Israel blasts UN for excluding Hamas from sexual violence blacklist

Demonstrators gather during a protest the crimes and sexual violence against women in October 7 Hamas massacre, outside of United Nations headquarters in New York City, on December 4, 2023. (Photo: Yakov Binyamin/Flash90)

The United Nations has decided to exclude the terrorist organization, Hamas, from its blacklist containing states and non-state actors which committed acts of sexual violence in 2023.

The UN claimed it excluded Hamas due to lack of credible evidence. The UN report also excluded Russia from the list, despite evidence of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against women in Ukraine.

Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, said he was “disgusted” by the report. The UN blacklist and wider annual report, authored by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was debated Tuesday, the first day of Passover.

“Guterres has turned the UN into an extremely antisemitic and anti-Israel institution during his tenure, which will be remembered as the darkest in the organization's history,” Katz said, in a statement to the media.

“If the crimes of the Nazis had come up for debate, he [Guterres] would have refused to denounce them if it suited his political interests,” Katz continued.

In January, Pramilla Patten, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, visited Israel to receive first-hand knowledge about the October 7 atrocities. At the time, she urged Israeli women to speak up about the horrors committed by Hamas terrorists and their cohorts.

“I’m here for a week, I’m prepared to meet you in a safe and enabling environment and to listen to your stories; the world needs to know what really happened on October 7,” Patten said at the time.

“Please come forward, please break your silence because your silence will be the license of those perpetrators.”

Following Patten’s visit to Israel, the UN published a report that concluded that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that Hamas terrorists did commit rape and sexual violence, both on October 7 and later on, towards female Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

However, Israel then accused the UN of trying to downplay the magnitude of the Hamas atrocities, something that the UN officially denies. It took about seven weeks for UN Women, a women’s rights group under the tutelage of the UN, to post, and shortly thereafter delete, a condemnation of the October 7 onslaught itself.

In March, Israeli President Isaac Herzog welcomed the Patten report, as an important international recognition of the sexual crimes committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women.

“The report issued by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, and her team is of immense importance. It substantiates with moral clarity and integrity the systematic, premeditated, and ongoing sexual crimes committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women,” Herzog wrote on X.

His wife, Israel’s First Lady Michal Herzog, joined the chorus of women’s rights groups lobbying on behalf of all the women who have suffered, and many killed, at the hands of the Palestinian terrorists.

“I’ve been advocating around the world on the issue of the gender based violence of October 7,” Michal Herzog said at a press conference on the issue, on February 22.

Israel's First Lady Michal Herzog during a press conference, Feb. 22, 2024 (Photo: Maayan Toaf/GPO)

“We, Israeli women, Jewish women, felt betrayed by the deafening silence of the human rights organizations and women’s rights organizations around the world, that did not respond or address the October 7 atrocities in any way or framework.

“The first step is to believe the women. Moreover,” said the First Lady, “there is ample evidence: unfortunately, we all watched and witnessed. This was a shockingly photographed and recorded series of events. The atrocities were shown and flaunted with glee by the people who actually took part in this horrible attack.”