by Mike Wagenheim
“The world must understand: Hamas uses rape as a weapon,” Michal Herzog, Israel’s first lady, said ahead of the council’s session in New York.
Following a warning from the head of the United Nations that Israel could appear on a sexual violence blacklist next year, the U.N. Security Council met on Tuesday for its annual debate on sexual violence in conflict.
António Guterres, U.N. secretary-general, added Hamas to this year’s list of offenders in a report produced by Pramila Patten, Guterres’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict. The blacklist includes parties that are “credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for patterns of rape or other forms of sexual violence in situations of armed conflict.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s session in New York, Michal Herzog, Israel’s first lady, said the move to add Hamas to the offenders’ list was “a long time coming.”
The terrorist group has been accused of carrying out rape and other sexual violence during its massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and subsequently, against hostages it kidnapped that day and has since held in the Gaza Strip. Patten said last year in a groundbreaking report that there was “clear and convincing information” that hostages held in Gaza had been subjected to sexual violence and reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations on Oct. 7.
“The world must understand: Hamas uses rape as a weapon,” Herzog said in a statement. “These atrocities—rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, sexual abuse in captivity—are not incidental. They are deliberate, premeditated and systematic tools of terror. If the international community fails to condemn them, in both action and words, we risk seeing more such crimes repeated in other conflicts across the globe.”
During Tuesday’s meeting, James Kariuki, deputy U.N. ambassador for the United Kingdom, said “we have seen reporting of sexual violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and we continue to call for all reports of abuses by all parties to be fully investigated,” using the name for Gaza, as well as Judea and Samaria.
Sandra Jensen Landi, deputy U.N. ambassador for Denmark, said her country takes “note that Hamas is now listed in the annex of the secretary-general’s report for the sexual violence and other violations. There must be accountability for all these violations.”
She also called on Israel to “grant the U.N. unimpeded access for monitoring purposes,” something that Guterres noted was lacking, and a reason for the warning against Jerusalem.
‘Focus on horrific war crimes’
Hedda Samson, deputy head of the European Union’s U.N. delegation, told the council that “we remain deeply concerned” with all forms of conflict-related sexual violence “by state actors or non-state actors like Hamas.”
She called Guterres’s warning to Israel an “unusual measure” taken because of “challenges to make definitive determinations regarding patterns, trends and systematicity of sexual violence due to the consistent denial of access for U.N. monitors.”
Guterres last week called on Israel to give his organization “unfettered access” to investigate alleged sexual violence allegations regarding Palestinian detainees and prisoners and to investigate and prosecute, where applicable.
He wrote to Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, that Israel was being placed on notice for a potential listing in the next sexual violence report over “significant concerns of patterns of certain forms of sexual violence” in Israeli prisons, a detention center and a military base.
Danon said the accusations were “baseless,” calling on the United Nations to instead “focus on the horrific war crimes committed by Hamas and the immediate release of all the hostages.”
He did laud the blacklisting of Hamas, telling an Israeli TV channel that the move can be used to push for the terrorist designation of Hamas by countries that have not yet taken that step.
‘A watershed moment’
The Dinah Project, an Israel-based advocacy group calling for justice for victims of conflict-related sexual violence that has compiled a lengthy analysis of Oct. 7-related sexual crimes, called Hamas’s listing “a watershed moment.”
In a statement, professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, director of the Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, in central Israel where the Dinah Project is housed, said: “It sends an unmistakable message: The world sees these crimes, names them and will not allow them to be erased from history.”
Recognition “is only the first step,” Halperin-Kaddari added. “The next must be swift prosecution and global condemnation of those responsible, ensuring these crimes are never again deployed as a weapon of war.”
Mike Wagenheim
Source: https://www.jns.org/un-security-council-discusses-conflict-related-sexual-violence-including-blacklisting-hamas-notice-to-israel/
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