Page 88 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

it was this ingrained impression that likely prevented those who would normally be attentive to rape allegations from acknowledging the mounting evidence and calling for a full investigation into the claim that on October 7 Hamas used brutal forms of gendered-based sexual violence as a weapon of war.
Thankfully, UN Women has now made a clear statement and the official investigation is underway. According to Halperin-Kaddari, while it is difficult to establish the case without surviving victims, the evidence is there, including information that points to the premeditation of the attacks. There is the testimony of first responders on the scene, those who collected the bodies or who received the victims at hospitals and morgues, as well as photographic evidence. Repetitive scenes, witnessed in multiple locations, indicate widespread acts of sexual violence: bodies stripped of clothes, torn underwear, bleeding from the genitals, broken pelvises, mutilated and eviscerated sexual organs, bodies of women and girls who had been shot in the breast, vagina, face or head, often multiple times.
There are also eyewitness testimony of gang rape of unspeakable brutality and the admissions of captured Hamas militants saying that they had orders to ‘dirty’ the Israeli women, or ‘to whore them’.
So, why should this horrific subject find space in a blog devoted to issues of Christian-Jewish relations? Clearly, our interfaith commitments must never be sanitised slogans or window dressing; Christian relations with Jews demand concrete action and fall squarely into the category of what it means to be ‘a just neighbour’ against the backdrop of the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is especially the case in light of the fraught history of Christian relations with the
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