SARAH VINE: The sadistic sexual violence unleashed by Hamas against men, women and even children on Oct 7 shows that it wasn’t about history or land but pure hatred and evil

As the mother of a young daughter, I remember watching the events of October 7 with terror and rage in my heart.

Shani Louk, that beautiful young woman whose twisted, broken body was paraded through the streets of Gaza, the locals kicking and spitting on her; Naama Levy, being manhandled into the back of a car, the bloody stains on her tracksuit bottoms grim proof of the horror that had already befallen her; Amit Soussana, pictured surrounded by armed men in the desert, dragging her kicking and screaming to her fate.

It made my blood boil. And this week, when the final report by The Civil Commission – an independent Israeli non-profit organisation led by human rights expert and 2024 Israel Prize laureate Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy – published its findings, it boiled again.

What kind of a depraved monster slices off a woman’s breast while she is being gang raped, and throws it into the dust to be used as a plaything? What kind of a twisted pervert turns rape into necrophilia by shooting a woman in the head while he is still defiling her?

What kind of ‘freedom fighters’ go into battle with a set of handy Arabic-to-Hebrew phrases, including ‘take off your pants’, ‘lie down’, and ‘spread your legs’?

What self-respecting human being presses nails, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers and other household tools into a woman’s genitals?

How hard do you have to rape someone, and with what, to shatter their pelvis? Who shoots a young girl in the face and then films her mutilated corpse on her brother’s mobile phone?

The answer is: Hamas terrorists. This is the stark reality of what they did to men, women and children on October 7, 2023. And the world must never forget.

They did other things, too: setting fire to whole families, shooting children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, tossing grenades into shelters, decapitating victims and chopping off their arms and legs for entertainment. Some bodies were so badly mutilated they could not be identified as male or female.

Those who were taken hostage in Gaza were subject to ceaseless sexual humiliation. Two related minors who were forced to perform sexual acts on each other were undressed, assaulted and whipped on their genitalia. One young man was asked if he wanted to make a porn film, then blindfolded and assaulted.

The list of atrocities committed on that day and beyond is so unspeakable it defies human comprehension. Maybe that is why so many still deny that any of this took place.

Those who march, week in, week out, in support of Palestinian resistance, those who bang the drum for ‘brave’ Hamas ‘resistance’ fighters, those who characterise them as ‘indigenous people defending themselves’, those who perform slut-drops with the Hamas flag tucked into their crop tops and flash the Hamas triangle with a come-hither wink: perhaps the problem is that they simply cannot bring themselves to believe they are supporting such evil. Or that they themselves are such useful idiots.

The sexual and gender-based violence that took place on October 7 was far from random, but instead, as this report says, formed a ‘systematic and integral’ part of Hamas’s operational strategy. The authors have identified 13 recurring forms of abuse, including rape, sexual torture and ‘kinocidal sexual violence’, where family members are coerced into acts against one another.

However one feels about the conflict in the Middle East, even if you believe that Israel has abused its power in the region, even if you are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, I cannot possibly see how you can condone or even justify such actions.

Even by the standards of a terrorist organisation whose entire existence is backed by hardline Islamist regimes such as Iran and its allies, what those paramilitaries did is beyond all conventional warfare, and has rightly been denounced as a war crime by multiple organisations, including the UN, the ICC, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty. But there is something more here, isn’t there? An obsession with sex and sadistic violence that goes beyond war and touches on something darker.

It’s a slasher movie that would make even the most extreme horror buff recoil in disgust. Rape has always been a tool of war, but this goes beyond that. It shows a grotesque obsession with sexual organs, a desire not just to execute the enemy – by which I mean children in their pyjamas, mums and dads clutching babies, the elderly and the disabled – but to obliterate them, dehumanise them, rob them and their grieving relatives of any dignity or humanity.

It’s that which sets this atrocity aside from any other in recent memory: that framing of the enemy – in this case a defenceless, unarmed enemy, not an equivalent trained fighting force – as less than human, ‘Untermensch’ in the language of the Third Reich. It is only by convincing yourself that the person you are humiliating, raping, mutilating, killing is not as worthy as you that you can do such things.

There is no doubt that Israel has enacted a terrible price for October 7. Over 70,000 dead, 20,000 of those children. Famine and disease stalk the Gaza Strip.

In her shock and rage, Israel has lost the support and sympathy of many who would otherwise be on her side. Anti-Semites have seized on Israeli military operations and used the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza to fuel Jew hate. But however much one may decry the response to October 7, it must be seen in the context of the brutality inflicted that day.

Inconceivable barbarism unleashes violent, visceral emotions. Israel’s response was similar to that of America after 9/11: it was as much a trauma response as a military one. Which is why this report is so important: it doesn’t justify Israel’s subsequent actions, but it does go some way to explaining them.

Israel didn’t just suffer a military attack on that day; it suffered a collective act of abuse. If you strip people of their humanity, don’t be surprised if their response is inhumane.

And that brings us to the heart of what October 7 was really about, which is not land nor history nor politics but hatred, pure and unfiltered. Specifically, hatred for the Jewish nation, borne of a hardline Islamist ideology that wants no nation but the nation of Islam and whose ambitions stretch beyond Palestine.

Because, make no mistake, Israel is by no means the only target. It’s just the only one with the resources to fight back. In West Africa and the Sahel (Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso), Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) rampage through the population. In Syria and Iraq, Yazidi and Druze peoples suffer appalling abuse.

In Sudan, Somalia, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Pakistan it’s the same: forced marriage, sexual slavery, rape, mutilations, humiliation, beheadings.

W omen stripped of their rights, unimaginable sexual violence against girls and women, communities brutalised beyond all comprehension by devils armed with guns and fuelled by a misogynistic creed whose only aim is to spread its tendrils as far and wide as it can.

And let’s not forget the vast majority of these victims are Muslims themselves.

So when you support Hamas, be aware it’s all that which you are supporting. Misery, brutality, chaos. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people whose lives have been torn apart by Islamist terrorism, ordinary people with hopes and dreams like the rest of us.

And yet week after week armies of Britain’s privileged young people march in solidarity with this, congratulating themselves as they chant ‘Death, death to the IDF’, while lily-livered politicians and half-baked celebrities cheer them on. Not just useful idiots, but dangerous ones, too.

In the context of Gaza, it is not peace Hamas seeks; it’s total annihilation of Israel. The organisation’s 1988 charter defines its main goals very clearly: the establishment of an Islamic state in historic Palestine, governed by Sharia law, in which the struggle against Israel is framed as a solemn religious obligation.

That is the backdrop against which the atrocities of October 7 must be seen. Atrocities which, astonishingly, have not yet been acknowledged as genocide, and which some even still seek to frame as ‘resistance’.

No. Rape is not ‘resistance’. And Hamas are not heroes. There are no winners here. But at least know evil when you see it. And what happened on October 7 was its purest and most ruthless incarnation. I hope the world can see that now.