Several people involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of those killed in the attack told us they had seen multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.
The horrifying accounts of Hamas ‘rape genocide’ that left survivors so traumatised
Video testimony of an eyewitness at the Nova music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.
Videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack, and photographs of bodies taken at the sites afterwards, suggest that women were sexually targeted by their attackers.
Few victims are thought to have survived to tell their own stories.
Their last moments are being pieced together from survivors, body-collectors, morgue staff and footage from the attack sites.
Police have privately shown journalists a single horrific testimony that they filmed of a woman who was at the Nova festival site during the attack.
More war crimes
She describes seeing Hamas fighters gang rape a woman and mutilate her, before the last of her attackers shot her in the head as he continued to rape her.
In the video, the woman known as Witness S mimes the attackers picking up and passing the victim from one to another.
‘She was alive,’ the witness says. ‘She was bleeding from her back.’
Witnesses’ statement
She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim’s body during the assault.
‘They sliced her breast and threw it on the street,’ she says. ‘They were playing with it.’
The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues.
‘He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn’t even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.’
One man from the festival site said he heard the ‘noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated’.
Question was asked about how he could be sure – without seeing it – that the screams he heard indicated sexual assault rather than other kinds of violence, he said he believed while listening at the time that it could only have been rape.
