Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny

Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer in the Times:

The body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” In another house, a person’s genitals were so mutilated that “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.”

Simcha Greinman, a volunteer who helped collect the remains of victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assault on Israel, took long pauses as he spoke those words on Monday at an event at the United Nations.

One can imagine why.

Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli military reserve unit tasked with preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial, said her team saw several who were killed on Oct. 7 “who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others had mutilated faces, or multiple gunshots to their heads.

Since the Oct. 7 attack, during which more than 1,200 people were killed and some 240 people were kidnapped, Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence — rape and sexual mutilation — particularly against women.

Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny from human rights groups, or the news media, amid the larger war between Israel and Hamas — and until a few days ago, they had not been specifically mentioned or condemned by UN Women, the United Nations’ women’s rights agency, which has regularly spoken out about the plight of Palestinian women and girls.

Does the UN hate Jewish women?

Israelis and many Jews around the world say they feel abandoned by an international social justice community — women’s groups, human rights groups, liberal celebrities, among others — whose causes they have supported in crises around the world.

Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sex crimes, which it said would violate Islamic principles.

Oh really. The way it “violates Islamic principles” to stone women to death for being raped? The way it “violates Islamic principles” to force women to wear bags from head to foot with only a thick woven grill to peer through when outside? The way it “violates Islamic principles” to keep gils out of school? No brutality to women violates “Islamic principles”; those principles are all about treating women like rebellious seditious livestock.

But ample evidence has been collected, like the bodies of women found partially or fully naked, women with their pelvic bones broken, the accounts of medical examiners and first responders, videos taken by Hamas fighters themselves, and even a few firsthand witnesses like a woman, in a video made public last month by police officials, who said she had watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilate her and then shoot her in the head.

And the UN has been studiously looking the other way.

The United Nations, and UN Women in particular, have become a primary focus — though hardly the only one — of mounting anger for their silence. Secretary General António Guterres immediately condemned the Hamas massacre, but not until late November did he issue a statement that the related sex crimes specifically must be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted.”

Dr. Cochav Elkayam Levy, an Israeli law professor and founder of a commission on Oct. 7 crimes against women and children, said that on Nov. 1, she sent a letter to UN Women, signed by dozens of scholars, calling for an “urgent and unequivocal condemnation of the massacre committed by Hamas,” including the use of rape as a tool of war. “They didn’t even respond,” she said.

Some women are more equal than others.

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