‘Screams without words’: how Hamas weaponised sexual violence on Oct 7

Warning: Extremely graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

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 October 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 Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.

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

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck – the rave, the military bases along the Gaza Strip border and the kibbutzim – they brutalised 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.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counsellors, 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 Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road.

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 Abdush’s – legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the agency UN Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks later.

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.

Israeli police have acknowledged that during the shock and confusion of October 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples – 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 Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate.

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

She attended the rave with friends. In a two-hour interview, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.

She said that at 8am on October 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about six kilometres south-west 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 metres from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said she saw ‘‘about 100 men’’, most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits. She said the men congregated along the road and passed among them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles – and badly wounded women.

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with coppercoloured 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 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. 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.

That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about one-and-a-half kilometres southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen – a young Israeli who had also attended the rave – said 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.

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,’’ 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.’’

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

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 at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, often alone.

One of the last images of Abdush alive – captured by a security camera on her front door – shows her leaving home with her husband, Nagi, at 2.30am October 7 for the rave.

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 messages as they moved. ‘‘We’re on the border,’’ Abdush wrote to her family. ‘‘We’re leaving.

‘‘Explosions.’’

Gunshots rang out, and the message stopped.

A week after Gal Abdush’s body was found, three government social workers told her family that Abdush, 34, had been found dead.

But the only document the family received was a one-page form letter from Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressing his condolences and sending a hug. The badly burned body of Abdush’s husband, 35, was identified two days after his wife’s.

The couple’s sons, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7, are now orphans.

Night after night, Gal Abdush’s mother, Eti Bracha, lies in bed with the boys until they drift off. A few weeks ago, she said she tried to leave their bedroom when Refael stopped her. ‘‘Grandma,’’ he said, ‘‘I want to ask you a question.’’

‘‘Honey,’’ she said, ‘‘you can ask anything.’’

‘‘Grandma, how did Mum die?’’