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This is a guest essay by Meg Keene, an author and essayist.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Editor’s note: This essay contains graphic language. Reader discretion is advised.
On Wednesday, a comprehensive scholarly report titled “Silenced No More” was released about the patterns of extreme sexual violence and torture perpetrated by Hamas and Palestinian civilians against Jews and Israelis on October 7, 2023.
Yet, somehow, most of this week has been consumed about talking about the did-they/ didn’t-they of dog rape of Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons, in a shoddily-put-together opinion piece for the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, that had only a handful of sources. Two were Hamas-affiliated, the others were anonymous.
In fact, in 950 days since October 7th, we have been screaming about the horrific sexual atrocities that were perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli women. And even though the crimes were live=streamed by jubilant attackers, even though we had video and photo and firsthand testimony, starting the exact minute the crimes commenced, they have been denied and denied and denied.
The organizations that delayed discussing the horrific sexual violence, despite their messaging of #BelieveAllWomen include UN Women, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the National Organization for Women, and of course The Women’s March.
Then there is the hall of shame, the feminists who actively sided with evil by denying that the rapes ever happened — including Rama Duwaji, the wife of the new mayor of New York City who liked posts denying the rapes.
Societies are judged by the truths they are willing to confront. This report is part of that choice: a refusal to look away, and an insistence that what happened on October 7th, and in captivity thereafter, be carried forward not as history alone but as a persistent demand for justice.
Under the direction of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, The Civil Commission put together a nearly 300-page report, along with independently secured war crimes archive. Hillary Clinton is the first Honorary Endorser. It reports on, in detail, the sexual and gender-based violence committed on October 7th. The executive summary describes the findings this way:
“What emerges is not a collection of isolated incidents, but a coherent and repeated pattern of violence, carried out across multiple locations and phases, from the initial attacks, through abduction and transfer, to prolonged captivity and the deliberate digital circulation of abuse.”
It’s based on 10,000 photographs, 1,800 hours of video footage, and more than 430 interviews with survivors. It’s vital. It’s incontrovertible proof of what happened on that day. And it’s largely being ignored by mainstream media, and iced out of the “social justice” conversation.
Dr. Elkayam-Levy opens the report thusly:
“There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves. Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood. October 7, 2023 was such a moment.”
In the week after that horrific day, my rabbi described what happened as a spiritual violence. The atrocities were so unbearable that it was hard to wrap words around them. The were so profound that they required a re-ordering of our understanding of the world. And having spent hours with this report, I can attest that they profoundly change the soul of anyone who bears witness. One of the witnesses of the gang-rapes, tortures, and murders at the Nova music festival said he heard:
“Women screaming. Screams that pierced the heavens, and cut the soul to pieces.”
The report describes evidence as “materials [that] are almost unbearable in their brutality,” and “their cruelty and magnitude … rendered them impossible to comprehend and harder to believe.”
The scale and horror of the atrocities was the point. In committing crimes that defied our very humanity, in celebrating them, live-streaming them, and then getting much of the world to deny or ignore them almost instantly, to blame the Jewish state, to blame Jews as a whole, Hamas accomplished their goals. They turned the worst evil imaginable into a carnival of hate that much of the West was happy to justify, to endorse, to at the very least dismiss as “part of something complex and nuanced” — as if the sheer scale of the evil could ever be nuanced.
The fundamentals of what happened in the early hours of October 7th are not in debate.
Gaza was a small, densely populated, self-governing territory under Hamas control. And because Hamas is a terrorist organization, it was subject to a blockade by both of its neighbors, Israel and Egypt. Israel fully withdrew from the territory in 2005. Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, and in 2007 violently ousted the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, with which it supposedly had a “unity” government.
In short, on October 7, 2023, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. In fact, not a single Israeli or Jew was in the territory, even Jewish graves had been dug up and removed.
On that morning Hamas, staged a full scale incursion into southern Israel, breaching the border in 21 places, coming in by paragliders, and via the sea. The attack was planned, detailed, and orchestrated. Notebooks, guides, and instructions have all been recovered. They include useful Hebrew phrases, including “take off your clothes” and “spread your legs.” The plan was always to use sexual violence as one of the primary weapons of war.
The part of Israel that was invaded is known as the “Gaza Envelope” in Hebrew. I visited last summer. It’s a collection of small towns, open fields of wildflowers, farmland, and kibbutzim (think hippy communal living). It was inhabited by some of the most dedicated Israeli peace activists, who had nurtured close relationships with Gazans, some who had dedicated their retirement years to ferrying Gazans in need to Israeli hospitals (which were better equipped than the hospitals in Gaza).
