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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 months

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1937. 1947. 1967. 1991. 2000. 2001. 2007. 2008. 2010. 2013. 2019. 2020.

What do all those years have in common?

The answer is, those were all the years that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians were offered a state. In all those cases, they rejected that offer immediately.

Why would that be? Well the answer is quite clear. The answer is, they don't want a state. The answer is, they like to play victim. They like to talk about occupation. They like to talk about apartheid.

But it's time someone looked at history. It's time we actually looked at the facts. Because the world won't tell you the facts. The world eats Hamas's propaganda.

So, let's talk about this.

In 1947, the United Nations announced the Partition Plan. A state for the Arabs, a state for the Jews. The Arabs rejected and the Jews accepted. Hence, 1948, the establishment of the state of Israel.

What happened there? Why did the Arabs reject yet another offer? The answer is, read their charter. It's really not a mystery. The PLO, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, they declare proudly what they want. And here's a spoiler: it's not a state.

So they rejected that offer and they've declared their goal ever since: to destroy the state of Israel. They don't want a state, they want no Israel.

Now with this war, everyone's talking about Gaza. So, let's focus on that for a second. 2005, listen carefully, because this is mindboggling. 2005, we all know the disengagement. What you might not know is that Israel, in addition to evacuating 10,000 of its citizens, dug up its dead. I'm going to repeat that: Israel dug up its dead from Gaza cemeteries. Why? Because we knew that if we leave our dead bodies in the ground, Hamas would do what they did. Now we know we were right.

So, since 2005 there has not been one Jew, not alive and not dead in Gaza. There was no occupation. That is one big fabrication that the world loves to eat up. Not one Jew in Gaza since 2005.

Israel handed the Palestinians Gaza on a silver platter and said, "here make a state. Let's make peace." What did the Palestinians do almost immediately? In 2006, they elected Hamas, a world recognized global terror organization. The people in Gaza, I'm going to repeat this because it is so important, the people of Gaza elected Hamas.

Let's talk about that for a second. To be clear, and this is an important disclaimer, are there innocent people in Gaza? Of course there are innocent people in Gaza. Were there innocent Germans in World War II? The answer is yes. Many of those innocent Germans were tragically killed in World War II. Does anybody debate the validity of World War II? Does anybody say, since innocent Germans were killed in World War II, it was not a justified war? We should not have de-Nazified Germany? Of course not. Anybody with a brain and a moral compass understands that in war, people die. This war is no different. There are innocent people in Gaza. But those people elected a terrorist organization.

As soon as they elected that terrorist organization, Israel had to put blockades around Gaza because we weren't going to allow rockets and infiltration of terrorists into Israel. And the world yelled, "it's an open-air prison!" We see what happened on October 7th when they made one little hole in the security fence. 1400 innocent people massacred.

So, we gave them a state again in 2005. But again, they rejected it because, again, they don't want a state. You know, it's one thing to not know the facts. It's another thing not to read their charter. It's available on the internet. Read Hamas's Charter. What do they want? They say it, they don't even want dead Israelis. They want dead Jews anywhere in the world.

And the first line, the first line of defense, is Israel. But if anybody around the world, whether it's in the United States or Europe, thinks that Hamas wants to stop with Israel? Again, you're not paying attention. Read their charter. Find me one, one, Palestinian leader that has declared that they want peace with Israel, that Israel has a right to exist and they denounce terror. You won't find one because it doesn't exist.

So let's talk about some of the arguments that you and I hear on college campuses and around the world.

Let's start with genocide. Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Really? Because if you look at the numbers, they tell a different story. The Palestinian population has grown six-fold since Israel was established. 6X. So, Israel is either really bad at genocide or that's yet another lie.

Apartheid, right? Israel is an apartheid state. Do you know that there are Arabs in basically every single key role in this country? Supreme Court justices in the parliament, I mean they're everywhere. They have not just equal rights, they have more rights than they have in any Muslim country in the world. That's just a fact, there's no debating that.

