Members of Israeli security forces search for identification and personal effects at the Tribe of Nova music festival site, where 364 people were killed and dozens taken by Hamas militants. Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
By Beth Harpaz November 8, 2023
Editor’s note: This article contains explicit descriptions of sexual assault.
Israeli police released a horrific account of rape carried out by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attack on the music festival.
The testimony was provided by a survivor of the massacre who witnessed, from her own hiding place, a young woman being gang-raped, then murdered.
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“They bent her over and I realized they were raping her and simply passing her on to the next,” the witness told investigators from the police department’s Lahav 433 National Crime Unit . The victim was “alive,” the witness continued, “on her feet and bleeding from her back.” She was murdered by a man who pulled her long brown hair, then “shot her in the head while he was raping her, didn’t even lift his pants.”
Reports of the testimony were published in Hebrew in Haaretz , Maariv and other Israeli news outlets, as well as in the English-language Jerusalem Post .
Haaretz police reporter Josh Breiner posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) that police also “collected testimonies from dozens of ZAKA members who said that they found naked women with injuries and their genitals mutilated, including women shackled naked in the lower part of their bodies.” ZAKA is a search-and-rescue organization trained to respond to terror attacks to retrieve and identify victims.
For the first time, Lahav 433 investigators collected a testimony from one of the survivors of the massacre in the south of Israel, who, from a hiding place, was a direct witness to the rape and abuse of a young women right before she was murdered.
— Josh Breiner (@JoshBreiner) November 8, 2023
Trigger Warning -
Hamas terrorists murdered 1,400 people in their Oct. 7 attacks on the music festival and kibbutzim. Israel has responded by waging a war on Gaza that Gaza health officials say has killed more than 10,000 people, including thousands of children.
Beth Harpaz is a reporter at the Forward. She previously covered politics and breaking news for the Associated Press and has written three nonfiction books.
