The Israeli expert who leads a civilian commission into sexual violence by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling for global bodies to recognize “a new crime against humanity” involving violence against families.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world should take a stand against the destruction of families as a specific, identifiable weapon of conflict aimed at terrorizing loved ones. She suggests calling the crime “movie murder.”
She also said in an interview that Canadians can demand that Hamas be brought to justice while demanding 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 of international institutions,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview last month during a visit to Ottawa.
Elkayam-Levy is a professor of international law at the Hebrew University and heads Israel’s October 7 Civil Commission on Crimes Against Women and Children.
This non-governmental organization originally aimed to document patterns of sexual violence by Hamas and its allies during the 2023 attack and against hostages it took in the Gaza Strip.
The goal was not to create an inventory of abuses, but rather to document systemic factors in the rape, torture, and mutilation of women. The idea was to create an understanding that could help victims and their descendants deal with intergenerational trauma, and to create an archive that researchers and prosecutors could use for potential investigations.
Elkayam-Levy’s team reviewed hours of footage showing “very extreme forms of violence” from surveillance cameras and what the militants themselves recorded.
They noted six patterns of violence that applied to the circumstances of more than 140 families.
This includes victims’ use of social media to spread the word about the tortured person to their friends and family, including hostages and those killed. Another involved the murder of parents in front of their children or vice versa, another involved the destruction of family homes.
“We began to understand that there was something here, a unique form of violence,” she said. “The abuse of family relationships to increase harm and suffering.”
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Elkayam-Levy said she developed the term with the help of experts, including Canadians like former Attorney General Irwin Cotler. The rules underlying the International Criminal Court only mention families in a procedural context, not as a factor in war crimes, she stressed.
“It’s a crime with no name,” she said, arguing that it makes it harder for victims to heal.
She said experts from previous conflicts agreed with her, saying that cinema killings must have been a factor in how the world understood and sought justice for atrocities on different continents, such as how Islamic State militants targeted Yazidi families from 2014 to 2017 .
“Justice begins with this recognition; Healing begins with recognition,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy noted that “gender-based violence” existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.
She also took aim at “the silence of many international organizations and the lack of moral clarity” in denouncing sexual violence on a global level.
Notably, UN Women did not condemn Hamas’ sexual violence until almost two months after that attack, a move that Elkayam-Levy said sets a bad precedent for upholding global norms.
“They promoted denial of the sexual atrocities,” she said, adding that social media was permeated by a constant demand for physical evidence “in a very anti-Semitic way.”
Israeli police said forensic evidence was not preserved in the chaos of the attack and people believed to be victims of sexual assault were often killed and immediately buried.
Sexual violence was not part of the 43-minute video that Israel’s Foreign Ministry showed to journalists, including The Canadian Press, which was drawn from security footage and videos filmed by militants during their October 2023 attack.
In March, a U.N. envoy said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape and “sexualized torture,” “including rape and gang rape,” during the attack, although the group denied this.
That same month, released hostage Amit Soussana revealed that her captors had groped her and forced her to perform “a sexual act,” which she declined to specify.
As part of its avowedly feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. Still, conservatives have criticized liberals for not condemning Hamas’ sexual violence until five months after the attack.
In March, Ottawa came under fire for pledging both $1 million to groups supporting Israeli victims of sexual violence at the hands of Hamas and $1 million to Palestinian women experiencing “sexual and gender-based violence.” unspecified actors were exposed.
Global Affairs did not say whether this was domestic violence or sexual violence by Israeli officials, drawing a rebuke from a senior Israeli envoy.
Human rights groups have long accused Israeli officials of sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank. In July, these concerns escalated 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’s pattern of sexual violence against Israelis and also demand that the Israeli state investigate and prosecute its soldiers who commit 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 ambiguity – instead of giving all victims space to be heard for what they have endured.” she said.
For them, 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 violated international law and undermined human rights systems.
Elkayam-Levy was critical of the Israeli government, arguing before the conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had sought anti-democratic reforms of the country’s judiciary.
She criticized the lack of women in his war cabinet, citing extensive media reports that female military personnel had discovered that Hamas was planning a major attack, but male leaders rebuffed them.
She said the world must condemn violence against families and seek to prosecute those responsible. Otherwise, she fears combatants in other countries will adopt the brutal tactics.
Otherwise, “we will see an international system that will not last long,” she said.
