When the temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel collapsed on Friday, it was because of the women. The deal had been that Hamas would free most of the remaining women and children in its captivity in exchange for a pause in fighting. Hamas still holds 137 Israeli hostages, among them 17 women. In talks last week, Hamas refused to send a list of the next batch of women—apparently around 10—to be released, but suddenly offered to start discussing the release of elderly men instead.
The Israelis were stunned. “Our deal was [releasing] the women,” one senior Biden administration official told me about the collapse and the Israelis’ thinking. “We’ll take the men, sure, but they’re not going to jump the line.” Still, Hamas refused to release the remaining women in its custody, the ceasefire collapsed, and we’re now back to watching the resumption and expansion of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
But why did Hamas refuse to release the rest of the female captives? Speaking on Monday during his daily briefing, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that “it seems one of the reasons they don’t want to turn women over that they’ve been holding hostage, and the reason this pause fell apart, is because they don’t want these women to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody.”
Three senior administration officials confirmed to me that this is the going hypothesis in the White House: that the Israeli women still in Hamas custody are young, in their 20s and 30s, and Hamas members have raped and sexually assaulted them. “Everyone assumes it seems to be the case,” said one of the sources. “It’s quite ugly.” Said a second senior administration official, “That is our going assumption, that at least one reason they’re unwilling to let these young ladies go is that they have been sexually assaulting them.”
According to one of the sources, one of the women is 19-year-old Naama Levy, a new soldier who, in a widely circulated video, was seen being pulled off the back of a vehicle in Gaza on October 7. She is bloodied, barefoot, and terrified, and the seat of her gray sweatpants was stained with blood, leading many observers to suspect that she had been raped.
None of the three officials said they had seen concrete, specific proof that this was why Hamas refused to hand over the remaining women in their custody. Rather, they said that this was the supposition of the Israeli government, and that the U.S. believes this is a reasonable conclusion based on Hamas’s strange unwillingness to hand them over. Within the administration, however, there is a difference of opinion as to why Hamas wouldn’t want to release the female hostages its men have allegedly raped. One source speculated that this was because Hamas didn’t want the story out there that it was raping Israeli women. “It’s haram,” the source explained. For Hamas, “Murdering civilians is okay, but rape very much isn’t. I don’t know if you have seen their responses to the accusations of rape so far, but they have vociferously denied it and talked about how it’s prohibited by their faith and they would never do it.”
But a second senior administration official disputed that reasoning. “I don’t think Hamas gives a flying fuck” about what the hostages say when they’re released, this official contended. “What I understand is, part of the assumption is just that they don’t want to release them because they want to continue to abuse them.”
The War’s #MeToo Moment
These allegations come at a time when the Israeli government has been pushing hard the stories of Hamas’s serial, systematic rape of Israeli women on October 7. Testimony given by police, first responders, and survivors of the massacre tell a horrifying and gruesome story: women’s bodies that were found stripped naked and bleeding from their genitals; women who had knives, nails, and other objects shoved into their vaginas; women who had their breasts lopped off while still alive; women whose pelvises were broken from the sheer force of the sexual assault; women who had been gang-raped, executed, and then had their faces and genitals mutilated. “We certainly understand why our Israeli partners would be coming to the conclusion” that these women had been brutally raped, one senior administration source told me.
There were also cases of Israeli men who were raped or had their genitalia cut or shot off. In one case, a dead person’s genitals were so badly mutilated that investigators couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman.
We are hearing more about the sexual violence of October 7 now for several reasons. In part, this is because the evidence took time to collect—there are very few surviving victims, and some of the survivors, it seems, are still in Hamas custody. In part, the Israeli government looks to be abandoning its early attempts to shield its already traumatized population from the details. In the first days and weeks after October 7, Israeli media showed interviews with first responders who, though utterly shaken by what they had seen at the Nova rave and in the kibbutzim, spoke elliptically about the “abuse” and desecration of the bodies they had seen. Israeli news outlets were very careful about what they shared about the rapes, sometimes even adding that they had decided not to print certain details. The public had been traumatized enough, the thinking went, and telling them about such horrors would just be counterproductive at a time when the country needed to band together.
In the last week, however, that strategy has mostly been dispensed with, at least abroad. The accounts of Hamas’s sexual terror flooded the informational space, along with very legitimate claims of hypocrisy aimed at international organizations, like the U.N., who were very loud about the very real plight of Palestinian women and girls, but silent about their Israeli counterparts. On Monday, a several-hundred-strong protest at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York included appearances from Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton, as well as Israel’s U.N. ambassador Gilad Erdan. “Silence is complicity,” Sandberg announced. Protestors carried posters that proclaimed “#MeToo unless you’re a Jew.”
On one hand, it is important that these stories are told. If the victims had to endure it, then we have to endure the knowing and remembering. That is the argument for justice and an accurate historical record.
On the other is the political argument: It is important to highlight that this is what people are justifying when they justify Hamas’s attack on October 7. It is important to show that, when the Western left says “Believe all women,” they might not mean “Believe Israeli women” or even “Believe Jewish women.” It is important to show how emphasizing “context” when discussing October 7 can slide quickly into apologia, in the way that how much a rape survivor had to drink could also be considered “context.”
But this is also where it gets tricky. When I asked members of the administration why they thought the Israeli government was pushing so hard to get these grotesque stories out there now, one of them put it this way. “Hamas has been holding children hostage, and somehow Israel lost the debate over who has the moral high ground,” the official said. “The hostages were completely forgotten by the international community. It’s totally fair to criticize Israeli airstrikes—but to just completely lose sight of children held hostage is kind of shocking.” The source added, “I’m amazed by the number of people defending Hamas. It’s like, man, really? I get having issues with what Israel is doing, but really?”
And that, it seems, is the point: to make Hamas even more impossible to defend, to make the Israeli campaign against the terror organization harder to criticize, and to undermine the credibility of international organizations who have been criticizing the Israeli government. Israeli women were brutalized on October 7, and now they will help the Israeli government regain the moral high ground it has lost over the last two months.