With Agency reports
(Warning: this story describes deeply disturbing events and testimonials in graphic detail.)
Hamas terrorists shot female Israeli soldiers ‘in the crotch, intimate parts and breasts’ as part of a ‘systematic genital mutilation’, the Israeli Defence Force has claimed.
Some of the female victims of the attack on October 7 were left with agonised looks on their faces in death, according to an Israeli unit that helped bless the bodies.
Army reservist Shari Mendes said many bodies of female victims, both civilian and soldiers, arrived ‘in bloody shredded rags or just in underwear’.
Mendes, whose unit is based at the Shura Army Base in central Israel, was speaking at a UN event in New York on Monday titled ‘Hear Our Voices: Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the October 7 Hamas terror attack’.
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She said: ‘Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast.
‘This seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.’
Mendes said that she and her unit are forced to make a decision to not show the families of dead soldiers their bodies.
‘These women arrived with their eyes opened, their mouths in grimaces, their fists clenched,’ she added.
‘The soldiers that we dealt with had expressions of agony on their faces still.
‘I remember one young woman whose arm was broken in so many places it was difficult for us to lay her arm in the burial shroud, her leg too.
‘In her case the entire left side of her body was shredded, torn apart, most likely by a grenade.’
Mendes, describing the atrocities in graphic detail, said that she and her unit are forced to make a decision to not show the families of dead soldiers their bodies.
‘Some were shot in the heads which were bashed in so badly that their brains were spilling out,’ she said.
‘Some were shot in the heads so many times at close range that their heads were almost blown off.’
Mendes said the scene that lay before her as she arrived at Shura Army Base a day after Hamas killed 1,200 people during its incursion was ‘unimaginable in scale’.
‘Body bags were piled to the ceiling, lining the corridors in every room. Refrigerator trucks were waiting outside, also full.
‘Body bags just kept coming in all shapes and sizes. Many were oozing liquids and the floors were wet.
‘The smell of death was already unbearable. It is impossible to overemphasise the number of bodies we were dealing with, the sense of shock and despair.’
More and more reports of Hamas using sexual violence as a method of warfare during its bloody incursion on October 7 have been published in the weeks since.
Yoni Saadon, 39, told the Sunday Times that he saw Hamas fighters targeting women at the Nova festival.
‘I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her,’ he said.
‘She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’
Saadon said that when they were done, they laughed and shot her in the head.
‘I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters,’ added the father of four.
‘Or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.’
Amit Soussana, 40, found herself alone and surrounded by armed attackers with no way of defending herself as they marched her towards the border, having torn her from Kfar Aza kibbutz.
But any sense of bending to the will of her captors in the hope of receiving less brutal treatment was overridden by her staunch refusal to go quietly.
The astonishing footage, captured by a security camera according to Times of Israel, showed how one terrorist lifted the Israeli lawyer onto his back, only to tumble to the ground as she kicked and wriggled against him.
Holding her down, the attackers can be seen slapping Amit as they attempted to wrap her in a shawl or blanket, but still she fought back, twisting and kicking.
Eventually the captors were forced to bundle her into a car to get her back to Gaza as they were unable to drag her on foot
Hamas have also been accused of treating living hostages badly, with the US claiming that the terror group refused to release ten female hostages because they do not want them to reveal what they have been subjected to while being held captive.
State Department spokesman Matt Miller said this was the reason the week-long ceasefire, which came after Hamas agreed to release more than 100 hostages, ended.
The official said on Monday: ‘It seems that one of the reasons Hamas doesn’t want to turn women over that they’ve been holding hostage, and the reason this pause fell apart, is they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody.’
