Content Warning: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault
A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.
And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.
It is cyclical and retaliatory.
Looking at the world through the lens of media is a concept as old as humanity itself. The edgier shows will have The Hero feel horror at the realization that their army is going to do bad stuff to a sacked city and depict them heroically protecting one family or person to show that they are above it all.
The reality is that doing so is a good way to have your army revolt against you right then and there. Fragging is for more than just the incompetent Lieutenant who is going to get the hero killed.
And that is what is happening here. Same as it happens in every war (just ask any Chinese or Korean person about their mixed feelings on the US and Russia liberating their grandparents from the horrors of Imperial Japan and how white people have never been able to tell Asians apart…). An atrocity happened. Vengeance is needed. And maybe the locals are “siding with the enemy” either vocally or by just not assisting in stopping them.
And that is even worse in this situation. Because the communities and people attacked were the ones who lived nearest to the prison walls and/or who outright advocated for peaceful resolutions. Knowing that your sister, who wanted nothing more than a peaceful resolution to the unjust imprisonment of a people, was brutally raped and murdered by those same people? That fundamentally shuts off your ability to listen to “both sides” and starts making it really hard to acknowledge that the residential building that you KNOW a terrorist leader is hiding in isn’t actively protecting said leader.
So the soldiers and even leadership who understand how fucked this all is? They literally cannot do anything because it will just result in them having to realize how little control they have over their soldiers at this point and potentially being deemed “a traitor” while they are in a position where it would be trivial to say a terrorist popped out and killed them. Same with the rank and file who want to speak out against the violence or even the people relaying the orders for artillery and missiles.
At this point, everyone more or less understands that if you kill one “terrorist” you likely have made two more between collateral damage and just taking someone’s loved one away from them. But the same applies to both sides. It is just that, ever increasingly, one side has enough munitions to level a large city and the other depends on human shields to protect them.