The “Gaza Envelope” is also home to Orthodox Jewish communities, as well as small-town Israelis. In fact, the city of Sderot was the only place I encountered Israelis who didn’t speak English.
This area has been subject to ongoing rocket fire from Gaza since 2004. In playgrounds there were three or four different bomb shelters, because you only have a few seconds to reach shelter, so one small park requires multiple safe places.
But despite this, the land is beautiful. We spent a morning working in the fields near the border, instructed that if rockets were fired, all we could do was lay on the ground — but that there was an Iron Dome battery nearby that would work to intercept incoming fire. The people who lived there loved the land, and until the day that broke everything, many of them lived there precisely because they wanted peace with their neighbors across the fence.
On October 7, 2023, unknown to Hamas, there was a music festival taking place in an open field, with 3,500 young people who had danced all night. The theme was peace, love, and unity. It was a Jewish holiday, one where we celebrate receiving the Torah. It’s a day of joy and celebration, and many religious Jews in the area had their phones off, and were cut off from easy communication.
What happened was so horrific, it’s hard to put words to. In advance of writing this, I spent hours reading the report. After getting through every page of testimony on the Nova music festival before I had to stop, take a break, breathe, and try not to vomit.
I visited the Nova site recently. I looked at photos of the young people who died. And they were so young, so hopeful, so full of joy. To read about how they died was to kill something inside me. Because what I read was beyond comprehension.
There was gang-rape, of both men and women. Women were stabbed while they were being raped, raped after they died. Women were shot with their rapists still inside them, and then their corpse was passed to another man to rape, while the men around joked and laughed and praised God.
Women were bound and tortured. They were shot in their genitals. Their uteruses were ripped out. They were raped and tortured in front of their partners, who were forced to watch and then murdered.
Women were found split in half, beheaded, exploded by what was placed inside their vaginas. Men were found with their genitals shoved into their mouth. In some cases bodies were found staged, a woman holding a man’s severed penis. People were doused in gasoline and burned alive. Nail guns were used to drive nails into women’s groins. Spikes were driven into their vaginas. Knives, axes, screwdrivers, and other tools were all driven into a single woman’s body. Women were gang-raped, and after surviving they were burned alive.
Children were killed in front of parents. Parents were killed in front of children.
Dead bodies were taken, along with hostages, and paraded down the streets of Gaza to cheering crowds. Hostages were subjected to sexual torture and slavery. The torture was so extreme that a new form of violence had to be defined for this report: “kinocide,” defined as sexual violence deliberately designed to destroy family structures by weaponizing familial bonds.
All of this violence was documented, streamed live to the world. We knew. We always knew, because they wanted us to know.
They didn’t hide it. In fact, the perpetrators cheered it, celebrated it, and called home to their families to boast of how many Jews they had killed. Gazan civilians followed after the initial invasion, joining in the orgy of violence. Women’s dead and broken bodies were paraded through the streets of Gaza, while crowds cheered and the women were spit on. Hostages, women and children, were also paraded, jeered and mocked, before descending into their own hell of sexual torture.
On October 9, 2023, I had to get on a group call for my coaching program.
There was no war yet. The IDF was still fighting terrorists on the ground, trying to clear the area.
Like every other Jew, I was shattered. I could look at my screen of 100 women and pick out the other three Jews by their dead eyes and fractured faces.
The lead coach asked to lead a prayer. And who she prayed for was not Israelis, not Jews, not survivors of the attack. She prayed for us and our perpetrators in equal measure. I hit mute. I starred at the wall. I tried not to throw up. And I realized this was a sign of what was to come.
In the moments after October 7th, Jews were already being asked to commiserate with the people that committed, supported, and cheered on, these crimes that break the boundary of what it means to be human. We were asked to rise above the devastation of the soul. And then we were asked to put what happened aside, to leave our hostages to the depraved sex and torture tunnels of Hamas, to move on, to be the bigger people.
When you look at the facts, the details, the truth of what actually happened, you realize how impossible that request always was.
Because much of society was unwilling to face what happened, we chose denial. That was our drug of choice, our way to survive the horrors. Just like in the Holocaust, the women and men who suffered these demonic fates were re-framed as sub-human. The victims were not imagined as the people. They were not seen as being just like us, like our children, like our friends, like our family.
For people in society to justify looking away, the victims could not be young adults who went to a music festival, or families slowly waking up on a Saturday morning, or kids watching cartoons, or women going for a run, or families ready to enjoy a holiday.