So forget apartheid, forget... you know what? Let's go back more fundamentally. Occupation, right? It's their favorite word. We're occupying. We've been occupying an Arab Palestinian state. Really? Let's talk about this because, you know, these false narratives, they're all over the place, and it's your responsibility and my responsibility to know our facts. Now, to be clear, some of us make mistakes. I've been guilty of sharing a post that I found out later was fake news, which I took from some media channel. We're all human beings, we make mistakes. But we need to know the facts. So let's talk about this occupation thing.

Before the occupation, before the state of Israel. In 1929, Arabs massacred Jews in Hebron. So, if occupation causes terror, which is their fundamental claim against the Jews and against Israel, presumably anybody with a half a brain understands that before occupation there should have been no terror.

But again, 1929, before the state of Israel was even established. but beyond that, where did this occupation thing come from? It came from Yasser Arafat, a terrorist by any standard, by any definition of the word, who literally, but literally, took the word Palestine. Okay, this is crucial. That meant is Israel. We have coins that say "Palestine" on them and have a Magen David, a star of David on them.

Palestine was Israel. Yasser Arafat took that word Palestine and basically hijacked it to mean something that it never meant before, which is these Arabs who are from Jordan and from other places. He called them Palestinians.

Words matter, guys. Words matter. And it's not just semantics - call them Arabs, call them Palestinians. Call it the West Bank, call it Judea and Samaria. Words matter. So, let's be accurate. Okay? Palestinians. Golda Meir was a Palestinian. Okay. Israelis were Palestinians. These people who call themselves Palestinians, they're not. They're Arabs who came from Jordan. So, words matter.

But let's talk about this occupation. So we already established that before the occupation, there was terror. Okay? But again, we talked about Gaza. There was no occupation. What are they firing rockets at us for? Right? The occupation is, again, a historical fabrication that everyone likes to use, and listen carefully, to justify not their stance against Israel. But as we see in the world today, their stance against Jews.

And I want to clarify and emphasize this in the strongest, most unequivocal terms. Separating Zionism from Judaism is preposterous. It is ridiculous anybody who knows anything about Judaism knows that we pray to Zion throughout our entire prayers, every single day. For thousands of years, Jews faced Zion when we prayed. So to say, I'm anti-zionist but not anti-semitic is the most ridiculous sentence that millions of people utter every single day. To say that the Jews do not deserve a state of their own is anti-Semitic. Period. And I know it's not politically correct to say, because there are people who are anti-Zionist. Anti-Zionism is the new face of anti-Semitism. It's the same age-old hatred, the oldest hatred in the world, the hatred of Jews with a new mask called anti-Zionism. This is super duper important.

Furthermore, we need to talk about this moral equivalence that the world likes to make this big equal sign. There's Hamas, a terrorist organization that does what they did. And I'm not going to repeat what they did because it's bad for my soul and it's bad for your soul. But we know what they did. There's them. And then there's the IDF.

I want to explain to you, and we've all heard this, the IDF is the most moral army in the world. Let's actually talk about this. What does the IDF do? It's really actually unbelievable to hear. We drop pamphlets. Okay? We notify, we pick up the phone, we send SMSs to people, innocent civilians in Gaza, letting them know that we're about to attack. Now, I think you and I can both understand what that does to our deterrence, what that does to our element of surprise. Because if we let them, know we let our enemies know, but we risk that anyway. You know why? Because to us, human life, to us being the Jewish people, human life is the most important value.

So to compare us, the IDF, that values human life, and that does everything to minimize civilian death. To Hamas, that does everything to maximize civilian death, is moral bankruptcy. Stop making that comparison. These aren't two equal sides. This is good, the IDF, versus evil, Hamas.

Now, again, I want to go back to the most important point. There are innocent people in Gaza. There are. But those people, those innocent people, where are they? Are your social media feeds full of Palestinians denouncing Hamas? Because what I see are thousands, tens of thousands of Palestinians marching in support of Hamas. What I see are Palestinians dancing in the streets at 9/11. What I see are Palestinians giving out candies on the streets every single time an innocent Jew is murdered. So where are these innocent Palestinians? Where are they? I don't know. But these innocent Palestinians voted for Hamas.

