Women’s rights groups and officials in Israel who have been working tirelessly for the past six weeks to document cases of rape and gender-based atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists during their mass, brutal terror attack in Israel on Oct. 7., say the United Nations is ignoring them.
They say they have also shared much of this evidence, some of it horrifyingly graphic and all of it extremely intimate, with the United Nations and groups that protect and empower women.
The response: Silence.
“We’ve sent letters and shared graphic documentation,” Sarah Weiss Maudi, a senior diplomat and legal adviser in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Fox News Digital. “Their silence is so deafening that it’s sickening,” she said.
Weiss Maudi, who last year became the first Israeli representative to serve as a senior adviser to the president of the 77th Session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, said that U.N. bodies, particularly U.N. Women, whose specific mandate is to champion the rights of women regardless of race or ethnicity, have simply refused to acknowledge that atrocities were committed against Israeli women – and young girls – despite much of it filmed by Hamas, and other Palestinian terrorists from Gaza, themselves.
More than 1,200 people were killed in the mass terror attack, which took place in more than 20 Israeli communities, army bases, and a mass music festival. A further 240 individuals, including women and young children, were kidnapped back to Gaza. While no victims of sexual crimes have yet to come forward directly – mainly because they were murdered, kidnapped, or are still reeling from the trauma, the Israel Police said last week that it had collected some 60,000 videos, including footage from the terrorists, victims, first responders, and CCTV, showing these gruesome crimes. Some disturbing eyewitness testimonies of gang rapes and other sexual acts have also been documented, the police said.
“What I don’t understand is that we provided very graphic and descriptive evidence of rapes, including gang rapes and the remains of semen on young girls, it was not good enough for the U.N.,” said Weiss Maudi. “Yet data provided by the Hamas Ministry of Health is accepted and quoted without any verification at all,” she added.
On the U.N. Women’s website, the only reference to Israel since the Oct. 7 massacre deals with the “devastating impact of the crisis in Gaza on women and girls,” where Hamas’ Ministry of Health estimates that more than 11,200 people have been killed, of whom some 4,506 are said to be children and 3,027 women.
U.N. Women also details a two-day trip to Egypt by its executive director, Sima Bahous, where she called for “immediate and unhindered humanitarian access,” to Gaza.
