Two days after the horrific Hamas attack of October 7, I met Rotem, a young mother of two small children from a Kibbutz on the Gaza border. I held my breath as she recounted how she ran with her children to hide while terrorists rampaged through their home, how they made it to the safe room and desperately held the door, praying the terrorists wouldn't enter.
Her terror echoed accounts I've heard from abused women, except now the threat was not from a violent husband. And Rotem was not alone; she is one of thousands of Israeli women who simultaneously faced murder and rape by Hamas terrorists on that fateful day.
At the President of Israel's Residence in Jerusalem, we are preparing for the day the United Nations General Assembly has designated the International Day for the Prevention of Violence against Women, which is observed every November 25. Every year, I host victims, civil-society leaders, activists, and scholars committed to women's rights and safety on this day.
But this year will be different. Many things changed on October 7 when thousands of Hamas terrorists massacred Israeli families, burnt children and the elderly, and kidnapped hostages. This deeply impacted our visceral understanding of the cruelty of gender-based sexual violence—and our faith in the international organizations that claim to care about women.
It took me several days to grasp the monstrous nature and scale of violence suffered specifically by women on October 7. My first realization came when meeting volunteers of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers who discreetly told me of conversations with survivors. They heard testimonies that shocked them to the core.
At the Nova music festival, where more than 350 young people were slaughtered and dozens kidnapped, witnesses hiding in the bushes saw terrorists gang-rape, then murder and mutilate women. A Hamas video from a kibbutz shows terrorists torturing a pregnant woman and removing her fetus. Our forensic scientists have found bodies of women and girls raped with such violence that their pelvic bones were broken. Those of us unlucky enough to have seen video evidence broadcast by the terrorists themselves witnessed the body of a naked woman paraded through Gaza, and another, still alive, in bloodied pants held captive at gunpoint being pulled into a jeep by her hair. This evidence, along with the explicit recorded confessions of captured terrorists, makes abundantly clear that mass rape was a premeditated part of Hamas's plan.
And this crime is ongoing: The 240 hostages held in Gaza include many women and girls, and only when they are released will we know what they have endured.
In the 1990s, international agencies and legal experts finally began to see violence against women as a particular category of war crime. Organizations like UN Women exist to protect women from such crimes, while Israeli experts and activists have been involved in these international efforts. Thus, our second shock: The inconceivable and unforgiveable silence of these organizations when faced with the rape and murder of Israeli women.
It is not that condemnations of gender-based violence by Hamas have been weak or insufficient – there have been none at all. Statement after statement by organizations like UN Women, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have failed to condemn these crimes. They failed us, and all women, at this critical moment.
As a woman and a mother, my heart goes out to women and children in Gaza suffering the consequences of the war started by Hamas. I believe they deserve aid and support. But this does not mean the erasure of the atrocities committed by Palestinian terrorists on October 7. The silence of international human rights organizations, and the unwillingness to believe Israeli women in the face of overwhelming evidence has been devastating.
For the Israelis who have always been on the forefront of the fight for women's rights worldwide, this was a moment of crushing disappointment. A disappointment shared with me by one of our most prominent women's rights advocates, Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former CEDAW vice-chair.
"I knew it would be difficult to get them to issue a reasonable statement," she said of the UN committee in a Harvard Medical School video conference., "but never did I imagine that when faced with such undeniable atrocities – given the very purpose for which they have been established,– - that they would actually resort to not acknowledging it at all."
Ignoring the "unprecedented, premeditated and extreme cruelty of the sexual violence committed by Hamas," Prof. Halperin-Kaddari added, meant not only failing Israeli women but failing the entire international human rights system. "I still am a believer in this system. But this was a huge blow to this belief."
I agree with every word.
To mark this year's International Day for the Prevention of Violence against Women, Israeli women – Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze – will gather at the President's Residence in Jerusalem. We will meet in the lingering shock of the violation of our rights, and with the profound sense that all of us who believe in those rights have been betrayed.
Yet we will persist in presenting the truth to the world and to every human rights organization. We owe it not only to our own victims, but to all women who will face these crimes in the future and must know that they are not alone.
Michal Herzog is First Lady of the State of Israel.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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