A poll that I saw recently is that they have 80%, Hamas has 80% support in Gaza. 80%. So it could be that there are innocent people. There are innocent people. But how relevant are they? In fact, even if they were the majority, which they're clearly not. If they remain silent, they are irrelevant. It doesn't matter how many they are, if they just remain silent. And the whole, but they can't speak out against Hamas because Hamas will kill them. They just need to fulfill orders. I'll let you for a second think where you heard that last. Yeah, it was the Nazis who said that. You cannot make that claim. "I'm sorry I can't stand up for morality and denounce terror and murder because I'm scared." You're scared? Then do what you need to do in Gaza and get rid of Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization that rules Gaza thanks to those innocent Palestinians.

And let's say it as clearly as possible. Those people who dance in the streets, who give out candies and who elected Hamas are accountable for their words and their actions. And here's the irony of it all.

Those people who say, no, they're just they're innocent people. They can't do anything. They they're not to be held accountable. Wait a second. Are the Palestinian people a people? Are they a nation that deserves a state? Because if they're a nation, they should be held accountable as a nation. And if they're not a nation, they're just a bunch of, you know, punks acting up. Well, then why do they deserve a state? Think of the irony. Think of the hypocrisy here, those very same people who claim that the Palestinians deserve a state are the very same people who say nah they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. But they should. And they will be. And they are in this war.

It's horribly tragic when innocent people die. But that's what happens in war. Did Israel want a war? Absolutely not. The Israel Defense Forces is exactly that. Defense Forces. Israel has never attacked anyone. We were in shul, we were in synagogue on Simchat Torah dancing with Torah scrolls when Hamas decided to do what they did. Unprovoked and for no reason whatsoever other than one, they want to see dead Jews.

Now we're hearing on campuses, you know the Nakba, right? We forcefully removed Arabs from their houses in 19... Guys. Please. 1947, the partition plan. They had a state. They did not want a state. I'm going to keep repeating it. I know I sound like a broken record, but this is so fundamental. Anybody who says that Israel occupied an Arab Palestinian state in 1948 ask them one question. Just one question. Look them in the eye and say, okay, Israel occupied an Arab Palestinian State. Fantastic. Do me a favor. When was that, uh, state established? Just give me the date that that Arab Palestinian state was established or, you know, what forget the date. Kindly remind me what the national anthem was or who the Prime Minister was or what language they spoke or what their currency was, because such a state never existed. It's all a lie.

Which begs the question, how do so many people, how do so many millions of people believe these lies? The answer is again, the oldest hatred in the world, the hatred of Jews. The new mask in 2023. Facts don't matter to them. They have now found an excuse to let their anti-Semitism come to the surface and so they can believe whatever they want in Ivy League colleges.

Truth be told, I'm extremely worried. Extremely worried about my brothers and sisters outside of Israel. And I know that sounds funny after what we've been through, but at the end of the day, what we do in Israel and how we retaliate is in our hands. We're not at the mercy of some government and we don't have to hope that they'll come to our rescue. We see pro-Palestinian protests. We see people being murdered in the streets in L.A. We see people being stabbed. We see posters being pulled off. This is a new level. We have reached a new level of anti-Semitism.

In fact, I'll say, you know, and this is also a hard thing to say, that on October 7th, when I heard, after I turned my phone on after the holiday and I heard what had happened, I'm an optimistic guy. I tried to find something to grasp onto something positive. And you know what I could come up with? I said, you know, this is a tragedy of unparalleled proportions, but maybe, perhaps the only silver lining here is that the world will finally see what Israel knew for decades. The world will finally, unequivocally stand with Israel.

