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The Israeli expert who heads a civilian commission into sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling on world bodies to recognize “a new crime against humanity,” involving violence directed at families.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world should take a stand against the destruction of families as a specific and identifiable weapon of conflict, intended to terrorize family members. She proposes that the crime be called “kinocide.”
In an interview, he also said Canadians can demand that Hamas be brought to justice and at the same time seek accountability when Israeli troops commit sexual violence against Palestinians, without drawing a false equivalence.
“We need to see Canada’s leadership in addressing the lack of moral clarity in international institutions,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview during a visit to Ottawa last month.
Elkayam-Levy is a professor of international law at the Hebrew University and chairs Israel’s Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children.
That non-governmental body originally set out to document patterns of sexualized violence by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 attack and against the hostages it took in the Gaza Strip.
The goal was not to obtain a count of assaults, but to document the systemic factors in how women were raped, tortured and mutilated. The idea was to reach an understanding that could help victims and their descendants cope with intergenerational trauma, and create an archive for investigators and prosecutors to use in potential investigations.
Elkayam-Levy’s team reviewed hours of footage showing “very extreme forms of violence” taken by closed-circuit cameras and what the militants themselves recorded.
They began to notice six patterns of violence involving the circumstances of more than 140 families.
These include using victims’ social media to broadcast that person’s torture to their friends and family, including those held hostage and those killed. Another involved murdering parents in front of their children or vice versa, while another is the destruction of family homes.
“We began to understand that there is something here, a unique form of violence,” he said. “The abuse of family relationships to intensify the damage, to intensify the suffering.”
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Elkayam-Levy said she developed the term with the help of experts, including Canadians such as former Attorney General Irwin Cotler. The rules underpinning the International Criminal Court only mention families in procedural contexts, but not as a factor in war crimes, he noted.
“It is a crime without a name,” he said, arguing that it prevents the victims from healing.
She said experts on past conflicts agreed with her, saying kinocide should have been a factor in how the world understood and sought justice for atrocities on several continents, such as the way Islamic State militants attacked to Yazidi families from 2014 to 2017.
“Justice begins with this recognition; “Healing begins with recognition,” he said.
Elkayam-Levy noted that “gender violence” existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.
He has also pointed to the “silence of many international organizations and the lack of moral clarity” in denouncing sexual violence on a global scale.
Notably, UN Women did not condemn Hamas sexual violence until nearly two months after that attack, a move that Elkayam-Levy said sets a bad precedent for upholding global norms.
“They have fueled denial of sexual atrocities,” he said, adding that a constant demand for physical evidence permeates social media “in a very anti-Semitic way.”
Israeli police have said that forensic evidence was not preserved in the chaos of the attack, and that people believed to have been victims of sexual assault were often killed and buried immediately.
The acts of sexual violence were not part of the 43-minute video that Israel’s Foreign Ministry screened for journalists, including The Canadian Press, which was obtained from security footage and videos shot by militants during their October 2023 attack.
In March, a U.N. 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, freed hostage Amit Soussana made public that her captors had touched her and forced her to perform “a sexual act” that she asked not to be specified.
As part of its declared feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. However, conservatives have criticized liberals for not condemning Hamas sexual violence until five months after the attack.
In March, Ottawa was criticized for pledging $1 million to groups supporting Israeli victims of Hamas sexual violence and $1 million to Palestinian women facing “sexual and gender-based violence” by non-governmental actors. specified.
Global Affairs did not say whether that referred to domestic abuse or sexual violence by Israeli officials, prompting 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 increased when Israeli soldiers were accused of perpetuating the filmed gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers expressed support for mobs trying to free soldiers under investigation.
Elkayam-Levy said Canadians can denounce Hamas’ patterns of sexual violence against Israelis and also demand that the Israeli state investigate and prosecute its soldiers who commit acts of sexual violence against Palestinians.
“The fact that (Western leaders) are trying to make the right political decision, instead of the right moral decision, is creating confusion, it is creating moral confusion, instead of giving space for all victims to be heard by what they have endured.” she said.
For her, there is a “false parallel” between individual cases of sexual assault by soldiers who should be held accountable and a group that uses patterns of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.
Elkayam-Levy said people should uphold the principles of international law.
She is aware that many have instead argued that Israel’s military campaign has violated international law and undermined systems meant to defend human rights.
Elkayam-Levy has criticized the Israeli government, arguing before the conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had sought undemocratic reforms in the country’s judiciary.
He has criticized his war cabinet for lacking women and highlighted extensive media reports that female military personnel had detected that Hamas was planning a major attack only to be dismissed by male leaders.
He said the world needs to condemn violence against families and try to prosecute those responsible. Otherwise, he fears that fighters from other countries will adopt his brutal tactics.
Otherwise, “we will see an international system that will not last long,” he said.
