Israeli women who spoke out about sex abuse in Gaza are being mocked online. This denial hurts survivors everywhere
Demonstrators gather during a “#metoo unless you are a Jew” protest outside of United Nations headquarters in New York City. Photo by Charly TRIBALLEAU / AFP/Getty Images
Laura E. Adkins March 29, 2024
The trauma, stigma and shame around sexual abuse has long made survivors reluctant to reveal what they have endured. It can take years for them to tell anyone about what was done to them, if they ever feel safe enough to do so.
Fewer than 1 in 3 sexual assaults in the United States are ever reported to the police, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. A fraction of those are ever prosecuted. In the broader world, especially during wartime, things are even more grim.
Rape as a weapon in conflict zones, as the United States Institute of Peace recently put it, has been “part of the human dynamics of war since humans began recording their nefarious activities.” Sexual violence is used to degrade not just individuals but entire societies, and men, women and children are all routinely targeted. Despite strong international laws, the world has done little to prevent this. And corroborating allegations of sexual assault often takes a long time during active conflicts, delaying justice for the victims.
But something even more sinister is happening in Israel and Gaza right now. Even well-documented cases of sexual violence are being dismissed as propaganda.
This week, two Israeli women who were abducted on Oct. 7 and held captive by Hamas shared their painful stories of experiencing sexual violence in excruciating detail, only to be doubted and denounced online. Both women were among the 100 hostages released in late November.
The two accounts, one in a lengthy New York Times article and the other in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 News, are the first full, on the record testimonies to emerge from survivors in nearly six months of troubling public discourse around the issue.
Amit Soussana, a 40-year-old Israeli lawyer taken from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, told The Times that she suffered repeated beatings and was forced to commit a sexual act on one of her captors, a story she had also shared with two doctors and a social worker within 24 hours of her release. Moran Stella Yanai, a jewelry designer of the same age who was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival, suggested in the TV interview that her captors “searched” inside her vagina and said: “There was the constant fear of being raped at any moment.”
“Lies! They wouldn’t even touch her if she paid them!,” read one uncharitable response to Yanai’s story on Twitter.
Aviva Klompas, a popular pro-Israel activist, tweeted “Believe Israeli Women” a few hours after the article about Soussana was published. “I don’t believe any women,” responded Jackson Hinkle, who has 2.5 million followers, “let alone ZIONIST GENOCIDE supporting women!”
Reports of widespread sexual violence emerged in the first days after Oct. 7, and The New York Times published a lengthy investigation in December concluding that the assaults “were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence.” The United Nations followed in March with a report confirming sexual violence on Oct. 7 and against hostages in Gaza.
The internet was not moved. Social media accounts with massive followings dismissed the Times report as “rape atrocity propaganda,” and online outlets commissioned story after story attempting to discredit the coverage and its authors.
Yanai, it should be noted, did not say explicitly that she was raped. “They would give us ‘necessary checks’,” she said, using the Hebrew word “bedikah.” In this context, the implication is of an invasive “search” inside her vagina.
“How did they explain this as necessary,” the reporter asked.
Yanai paused, then said: “Let’s move on from this topic.”
“For me, the sexual harassment that I went through, was beyond the scope of the word,” she added. “When they come back,” she said, referring to the 100-plus hostages still in Gaza, “maybe I’ll deal with the definition of it.”
Soussana told The Times that a man named Mohammed who guarded her in Gaza routinely asked about her sex life and menstrual cycle, groped and beat her, including after she bathed; while she was chained to a bed; and while she was strapped across a couch so tightly she thought her wrists would snap. Soussana said she was never allowed to close the bathroom door and was forced to remove her towel at gunpoint.
And she said that Mohammed forced her to perform a sexual act that The Times agreed not to disclose. The world reacted with a barrage of denial and disinformation. I posted a thread on X noting that bad actors were trying to discredit Soussana. Which is exactly what then flooded my feed.
“This story doesn’t add up…. Bogus af,” read one reply.
“Dear, she is lying through her teeth and reading through a script,” added another.
The response to Yanai’s testimony was no different.
“She would rather not talk about it. It means that she forgot what she was supposed to say,” read one of the kinder posts I saw on X. “This is getting ridiculous. Israel, chill a bit with all the lies, please.”
“I’m glad they showed her face and we got to see her body language,” added another. “She’s a bar- faced liar, she was never sexually assaulted. And those tears are embarrassingly fake.”
“You can try to win sympathy with fake stories, buy you can’t keep trying forever, people see through it. Jewish women are liars , never trust a jewish hoe.”
I don’t know if there is a coordinated campaign to discredit Yanai and Soussana, who did not speak about sexual assault in a video about her captivity posted online a month ago. But the response to their stories is just more evidence of a heinous pattern: The world has resisted accepting that the terrorists who invaded Israel on Oct. 7 raped men, women and children despite overwhelming evidence.
If there isn’t a coordinated campaign, it’s almost even worse. Are people so intent on disbelieving Jewish women that nothing can convince them otherwise?
“Btw, a nation so deeply involved in lying for so long, with the world witnessing during this genocide, it is hard to believe anything they say,” was one reply to my X thread about Soussana.
“Not believing. There’s a reason. Your camp has a history of too many lies to be credible,” was another
“I’ve never seen a nation so obsessed with rape.”
There is a line from the U.N. report that has haunted me since its publication in March:
“Trust in national governmental institutions or international organizations, such as the United Nations, are at an all-time low” among witnesses and survivors of Oct. 7, the report said. That has made them “reluctant to come forward, in addition to the high media scrutiny of those who do opt to share their accounts publicly.”
In other words, traumatized survivors were afraid to speak to the U.N. because of the way they might be treated in the press and on social media as a result of doing so.
And this was all before Amit Soussana and Moran Stella Yanai told their stories and were vilified for it.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Today is the last day of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need you to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Today is the last day to contribute.
