What They Did to Our Women

Azadeh Moaveni

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On 4 March,​ the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, held a press conference to brief reporters on the attacks of 7 October. A team from her office had spent two weeks in Israel and the West Bank, at the invitation of the government, examining what had happened that day, but Patten was expected to make, at most, a short press statement. Her office didn’t have a mandate to investigate sexual crimes on the ground and had never undertaken such a mission before. I was told by multiple sources at the UN that her trip was a matter of fierce controversy within the organisation. Many feared it would establish little and that in the absence of a firmly evidenced narrative, her report might appear to offer the UN’s imprimatur to the error-riddled stories circulating in the press. The Israeli government wanted to prove that the sexual violence on 7 October had been systematic and widespread not simply in order to establish a record of Hamas’s crimes, but to help it justify the continuation of the war, which by the time of Patten’s press conference had claimed more than 30,000 Palestinian lives, and destroyed much of the Gaza Strip, as well as displacing almost its entire population. Hamas, for its part, denied that its fighters had been guilty of rape; it claimed that they were disciplined, committed to Islamic values and had been ordered to target military sites and ‘arrest’ soldiers.

Instead of the expected short press statement, Patten issued a 22-page report. She devoted the first ten minutes of the press conference to establishing the limited scope of her mission. Her team, she said, had ‘gathered information’, ‘not evidence’. They had looked for verifiable facts, which they did not assess according to legal standards. Because her team had no investigative mandate and couldn’t make legal assessments or analyse military behaviour, they couldn’t take a view on the two questions to which many were seeking answers: the scale of sexual violence committed on 7 October and the identity of the perpetrators.