The Israeli expert who heads a civilian commission on sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling on world bodies to recognize “a new crime against humanity” involving violence targeting families.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world should take a stand against the destruction of families as a specific and identifiable weapon of conflict, aimed at terrorizing loved ones. She suggests that this crime be qualified as “kinocide”.
In an interview, she also said Canadians can demand that Hamas be brought to justice while seeking 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 the Israeli Civil Commission on Crimes Against Women and Children of October 7.
This non-governmental organization initially aimed to document patterns of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 attack and against the hostages it took in the Gaza Strip.
The goal was not to keep a tally of assaults, but rather to document systemic factors in how women were raped, tortured and mutilated. The idea was to achieve an understanding that could help victims and their descendants cope with intergenerational trauma, and to create an archive that researchers and prosecutors could use for possible investigations.
Elkayam-Levy’s team examined hours of footage showing “very extreme forms of violence” from closed-circuit cameras and what the activists themselves recorded.
They began noticing six patterns of violence involving more than 140 families.
This includes using victims’ social media to broadcast the fact that this person was tortured to their friends and family, including the hostages and those killed. Another involved the killing of parents in front of their children or vice versa, while another involved the destruction of family homes.
“We started to understand that there was something here, a unique form of violence,” she said. “The abuse of family relationships to intensify evil, to intensify suffering. »
Get the latest national news
For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up to receive breaking news alerts sent directly to you as they happen.
Elkayam-Levy said he developed the term with the help of experts, including Canadians like 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, she stressed.
“It’s a crime without a name,” she said, arguing that it hinders victims’ 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 committed on different continents, like how activists in Islamic State targeted Yazidi families from 2014 to 2017.
“Justice begins with this recognition; healing begins with recognition,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy pointed out that “gender-based violence” had existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.
She also attacks 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 this attack, a decision that Elkayam-Levy said sets a poor precedent for respecting global norms.
“They have fueled the denial of sexual atrocities,” she said, adding that a constant demand for physical evidence permeates social media “in a very anti-Semitic way.”
Israeli police said forensic evidence was not preserved in the chaos of the attack, and that people suspected of being victims of sexual assault were often killed and immediately buried.
Acts of sexual violence were not part of the 43-minute video that the Israeli Foreign Ministry screened for journalists, including The Canadian Press, which was drawn from security footage and videos filmed by militants during their October 2023 attack.
In March, a UN envoy said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape and “sexualized torture” during the attack, “including rape and gang rape.” », despite the group’s denials.
The same month, released hostage Amit Soussana made public the fact that her captors had groped her and forced her to perform “a sexual act” that she asked not to specify.
As part of its stated feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. Yet conservatives castigated liberals for not condemning Hamas’ sexual violence until five months after the attack.
In March, Ottawa was criticized for promising both $1 million for groups supporting Israeli victims of Hamas sexual violence and $1 million for Palestinian women facing “sexual and gender-based violence.” from unspecified actors.
Global Affairs did not clarify whether this referred to domestic violence or sexual violence perpetrated by Israeli officials, prompting a rebuke from a top Israeli envoy.
Human rights groups have long accused Israeli officials of sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees in the West Bank. In July, these concerns intensified when Israeli soldiers were accused of carrying out the filmed gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Far-right Israeli ministers have expressed support for crowds 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, creates confusion, creates moral vagueness – instead of leaving room for all victims to be heard to what they endured. » she said.
She said there is a “false parallel” between individual cases of sexual assault by soldiers who should be held accountable and a group using patterns of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.
Elkayam-Levy said people should respect the principles of international law.
She is aware that many argue that Israel’s military campaign broke international law and undermined systems meant to uphold human rights.
Elkayam-Levy criticized the Israeli government, arguing before the conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had sought undemocratic reforms to the country’s justice system.
She criticized her war cabinet for the absence of women and pointed to numerous media reports that female military personnel had detected that Hamas was planning a large-scale attack only to be rejected by male leaders.
She said the world must condemn violence against families and try to prosecute those responsible. Otherwise, she fears that fighters from other countries will adopt her brutal tactics.
Otherwise, “we’re going to see an international system that won’t last long,” she said.