Israel has criticised the head of the United Nations children’s agency after she condemned acts of sexual violence committed against women during Hamas’s deadly assault on Israel on 7 October, as attention has focused on rapes and other atrocities in recent days.
Israel said the comments by Catherine Russell, the executive director of Unicef, were insufficient and were issued only as a result of international pressure.
In a post on Wednesday on X, Russell said the accounts of sexual violence were “horrific”. She added: “Survivors must be heard, supported, and provided with care. Allegations must be fully investigated. We condemn gender-based violence and all forms of violence against women and girls.”
Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for the Israeli foreign ministry, said the statement was too little and too late. “It took Unicef almost two months to say something about the Israeli victims … [and] only after an international campaign and pressure,” he told the AFP news agency.
“The fact that she [Russell] doesn’t mention the Hamas terror organisation is another way of turning a blind eye on the atrocities that Hamas did. By not mentioning Hamas, she is legitimising their activities.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has also criticised aid and rights agencies over the issue of sexual violence. “I say to the women’s rights organisations, to the human rights organisations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation – where the hell are you?” he said at a news conference on Tuesday.
President Joe Biden called on governments and international organisations to “forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation”.
Speaking at a campaign fundraiser on Tuesday, the US president said that survivors and witnesses to the attacks had shared “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty”.
He added: “Reports of women raped – repeatedly raped – and their bodies being mutilated while still alive – of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling.”
Hamas has rejected accusations of rape and sexual violence during the 7 October attacks as “unfounded lies”.
Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said Israel should allow a UN team to investigate the allegations independently.
“These are very, very serious allegations and they need to be investigated, they need to be properly documented,” he told a press conference on Wednesday. Israel had not responded to repeated requests for access, he said.
“We take the allegations extremely seriously,” he said, but “you need to go into quite some detailed examination of whether it’s premeditated, whether it was widespread, systematic”.
He said that for weeks he had been asking the Israeli authorities “to deploy a team, my team, to monitor, document, investigate the issues of the horrific attacks on Israelis. I’ve repeated this call and I hope it will be heard but so far, I haven’t received a response.
“Atrocious forms of sexual violence need to be thoroughly investigated, and we need to make sure that justice is served. That’s what we owe the victims.”
At a meeting this week with Netanyahu, some recently released Israeli hostages shared testimonies of sexual abuse during their time in Gaza, according to participants.
Separately, a doctor who treated some of the 110 released hostages told the AP news agency that at least 10 men and women among those freed were sexually assaulted or abused, but did not provide further details.
