The wartime outrage in Gaza that no one is talking about

 

Trust me, you do not want to watch Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary, “Screams Before Silence,” about sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 and beyond.

Trust me, you should.

You should watch it and speak out, about how rape and gender violence were deployed as weapons of war. About breasts cut from bodies. About nails driven into a woman’s vagina.

About the piercing screams of women being assaulted — and the appalling silence of prominent individuals and organizations, including women and women’s groups, that would ordinarily rush to condemn such atrocities but whose reaction has for some reason been muted when it comes to gender violence deployed against Israeli women.

None of this is to diminish the terrible damage inflicted on the civilian population in Gaza, the loss of life, the trauma, the hunger approaching famine proportions. But the violence described in Sandberg’s documentary, directed by Israeli filmmaker Anat Stalinsky, occupies a different plane of calculated cruelty — indeed, of evil.

The world that assails Israel for its conduct of the war in Gaza should be speaking out about Hamas’s concerted assault on women. The terrorist group can deny this all it wants, but any repudiations are belied by the facts: The sexual violence was not isolated but repeated and methodical, from bloody venue to bloody venue.

Hamas’s denials are contradicted by the findings of a United Nations report last month that found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.”

It continued, in the anodyne language of investigators: “Across the various locations of the 7 October attacks, the mission team found that several fully naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down were recovered — mostly women — with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head. Although circumstantial, such a pattern of undressing and restraining of victims may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.”

Likewise, the U.N. report found, with respect to the hostages, “clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and … reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.” Where is the outrage?

Where is the condemnation?

“I think politics are blinding us,” Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, told me in a Zoom call. “I think people have become so polarized and so bought into their frameworks that they’re not able to see information that doesn’t align with those frameworks.”

Sandberg paused, then added, “I think there’s some antisemitism happening as part of this.”
Sandberg calls the documentary “the most important work of my life.”

You can find it on YouTube, all 57 harrowing minutes. You will see: hostage Naama Levy, 19 at the time of her abduction from the Nahal Oz military base, her gray sweatpants with an enormous apparent bloodstain around the crotch, hands bound behind her back, as she is dragged, screaming, off the back of a vehicle.

You will hear:

— Tali Binner, who hid in a trailer at the Nova music festival for seven hours as she heard the extended screams, then the silence, which gave rise to the film’s title. “When I heard someone scream and then silence, I knew that it’s probably someone gets shot,” Binner said. “But when you hear this chaos for 20 minutes … you understand something else much worse is happening right over there.”

— Raz Cohen, another survivor of the music festival, on watching a pickup truck arrive at the site. “Some terrorists got out and grabbed a girl there,” he recalled. “There was kind of a semicircle around her, and one of them raped her. I remember that her pants were halfway on, and he was behind her … and when I looked again, she was already dead, and he was still at it. He was still raping her after he had slaughtered her.”

— Rami Davidian, a first responder. “I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here. … Their legs were spread. … Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. … I had to close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw.”

You will hear, for the first time on video, Amit Soussana, held hostage for 55 days after being kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, describe how her captor sexually abused her. “He started touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom, and then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him. 

And I remember, the entire time, I was thinking: ‘Amit, okay, you knew it’s going to happen. It’s really happening.’ I said to myself: ‘Okay, you can handle this. You just want to survive.’”

Soussana wasn’t alone. “Your body is simply open to everyone,” said another freed hostage, Agam Goldstein-Almog, 17 when she was abducted from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where her father and older sister were murdered. “They can wake you up in the middle of the night and rape you, and the whole time, a gun is pointed at your head.” Of the female captives, half were sexually and physically abused, Goldstein-Almog estimated. “And they’re still there, still living with their rapists.”

But you won’t see or hear the worst of it, partly because we will never know the full extent. Unlike in many situations of sexual violence during wartime, most of the victims were murdered; they cannot describe what they endured. For reasons of religious practice (it is Jewish custom to bury bodies quickly) and responders being too overwhelmed by the extent of the carnage, forensic evidence is lacking.

And the filmmakers deemed some of the most searing evidence too gruesome and too intrusive to be shown. “It’s actually worse than you are able to show,” Sandberg said, her eyes filling with tears. “Much worse.”

The silence is deafening. The burden is on us to break it.

-Ruth Marcus, Washington Post