And here we are one month later. And anti-Semitism has increased by hundreds of percentages. Hundreds. So the world does not recognize, the world does not accept. And you know, Holocaust deniers. You know, it's a sick thing. But perhaps they could say, hey we don't have any hard evidence. Hamas live streamd the atrocities. There is no denying, there is no debating what Hamas did.

And yet, despite that, there are still people who side with Hamas. There are still people, intellectual people, by the way, otherwise moral people who claim that it is justified, it is resistance. Resistance? If you're watching this, is there any scenario, any scenario in which you as a human being with a heart and a conscience and blood in your veins, is there any scenario in which you would justify doing what Hamas did? Any scenario? Anything?

Someone kicks me out of my house, which is their narrative, a false narrative, but it's their narrative. Someone kicks me out of my house. I'll protest, I'll go to the police. I'll do whatever I have to do. Will I do what Hamas did? No. You know why? Because I have a conscience. These people do not have a conscience. There's no Nakba. There's no occupation. There's no apartheid. These are all fabrications that our enemies used to justify their hatred of Jews.

And so what's going to happen now, based on the Intel that I have, the knowledge that I have of this war, we're going to continue until Hamas is completely eliminated from this world, and then we're going to take security control over Gaza like we have in Judea and Samaria, what the world calls the West Bank. And we will facilitate, hopefully, and this is not information that I have, this is my hopes and dreams. We will facilitate the ability for them to build a new society that is not promoting and encouraging terror and the murder of Jews.

But that, we have a long time till we get there. Right now, we're focusing on getting rid of Hamas and the world as a whole can either thank us for the work that we're doing, for them, because again, if you think they're stopping with Israel, you're not paying attention.

So the world can either stand with us, support us, denounce terror, or they could sit it out and sit down and let us do the work that we need to do and let them thank us later. The world was silent in the past. The world was silent in World War II. The world was silent throughout all of the persecutions that the Jewish people experienced. The Inquisition, the pogroms, the Crusades, the Ho-- the list is long. They were quiet then and they're being quiet again.

So if you're watching this and you know someone who is pro-Palestinian, you need to know that in today's day and age, after what Hamas has done, being pro-Palestinian, is being pro a people that elected the terrorists who did what they did. And again, yes, there are innocent Palestinians, but the Palestinian cause, the narrative, the agenda is in the charter and they say it loud and clear.

And the irony, and there's so much irony in this war. The irony is that we're not listening to them. They're saying, guys, we don't want a state. We want dead Jews! And the world's saying, no, no, no, no, no. They don't mean it. They really want a state.

Here's the problem fundamentally. In the West, we have some values, some core fundamental values. For example, treat someone with dignity and they'll treat you with dignity back. A basic fundamental principle of Western civilization. What we're trying to do is we're taking those values and applying them to radical Islam. But radical Islam does not share those values. You could treat the Palestinians as well as you want. They want dead Jews.

And by the way, I keep saying dead Jews, they're not stopping at the Jews. They say it. They want all infidels. Anyone who's not radical, anyone who's not Muslim to either convert to Muslim or see their death.

More irony. Queers for Palestine. LGBTQ activists supporting Hamas? Have you lost your mind? Do you know what would happen if you walked into Gaza with an LGBTQ flag? Let me tell you what would happen. You'd be thrown off a roof and your dead body would be dragged with a pickup truck throughout the streets of Gaza. This isn't, you know, me sounding sensationalist and saying -- you could see this footage. They are proud of this. They are proud of this. This is their value system and when I say their I mean Hamas and Hamas supporters.

I'm going to keep saying it because I don't want anyone to take what I say out of context. There are innocent Palestinians, but those innocent Palestinians are irrelevant if they remain quiet, irrelevant. And so when you see on college campuses, Liberals for Hamas, you need to understand the depth of hypocrisy here. Those very liberals and their values and the things they stand for are 100% fundamentally opposed to what Hamas stands for. They hang and they murder people with liberal values.

