Life under terrorist control: Hostages describe war crimes inflicted by Hamas, including rape

[Valin]

Just The News

One hostage described seeing her husband and daughter murdered in front of her before being hauled to Gaza. Another, kidnapped during the music festival attacked by Hamas said "I was a prize. They brought people to look at us from outside to see what they had managed to catch."

Madeleine Hubbard

Dec. 28 2023

Former Hamas hostages are opening up about their horrifying experiences in Gaza after being released during a temporary ceasefire exchange late last month. Many are describing their time in captivity as being like the "holocaust" and leaving them "broken," as others describe assaults and being treated like an animal.

French-Israeli Mia Schem, 21, told Israel's Channel 13 in an interview released Thursday that she was shot and left "on the floor, covered in blood" when she attended the Nova music festival on Oct. 7.

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"It's important to understand that I went through a Holocaust and that everyone there is a terrorist," she also said before describing how a family held her captive.

"These are families under Hamas. In retrospect, I suddenly realized that I was with a family, suddenly, I started asking myself questions, why am I in a family's house? Why are there children here? Why is there a woman here?" she reflected.

Former hostage Sharon Aloni-Cunio, 34, who was released in November alongside her 3-year-old twins while her husband, David Cunio, was left behind in Gaza, told Israel's Channel 12: "I am a broken woman, whose husband was taken from her."

Aloni-Cunio said while she was being kidnapped, a terrorist separated her from the group. "I was sure he was going to rape me and kill me," she said, as translated by Israel's i24 News.

As she was moved to Gaza, she and the other hostages were assaulted by onlookers. 

It was "a scenario where you don't even know if you’re being taken hostage, or going to be lynched in front of a crowd," Aloni-Cunio said.

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An Israeli military official and two doctors who treated the freed hostages confirmed reports of violent sexual assaults to USA Today last week. The International Criminal Court explicitly declares that rape in these types of circumstances is a war crime.

One of the doctors said that "many" of the female Israelis ages 12 to 48 who were released were sexually assaulted in Gaza. All of the freed captives who were of reproductive age were given sexually transmitted infection screenings and pregnancy tests. 

Speaking about the hostages, the Israeli military official said: "We know they were raped in Hamas captivity." The official also said the hostages are being beaten and kept in "very bad mental and physical conditions."

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[Valin]

On the sexual atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7

We cannot ignore the depravity of these attacks, or what they mean for women
Alex Berenson
Dec 29, 2023

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And the puzzle has one more piece.

As far as we know, these attacks mainly spared Israeli men. Of course, many men were killed in the attacks; but the mass torture and sexual crimes focused on women. Why spare the men?

The answer cannot simply be Muslim prohibitions on homosexuality. Southern Afghanistan is among the most conservative Muslim societies in the world, but many Afghan tribal leaders have open sexual relationships with young boys.

Further, raping male Israeli prisoners could easily be justified not as homosexual behavior but as a way to humiliate them further before executing them.

Hamas fighters appear to have intended the rapes of women mostly as physical degradation, a form of torture before execution. Raping men could have served the same purpose, or been excused that way.

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So. Why? Why single out women for this special abuse?

And the answer appears to be that the men of Gaza bore a particular rage for these women who lived free and secular lives - in particular the teens and twenty- and thirty-something women they captured at the Nova rave.

The freedom of these women, in particular their sexual freedom, became worthy of the most hellish punishment (un)imaginable. They were unworthy even of being vessels for children. And so they weren’t bred. Instead their sexual organs were mutilated and their bodies desecrated even as they were raped - and sometimes further after they had been killed.

That radical Islamist culture is incompatible with Western society is not a surprise, not to anyone who was awake for the atrocities ISIS committed. Yet even by those standards Oct. 7 must serve as a warning.

And women’s groups globally, including Muslim groups, are fools to ignore it - as they largely have. By failing to speak out and press less radical Muslim leaders to condemn the violence, they are setting the stage for their own degradation tomorrow.

For these were Jewish women, yes.

But Jewish is the adjective. Women is the noun.

[Valin]

Jan 1, 2024

'Stolen Youth' co-author Bethany Mandel reacts to a 'Friends' star going off on Hamas apologists on Fox News Live.