Israeli expert urges justice for both Israeli, Palestinian victims of sexual violence

OTTAWA — The Israeli expert leading a civilian commission into sexual violence by Hamas is calling for global bodies to recognize “a new crime against humanity,” involving violence targeted at families.

Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world should take a stance against the destruction of families as a specific, identifiable weapon of war, aimed at terrorizing one’s kin. She is proposing the crime be called “kinocide.”

In an interview, she also said Canadians can demand Hamas be brought to justice while also seeking accountability when Israeli troops commit sexual violence against Palestinians, without drawing a false equivalence.

“We have to see Canada’s leadership in addressing the lack of moral clarity of international institutions,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview during a visit to Ottawa last month.

Elkayam-Levy is an international-law professor at Hebrew University who chairs Israel’s Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes Against Women and Children.

That non-governmental body originally set out to document patterns in sexualized violence by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 attack and against hostages it took into the Gaza Strip.

The aim wasn’t to come up with a tally of assaults, but to instead document systemic factors in how women were raped, tortured and mutilated. The idea was to have an understanding that could help victims and their descendants cope with intergenerational trauma, and to create an archive for researchers and prosecutors to use for possible investigations.

Elkayam-Levy’s team reviewed hours of footage featuring “very extreme forms of violence” from closed-circuit cameras and what militants themselves recorded.

They started to notice six patterns of violence involving among the circumstances of more than 140 families.

These include using victims’ social media to broadcast that person being tortured to their friends and family, including hostages and those killed. Another involved murdering parents in front of their children or vice versa, while another is the destruction of family homes.

“We started understanding that there is something here, a unique form of violence,” she said. “The abuse of familial relations to intensify harm, to intensify suffering.”

Elkayam-Levy said she developed the term with the help of experts, including Canadians like former attorney general Irwin Cotler. The rules undergirding the International Criminal Court only mention families in procedural contexts, but not as a factor in war crimes, she noted.

“It’s a crime without a name,” she said, arguing that impedes victims’ healing.

She said experts in past conflicts have agreed with her, saying kinocide should have been a factor in how the world understood and sought justice for atrocities on various continents, such as how Islamic State militants targeted Yazidi families from 2014 to 2017.

“Justice begins with this recognition; healing begins with recognition,” she said.

Elkayam-Levy noted “gender-based violence” existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.

She’s also taken aim at “the silence of many international organizations, and the lack of moral clarity,” in calling out sexual violence by Hamas, which Ottawa deems a terrorist group.

In particular, UN Women did not condemn Hamas’ sexual violence until nearly two months after that attack, a move Elkayam-Levy said sets a bad precedent for upholding global norms.

“They have fuelled denial of the sexual atrocities,” she said, adding that a constant demand for physical evidence pervades social media “in a very antisemitic way.”

Israeli police have said forensic evidence was not preserved in the chaos of the attack, and people believed to be victims of sexual assault were often killed and immediately buried.

Acts of sexual violence were not part of 43-minute video that Israel’s foreign ministry has screened for journalists, including The Canadian Press, which was sourced from security footage and videos filmed by militants during their October 2023 attack.

In March, a UN envoy said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape and “sexualized torture” during the attack, “including rape and gang rape,” despite the group’s denials.

That same month, released hostage Amit Soussana went public about her captors gropping her and forcing “a sexual act” that she asked not be specified.

As part of its avowed feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. Yet the Conservatives have lambasted the Liberals for not condemning Hamas’ sexual violence until five months after the attack.

In March, Ottawa came under fire for pledging both $1 million for groups supporting Israeli victims of Hamas sexual violence and $1 million for Palestinian women facing “sexual and gender-based violence” from unspecified actors.

Global Affairs did not say whether that referred to domestic abuse or sexual violence by Israeli officials, drawing a rebuke from a senior Israeli envoy.

Human-rights groups have long accused Israeli officials of sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees in the West Bank. In July, those concerns escalated when Israeli soldiers were accused of perpetuating the filmed gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers voiced support for mobs attempting to free soldiers under investigation.

Elkayam-Levy said Canadians can call out the patterns of sexual violence by Hamas against Israelis, while still demanding the Israeli state investigate and prosecute its soldiers who undertake individuals acts of sexual violence.

“The fact that (Western leaders) are trying to to make the right political decision, instead of the right moral decision, is creating confusion, is creating moral blur — instead of making space for all victims to be heard for what they have endured,” she said.

To her, there is a “false parallel” being made between individual cases of sexual assault from soldiers who should be held to account, and a group using patterns of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Elkayam-Levy said people should uphold the principles of international law instead of what she deems to be weaponizing global institutions against Israel.

She is aware that many have instead argued that Israel’s military campaign has broken international law and undermined the systems meant to uphold human rights.

Elkayam-Levy has been critical of the Israeli government, arguing before the war that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought anti-democratic reforms to the country’s judiciary.

She has been critical of his war cabinet for lacking any women, and has highlighted extensive media reports that female military personnel had detected Hamas was planning a large attack only to be dismissed by male leaders.

She said the world needs to condemn Hamas’ violence against families and try prosecuting those responsible. Otherwise, she fears combatants in other countries will take up its brutal tactics.

Otherwise, “we are going to see an international system that will not last for long,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 22, 2024.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press