And so you need to understand and be able to communicate with the people on campuses and all around America and around the world who don't stand with Israel today. You need to be able to communicate to them the facts. The historical facts that started before the state of Israel was even established in 1929, as I mentioned, in Hebron. You need to be able to communicate those facts clearly, concisely and accurately. Not to say that we're ever going to win the digital War because they outnumber us, obviously. But truth will prevail and at the end of the day, whenever that end of the day comes, we know the ending and it's going to be a good one.

And I want to emphasize that. Look throughout our history. Look at all of the holidays we celebrate. Do you understand the story of Purim? That was a near genocide of the Jewish people. And now we celebrate. But at the time, we couldn't even imagine celebrating. The same is true for today. We are in deep agony and pain and mourning, and the thought of celebrating is foreign to us. I understand that. Trust me, I do.

But we will win this. We know the ending. The question is, and this is a tremendous, you know, fundamental question, who will stand with us on the way to that ending, on the way to that victory? Who will be our allies and who will get in our face?

And I just want to end with one beautiful thought that I heard from my friend Rav Efrum Goldberg from Boca Raton. He said something that really to me illustrates the two sides of this war perfectly.

In the portion, the Torah portion of Lech-Lecha, God says to Abraham, whoever blesses you the Jewish people will be blessed. And he who curses you... you would have expected the Torah to say, I will curse, right? But it doesn't. Why does the Torah switch languages? So, Rabbi Goldberg said something that was just beautiful. I don't know in whose name he said it, but it was really beautiful and resonated with me deeply. And I think it really does illustrate the nature of the Jewish people.

Here is how you're supposed to read that verse. Those who blessed the Jewish people, those who stand with us, those who have moral clarity, those who have a moral compass, they will be blessed. Those that get in our face, those that get in our way, those that pass resolutions in the UN and appoint Iran as the head of the Human Rights Council, those people? They will see our light. They try to bring their darkness. Our light will extinguish their darkness. They will see the unity in the Jewish people. They will see all the charity. They will see all of the beautiful things that the Jewish people have done over the past month.

You try to bring your darkness on us. We'll bring our light. Those who bless us, will be blessed. Those who get in our face, will see our light.

Note: Memes added by myself.

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#Hillel Fuld #Israel #Palestine #Hamas #hamas supporters #hamas terrorists #islamic terrorism #islamic terrorists #October 7 #oct 7 2023 #pro palestine #pro palestine is pro hamas #exterminate hamas #free palestine #palestinian genocide #israeli occupation #religion is a mental illness

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 4 months

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By: Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella

Published: Dec 28, 2023

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella reported from across Israel and interviewed more than 150 people.

At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”

In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.

The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.

The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.

One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.

As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”

Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.

A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.

Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.

And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.

Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.

Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.

The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.

A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.

That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.

In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.

“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”

Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.

“The eyewitness might not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify as, ‘I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,’ that can be enough.”

‘Screams without words’

Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.

She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.

She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.

About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.

“It was like an assembly point,” she said.

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.

Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.

Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot, and he can be seen in one of Sapir’s photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.

Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso, and she can barely sleep, waking up at night, heart pounding, covered in sweat.

“That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”

That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”

Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.

Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.

“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”

Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in an elite unit.

Many of the dead were brought to the Shura military base, in central Israel, for identification. Here, too, witnesses said they saw signs of sexual violence.

Shari Mendes, an architect called up as a reserve soldier to help prepare the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said she had seen four with signs of sexual violence, including some with “a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.”

A dentist, Captain Maayan, who worked at the same identification center, said that she had seen at least 10 bodies of female soldiers from Gaza observation posts with signs of sexual violence.

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

The investigation

The Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence from the Oct. 7 attacks. They have gathered hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dashcams, security cameras and mobile phones showing Hamas terrorists killing civilians and many images of mutilated bodies.

But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman of Israel’s national police, said, “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.

In the aftermath of the attack, police officials said, forensic examiners were dispatched to the Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies — Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.

The examiners worked quickly to give the agonized families of the missing a sense of closure and to determine, by a process of elimination, who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.

