How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
October 7th will define world events for longer than any of us in America expect, I think. The brutality of that day still escapes most people here. Depending on who I talk with, if they have any knowledge of the Middle East at all, they’re either completely shocked or feel the events of that day were inevitable.
I find myself caught between the two, mortified by the brutality of Hamas and seething with anger at Israel, which has occupies the West Bank and has blockaded Gaza for a generation, then wonders, with almost no introspection or reflection, why most Palestinians hate them so much.
Take it from me: as a gay man in a small town, I know some of my neighbors hate me because of what I am. But I don’t go out of my way to give them more of a reason to. Kill them with kindness, for fuck’s sake. This is the only way, the smartest way. Israel knows better.
Hamas? Well, I’ve long given up on religion — any religion, but particularly Islam — being a net good. People that kill in the name of a made-up god are a dangerous kind of crazy, but those that believe the will go to heaven if they martyr themselves are worse. That kind of thinking, both destructive and self-destructive, needs to be stamped out wherever it’s found.
What a fucking mess.