Gaza, is bound to be an underestimate, she says, because many are too traumatised to speak.

That, and the vast majority were shot after being sexually assaulted, ‘silencing them forever’. 

Amit, 40, was taken hostage two years ago from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and spent 55 days in Hamas captivity, every second of which felt like an ‘eternity’. 

CCTV footage of her abduction shows her resisting her seven captors by kicking and writhing as they try and drag her across a field towards the Strip.

She was the first hostage to speak publicly about sexual violence in the enclave, telling the New York Times how she was held alone in a child’s bedroom, chained by her left ankle, and subjected to physical and psychological torture.

She described how her guard, Muhammad, obsessively quizzed her about her menstrual cycle. Once, he unchained her, took her to the bathroom and ordered that she bathe.

‘He sat me on the edge of the bath. And I closed my legs. And I resisted. And he kept punching me and put his gun in my face,’ she told the newspaper. ‘Then he dragged me to the bedroom.’

It was in the child’s bedroom where she claimed the guard, with his ‘gun pointed at me, forced me to commit a sexual act on him’.

Hamas and its supporters have denied that its members sexually abused people in captivity or during the October 7 attack, but Amit and numerous other returned hostages insist otherwise.  

Gritzewwsky, 31, also released during a temporary ceasefire in November 2023, is still in hell. 

She and her partner, Matan Zanguaker, were kidnapped when militants stormed her home in the Gaza border community of Nir Oz. To this day, Zanguaker remains in the enclave.

During her abduction on a motorbike, Gritzewsky claimed that she was groped beneath her shirt and on her legs. She fainted, only to awake half-naked surrounded by seven armed terrorists. 

In captivity, she claimed one of her captors hugged her and told her, while pointing a gun, that even if there was a ceasefire, she would not be freed because he wanted to marry her and have her children.

The lawyers at the Dinah Project are battling to prosecute the Hamas terrorists responsible for sexual crimes, but convicting individual perpetrators is close to impossible.

That’s because so many of the victims of sexual assault on October 7 were executed after – meaning first-person testimony is scarce.

The chaos of that day – when more than 5,000 terrorists stormed the border, set houses on fire, and burned the residents inside – resulted in the destruction of a great deal of evidence. 

But the testimony from witnesses who saw or heard the sexual crimes committed on the day is substantial.

Moshe Weitzman, an emergency medical volunteer, testified to seeing a considerable number of dead girls at the Supernova festival site who were naked in positions that were highly suggestive of rape or abuse. 

‘A girl without clothes lying on the floor…How did the clothes fall off her? You see one, two, three, four girls without clothes, you say to yourself, Ok, they weren’t at a party without clothes,’ he is quoted as saying within the UK Parliamentary Commission Report on the attack.

Nova attendee Yoni Saadon, 39, hid from the militants beneath a pile of bodies under one of the stages. He described one woman who was attacked and raped by up to 10 terrorists. She pleaded them to stop, and ‘when they finished, they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head’. 

Despite significant testimony from witnesses describing dozens of cases, it was difficult to preserve forensic evidence in the wake of the massacre, as some of the first responders were religious and felt their first priority was to recover the bodies and bury them in a timely manner, as per Jewish tradition. 

That’s why the independent group of legal experts is advocating for the notion of joint criminal responsibility, meaning every militant who joined the attack from the beginning will be held responsible for the horrors that unraveled – including the sexual violence.

‘The usual way of having evidence to prosecute and to convict perpetrators is not a possibility here,’ says Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, another founding member of the Dinah Project. 

‘Each and everyone who joined the attack should be accountable and responsible for everything that could have been anticipated,’ she adds, noting that the militants had all been ‘indoctrinated with a genocidal intent to bring total destruction’.

‘If this theory is not adopted, then we most likely lose the possibility of actually bringing justice.’

The lawyers are also calling on other nations – including Britain- to hold the militants who committed sexual violence accountable, under the principle of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity.

‘Universal jurisdiction is what allows nations to hold accountable those who commit crimes that are held to be crimes against all of humanity. 

‘There are crimes that, in their magnitude and characteristics, offend our deeply held principles of humanity – [so] each nation, which is part of humanity, is legitimised in holding [the perpetrators] accountable,’ she says.

The UK has universal jurisdiction over a small number of serious offences – including some war crimes, torture and hostage-taking – which means a person accused of committing these crimes in another country can be brought to justice in courts on British soil.

For Halperin-Kaddari, her work advocating for the victims of sexual violence is made all the more vital because of Israel’s sense of ‘desertion and betrayal’ from international feminist organisations such as UN Women.

She was astonished that it took the UN women’s agency until December 1 – almost two months after the massacre – to release a statement acknowledging gender-based sexual violence.

Halperin-Kaddari is conscious not to make sweeping generalisations – acknowledging the ‘profound and serious’ work of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, among several others in the UN.

But when it comes to UN Women, which is ‘supposed to be the leading organisation that protects and promotes women’s rights everywhere, I’m sorry to say that they completely failed their mission, they failed us’.

She did some work comparing their reaction to October 7 to other cases of conflict where there were reports of sexual violence, ‘and it clearly shows the double standard, when it come them almost eight weeks to say something, and in other cases, it was within a matter of days’. 

Two years on from the upheaval of October 7, Israel as a nation is still traumatised.

For the sake of the victims – those who have spoken out, and those who have remained silent –  the lawyers of the Dinah Project hope that countries around the world will help bring the Hamas sex attackers to justice once and for all.