We couldn’t bring ourselves to imagine it happening here in the West: in San Francisco, or Toronto, or London, or Paris, or Melbourne, or Cape Town. Nobody wanted to think about how these atrocities happened in front of apartment buildings, or a low slung mini-mall, or a junction on a highway, or in someone’s living room.
Instead, the atrocities were framed almost immediately as something that would never happen to us, even something deserved.
To justify and erase crimes of this magnitude, society has to make the Jewish state somehow so monstrous that Israelis deserve this. We have to make up lies like dog rape, organ stealing, child murder, and genocide. And since no state and no people could ever deserve this, no matter what their alleged “crimes,” the other choice is to deny that it ever happened, to look away.
Last year I was at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, when I saw members of the organization “Code Pink: Women for Peace” wearing huge signs, denying that the rapes of October 7th happened. Crowds were surging by them, happy, joyful, in some cases smiling and shooting them a thumbs up.
I cracked. I walked up to the man with the sign and hissed at him that he was endorsing evil. And then I vanished into the crowd, just as he started screaming, “Zionist! This is what they do!” at the top of his lungs.
Watching Western Feminist movements deny the sexual violence of October 7th — watching people ignore it, justify it, or both-sides it — has changed me forever.
My feminist beliefs didn’t change. In fact, I learned how deeply I believed them. But I realized that so many women around me never actually believed what they said they did. If they had, we’d have been talking about these atrocities non-stop for two-plus years. They would have been the focus of social justice movements, and this report would be headlining every major paper and every conversation.
Instead, when the New York Times for one finally covered the report, using language that questioned even the basic facts: “A team of researchers in Israel on Tuesday published what it described as the most comprehensive report yet. … The commission said it had analyzed and cataloged more than 10,000 photographs and video segments. … The commission’s archive is closed to the public because of the graphic nature of much of the material, it said. ... The report did not provide any precise numbers of cases it documented, saying that it was too difficult to quantify with certainty.”
And they both sides-ed with the perpetrators, with this truly shocking passage, giving legitimacy to the agents of horror:
“Hamas has not commented publicly on the report and an official of the group did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hamas has previously denied that its militants were involved in sexual abuse and has subsequently not responded to detailed questions about specific cases.”
What would it be like if you thought these horrific atrocities would realistically happen to you? To your children? To your daughters? Not violence in the abstract, but this. What if you knew that if it happened, so much of the world around you wouldn’t care? That they would justify it? How would that profoundly change you forever?
It’s deeply unsettling that there can be so much undeniable evidence in the form of photos, videos and witness testimony that was available immediately after the event and a substantial portion of society and the media are bending over backwards to sympathize with the perpetrators and their toady apologists. It wasn’t so long ago that Holocaust deniers were considered to be on the fringes of society, now they control the narrative and discourse. Feels like we’ve returned to the 1930’s.
They won't mourn us. They never have.
After October 7th — filmed, documented, undeniable — much of the world simply didn't care. Jewish suffering was minimized, reframed as political inconvenience, dismissed. Not because the evidence was unclear. Because it happened to Jews. That has always been reason enough.
And then, with breathtaking speed, that same world found its voice — not to condemn what was done to us, but to protect those who did it. The bodies weren't cold before the calls came to restrain any response, to demand proportionality, to shield the perpetrators from consequence. The world that couldn't summon outrage for the victims had endless outrage for the retaliation.
This isn't new. Throughout history, the world wasn't just a passive witness to mass violence against Jews. In many cases, they participated. In others, they simply waited.
The perpetrators of October 7th filmed it with pride. They knew exactly what they were doing — and they knew, from experience, that the world's outrage would be limited, conditional, and short-lived. And the world, predictably, forgot — or chose to forget — the glee. The pride. The honor they cultivated among their own people by broadcasting those acts. These were not ashamed men hiding their crimes. They celebrated them. They shared them. Their communities received them as triumph. That too was documented. That too was ignored.
Mourning doesn't protect anyone. Sympathy doesn't stop the next attack. Being the world's designated victim just paints a target.
Mourning doesn't protect anyone. Sympathy doesn't stop the next attack. Being the world's designated victim just paints a target.
So we act — without delay and without illusion. We build the kind of strength that commands respect, not sympathy. The kind of power that makes people calculate consequences before they act. If fear is part of that calculation, so be it. This is not a moment's resolve — it is a long term commitment, built deliberately, sustained across generations, because that is what survival has always required of us.
.History taught us the lesson the hard way: no one is coming to save us. We save ourselves. We always have. We always will.
The world doesn't have to love us. It doesn't have to mourn us. It just has to know — we are not defenseless, and we will never forget.