PREFACE

There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves. Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood.

October 7, 2023 was such a moment.

In the early hours of that morning, entire communities were devastated. Thousands of civilians - women, men, children, elderly people, and people with disabilities - were attacked in their homes, on roads, in shelters, and in places of refuge. They were hunted, executed, tortured, burned alive, mutilated, sexually violated, and taken hostage in acts of extreme brutality. 

The perpetrators did not conceal these acts - they glorified them. They filmed and broadcast them in real time, transforming their violence into spectacle and human suffering into an instrument of terror. During the prolonged captivity that followed, the families of the hostages, and an entire nation, endured months of anguish through images and videos of their suffering. These were intended to imprint themselves on the public consciousness. Visibility itself became a weapon, and the audience was, painfully, part of the plan. 

In doing so, this violence was designed to outlast the attack itself and reverberate across families, communities, borders, and generations. Its purpose extended beyond physical destruction, seeking to create humiliation and enduring psychological trauma.

Yet if the atrocities shattered the boundaries of what we believed possible, what followed exposed another fracture: the fragility of recognition in the face of sexual violence, and with it, the persistent struggle of victims to be believed.  

For victims of sexual crimes, recognition is inseparable from the possibility of justice. It is never merely symbolic: it forms a necessary step in the process of healing and the restoration of dignity.

In this sense, on October 7th, so many were silenced forever and left dependent on the willingness of others to bear witness to what they endured and to pursue justice on their behalf. 

That burden proved extraordinarily difficult. 

The materials are almost unbearable in their brutality. Their very extremity made the act of witnessing injurious and challenged our work on a daily basis. Nevertheless, we understood that their cruelty and magnitude also rendered them impossible to comprehend and harder to believe. In light of denial, distortion, disbelief, hostility, and the attempts to dismiss the atrocities, we felt bound by a profound moral obligation to proceed - to ensure that victims were believed, that the historical record could not be erased, and that silence or political motivations would not determine what the world remembers.

This report, and the historical archive it reflects, were born in that rupture, in the space between atrocity and denial.
For more than two years, the Civil Commission has undertaken the painstaking labor of documenting, preserving, and analyzing the crimes committed on October 7 and against hostages in captivity. What began as an urgent moral obligation became a rigorous legal, historical, and evidentiary work.

Guided by internationally recognized methodologies for documenting war crimes and sexual violence, the Commission gathered testimonies, preserved visual evidence, and conducted extensive analysis across multiple sites and contexts. We carried this work out of the conviction that sexual and gender-based violence, in all its forms, must be confronted rather than allowed to recede into history as something too painful to remember or too difficult to face at present.

The patterns documented in this report indicate that sexual and gender-based violence was a strategy of Hamas and an integral part of the October 7 attacks. Our findings demonstrate that it was a deliberate tactic within the broader architecture of the terror inflicted on victims and hostages.

The Commission's work identified another distinct pattern, one insufficiently theorized in law: the systematic targeting of the families as a site through which violence is amplified and terror deepened.

We conceptualize this pattern as kinocide: the deliberate and systematic torture of families and weaponization of familial bonds through the destruction and exploitation of family relationships in order to maximize suffering. In the context of this report, this includes what I suggest may be understood as kinocidal sexual violence: sexual violence strategically inflicted within familial settings in order to exploit bonds of care, dependency, and attachment. Kinocidal sexual violence weaponizes relational vulnerability, extends harm beyond the immediate victim, and transforms the family itself into a site of compounded trauma and collective devastation.

In naming this pattern, we contribute to the evolving legal understanding of how atrocity operates through human attachment, and how families themselves become targets of atrocity crimes.

Indeed, to document atrocity is to stand at the threshold between evil and memory. In this sense, the work of documentation was never only evidentiary. It was restorative and part of the moral process through which suffering is acknowledged and dignity begins - however incompletely - to be restored. It required entering, again and again, into the deepest chambers of human suffering to ensure that those who were silenced are neither forgotten nor ignored. For survivors and for families, there is profound significance in knowing that what happened has been seen, believed, written, and preserved for generations to come. 

Recognition cannot undo violence, yet it restores something essential: the conditions under which justice becomes possible. It restores faith in our shared humanity and affirms that what was suffered matters - that it will be remembered, and that the truth of what occurred will endure.

While nothing can bring comfort to those who suffered the atrocities of October 7th, this report ensures the voices and stories are carried forward. 

Societies are judged by the truths they are willing to confront. This report is part of that choice: a refusal to look away, and an insistence that what happened on October 7th, and in captivity thereafter, be carried forward not as history alone, but as a persistent demand for justice. This work places facts that demand reckoning before the public record, and before institutions of law, accountability, and history. 

Lastly, this report forms part of a much longer historical and legal struggle. Across time, geography, and generations, sexual violence has been weaponized as an instrument of war. Feminist legal scholarship, and in particular the work of Catharine A. MacKinnon, has transformed the legal understanding of these crimes by revealing what law too often failed to recognize: that sexual violence is not incidental to conflict, but integral to its design and organizing methods. It has long served campaigns of persecution, forced displacement, ethnic destruction, and, at times, genocide itself. Too often sexual and gender-based violence functions as a political and social means through which power is asserted and group destruction is advanced. It must therefore be understood not at the margins of atrocity, but among its constitutive methods.

It is precisely this recognition of sexual violence as structural and systematic that exposes the limits of law. No single legal proceeding, however important, could ever encompass or fully capture the full moral and historical magnitude of the crimes committed. By its nature, it cannot fully reflect the totality of human suffering caused by atrocity or the full scope of human devastation.

It is within—and because of—these limits that the present report assumes its particular significance. It preserves what law alone cannot. It reveals the scope and depth of the violence inflicted on victims. Grounded in the Commission’s war crimes archive, it ensures that what exceeds the reach of any proceeding is nonetheless placed on the historical record. 
What follows now is not remembrance alone, but a responsibility to pursue justice, to repair what can still be repaired, and to ensure that these crimes do not disappear into the ordinary erosion of time. 

We cannot prevent future atrocities if we ignore, deny, question, or look away from them. Nor can we begin to prevent what we do not know—or choose not to fully understand.

May the truth of what was done endure in the record of humanity, compel law and conscience, and sustain the long and necessary effort to seek justice, confront such violence, and prevent its recurrence.

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Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy