Hamas’s War on Women

W hen Hamas operatives nabbed Manar al-Sharif from her Gazan apartment in 2020, they brought her to an all-women prison where she spent weeks in solitary confinement. Manar’s crime? She was in a Palestinian peace organization that set up a Skype event for Israelis and Palestinians: “Skype with your Enemy.” Terrorists said Manar instigated an event that weakened “revolutionary spirit.” Palestinian freedom fighters had captured Manar before, in 2017, when she was mingling with male and female friends in her apartment. Because Hamas doesn’t allow men and women to intermingle, police took Manar to jail, where they beat her for two days.

Hamas terrorists have an uncomplicated history as woman-haters. The group only allows women privileges based on their complementary roles to men. A Hamas-run court in the Gaza Strip ruled in 2021 that women needed a male guardian’s permission to travel. Hamas rarely “punished perpetrators convicted of family violence,” the State Department said in a 2020 report, and it does not “enforce the law effectively in domestic violence cases.” Hamas shut down a women’s TV channel and a girls’ ballet school in 2017 in Gaza and banned women from competing in a United Nations–organized marathon in 2013.

Many cases of domestic abuse, physical violence, sexual violence, and incest are either unreported or under-prosecuted in Gaza. Hamas-established judiciaries in Gaza are less than concerned with what the West defines as women’s rights, and the Hamas Women’s Movement, which admits that it wants to “finish off the Israelites,” endorses Islamist radicalism. Feminists of the Western world might find it difficult to believe that Islamist women’s movements in Gaza support Hamas’s patriarchal structure. But the political context in which Westerners advocate women’s rights often contradicts the religious framework in Islam that determines women’s roles. This month, the news site Visegrád 24 street-interviewed female university students in a skit called “Hamas, or . . . ” Students were shocked to learn that Hamas, not the Taliban, allows men to legally rape their wives. They were almost as shocked to find out that Hamas, not North Korea, makes it almost impossible for women and children to report incest, and that Hamas, not ISIS, requires women to travel with male guardians.

Stories that have come out of Israel since October 7 detail Hamas’s particular violence against women. Hamas reportedly severed breasts from a woman’s body in front of her children, cut open a mother’s womb and murdered her baby, who was still attached by its umbilical cord, and raped young women next to their dead friends. A terrorist shot a woman in the back of her head while he raped her. Israel is still documenting what’s left of the communities Hamas ambushed.

Sheri is a mother of four, a family member of Holocaust survivors, and a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces team that identifies and handles burial preparations for female soldiers. She arrived at an Israeli base on October 8 to see body bags piled up to the ceiling. Identifying bodies is a painstaking process, she said. To ID bodies, doctors need fingerprints, dental records, and DNA samples, and, in most cases, forensic doctors couldn’t document all three.

“We had bodies that were so mutilated that it was impossible to wrap them in a shroud,” Sheri said during a press conference by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children. “One female soldier came in, and her arm was broken in so many places, her leg was broken in so many places, that it was very difficult to put her body into the shroud. The entire left side of her body was blown away by a grenade.”

Victims were usually shot “at least once in the body” and “many times in the head.” Sheri had to reconstruct brain tissue. Bodies dripped with blood a full three days after their mutilations. Most of the bodies arrived with open eyes, grimaced mouths, and clenched hands. Some were shot in the head “so many times that there was no blood left,” Sheri said. Some of the women wore only underwear, and some of the underwear was bloody. Genitals were mangled, limbs were cut off, and eyes were crushed. Doctors tried to restore faces as best they could so parents could have final moments with their daughters. Hamas booby-trapped one woman by stashing grenades in her body.

Sheri is also an architect. She deals in color and beauty, and the gray and brown-stained morgue was dark and dreary. She has seen hundreds of dead bodies and has a steel stomach. When she saw the last vestiges of color in the morgue on the slaughtered women’s manicured fingernails, Sheri cracked.

“I really started to cry, because I thought, that manicure — that moment of humanity — was the hope in this girl, this young woman, that she was going to look beautiful and go home to her lover, her husband, her boyfriend,” she said. “And that was gone.”

For those like Sheri who see the atrocities firsthand, small moments of humanity cause the most anguish. Moments of humanity, like when Doris Liber’s 26-year-old son Guy whispered, “Mommy, I love you” before Hamas terrorists discovered his hiding spot at a music festival. Or the hours Yonatan Lulu-Shamariz spent in a safe room with his seven-months-pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter, who celebrated her birthday on October 8. Yonatan managed to bring his daughter’s birthday cake into the safe room, but the family couldn’t sing “Happy Birthday.” Roaming terrorists might hear.

The commission on Hamas’s crimes against women has started to investigate the nature of the crimes. Led by Israeli women’s organizations, the commission will ask survivors and witnesses of sexual trauma inflicted by Hamas to document what they saw or experienced on October 7. Yifat Bitton, a member of the commission and an Israeli law professor, said that many victims of sexual violence can’t yet provide testimony or receive therapy; Israeli women are still fighting in the war, under fire from missiles, or, like Sheri, are still uncovering more horrors.

Israeli women’s organizations have confirmed that Hamas’s attacks against women and children were systemic. To humiliate women was a primary goal of Hamas in its murder spree. Yet Palestinian media and a large cohort of American university students who “stand with” the Palestinian cause claim that Hamas’s abuse of Israeli women and children has been unduly amplified by the Jewish state. Israeli propagandists, they say, spread lies about beheaded babies and raped women — as though Hamas’s track record suggests that it respects, or would do its best to spare, the innocent and vulnerable.

One 14-year-old girl was reportedly raped and murdered on the floor of her bedroom, “stripped from the waist down, legs wide open, with semen detected on her back,” the head of the commission and international law expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy said during the press conference. Women of all ages were raped, sometimes raped to death. Some rapes were so violent that the women’s pelvic bones were broken. Elkayam-Levy cited a video of Hamas terrorists who said they aimed to rape and humiliate Israeli women, and that they’d received permission from religious leaders to do so.

Israeli women now fight two battles: one against Hamas atrocities and another against global silence, Elkayam-Levy said. The nebulous, international group of female advocates and politicians who laud themselves as human-rights champions has not clearly condemned Hamas’s gender-based crimes. UN Women, the United Nations’ leading body on women’s empowerment, has failed to condemn gender-based violence against Israelis. Instead, it has emphasized the plight of women in Gaza and implied that Israel commits gender-based violence in its counter-attack against Hamas.

“The weak, if any, response by the international community just serves as a fertile ground for the continuing weaponization of women’s and girls’ bodies in warfare, as we have witnessed,” Elkayam-Levy said. “And Hamas might be now denying these claims, but during the attack and immediately after, Hamas and its terrorists released horrific visuals of the crimes.”

Even though Hamas live-streamed its spree on October 7, some media and international organizations insisted on more evidence before they decided to condemn gender-based attacks. Instincts to verify Hamas’s crimes are sound — that’s what the Israeli commission now seeks to do. But what occurred on October 7 wasn’t the result of a few bad-egg freedom fighters. Hamas’s violence against women and children is characteristic, even doctrinal. What further proof does the international community need?