According to Jewish tradition, funerals are held promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were put to rest without medical examinations, meaning that potential evidence now lies buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that it would be possible to recover some evidence from the corpses, but that it would be difficult.

Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized. Sitting at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he swiped open his phone, tapped and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vagina, which he said was recorded by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.

A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”

Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.

Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.

“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

The trauma from sexual assault can be so heavy that sometimes survivors do not speak about it for years, several rape counselors said.

“Many people are looking for the golden evidence, of a woman who will testify about what happened to her. But don’t look for that, don’t put this pressure on this woman,” said Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. “The corpses tell the story.”

The woman in the black dress

One of the last images of Ms. Abdush alive — captured by a security camera mounted on her front door — shows her leaving home with her husband, Nagi, at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 for the rave.

He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. She was dressed in a short black dress, a black shawl tied around her waist and combat boots. As she struts out, she takes a swig from a glass (her brother-in-law remembers it was Red Bull and vodka) and laughs.

You’ve got to live life like it’s your last moments. That was her motto, her sisters said.

At daybreak, hundreds of terrorists closed in on the party from several directions, blocking the highways leading out. The couple jumped into their Audi, dashing off a string of messages as they moved.

“We’re on the border,” Ms. Abdush wrote to her family. “We’re leaving.”

“Explosions.”

Her husband made his own calls to his family, leaving a final audio message for his brother, Nissim, at 7:44 a.m. “Take care of the kids,” he said. “I love you.”

Gunshots rang out, and the message stopped.

That night, Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site with three friends and found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car, about nine miles north of the site. She did not see the body of Mr. Abdush.

She saw other burned cars and other bodies, and shot videos of several — hoping that they would help people to identify missing relatives. When she posted the video of the woman in the black dress on her Instagram story, she was deluged with messages.

“Hi, based on your description of the woman in the black dress, did she have blonde hair?” one message read.

“Eden, the woman you described with the black dress, do you remember the color of her eyes?” another said.

Some members of the Abdush family saw that video and another version of it filmed by one of Ms. Wessely’s friends. They immediately suspected that the body was Ms. Abdush, and based on the way her body was found, they feared that she might have been raped.

But they kept alive a flicker of hope that somehow, it wasn’t true.

The videos caught the eye of Israeli officials as well — very quickly after Oct. 7 they began gathering evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Ms. Abdush’s body in a presentation made to foreign governments and media organizations, using Ms. Abdush as a representation of violence committed against women that day.

A week after her body was found, three government social workers appeared at the gate of the family’s home in Kiryat Ekron, a small town in central Israel. They broke the news that Ms. Abdush, 34, had been found dead.

But the only document the family received was a one-page form letter from Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, expressing his condolences and sending a hug. The body of Mr. Abdush, 35, was identified two days after his wife’s. It was badly burned and investigators determined who he was based on a DNA sample and his wedding ring.

The couple had been together since they were teenagers. To the family, it seems only yesterday that Mr. Abdush was heading off to work to fix water heaters, a bag of tools slung over his shoulder, and Ms. Abdush was cooking up mashed potatoes and schnitzel for their two sons, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7.

The boys are now orphans. They were sleeping over at an aunt’s the night their parents were killed. Ms. Abdush’s mother and father have applied for permanent custody, and everyone is chipping in to help.

Night after night, Ms. Abdush’s mother, Eti Bracha, lies in bed with the boys until they drift off. A few weeks ago, she said she tried to quietly leave their bedroom when the younger boy stopped her.

“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Honey,” she said, “you can ask anything.”

“Grandma, how did mom die?”

[ Via: https://archive.is/aFPBa ]

There are still pro-Hamas supporters, many of them aligned with #BelieveWomen and #MeToo, who have adopted the same "were you there?" tactic as Xians who want to deny evolution: unless someone captured it on video, it's just her word - if she survived at all.

#hamas #hamas terrorism #israel #oct 7 2023 #exterminate hamas #hamas rapists #islam #islamic terrorism #rape apologists #religion is a mental illness

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