*Israelis fail in their effort to manipulate the evidence against Hamas on
sexual assaults. **UN says no systematic evidence of sexual assaults by
Hamas. *
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 8:00 PM Ryan Grim <
dropsitenews+ryan-grim@substack.com> wrote:
> The Dinah Project had to come up with an entirely new standard for
> evidence to continue to claim sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on
> October 7, 2023.
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
> ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
>
> The Dinah Project authors understood from the beginning of their project
> that the lack of evidence or witnesses would present challenges, and so
> began thinking early on about a new framework to apply guilt to Hamas. “Our
> goal is to propose a scheme of deducing premeditation from circumstantial
> evidence, including through comparison to forms of violence that are
> typical to CRSV,” reads an early Dinah Project mission statement, referring
> to conflict-related sexual violence. That new evidentiary scheme is fully
> fleshed out in the new report.
>
> *The UN, however, has stated multiple times that it does not have evidence
> of systematic sexual abuse by Hamas*
> Forwarded this email? Subscribe here
>
> for more
>
>
>
> Drop Site News is fully reader-funded, which means we depend on supporters
> like you. Become a paid subscriber
>
> to gain access to our private Discord server, subscriber-only AMAs, chats,
> and invites to events. You can also visit our store for exclusive Drop
> site merchandise
>
> !
> ------------------------------
> UN Statements Undercut New Israeli Report on 10/7 Sexual Violence
> The
> Dinah Project had to come up with an entirely new standard for evidence to
> continue to claim sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
>
> Ryan Grim
> Jul 22
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> READ IN APP
>
>
>
> My book “The Squad” is out in paperback tomorrow. If you want to get it
> and avoid Amazon, you can do that here
> .
> In hindsight, I regret not fighting for the original title I wanted,
> “They’ve Got Money,” because it is a sequel to my previous one, “We’ve Got
> People.” The book isn’t really about The Squad so much as it uses them to
> tell the story of the left and resistance to establishment power over the
> past decade. It was written before October 7, but about half of the book is
> about the AIPAC-financed counter-revolution that rose up to beat back the
> new energy rising inside the party—energy we saw crest in New York City
> with the mayoral nomination of Zohran Mamdani this summer. This is a book
> for anyone who has ever wanted to know exactly how it is that Israel and
> its supporters amass and spend capital in Washington. And I voiced the
> audio book, if that’s your thing.
>
> Buy "The Squad" in paperback
>
>
> Benjamin
> Netanyahu appears at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 30,
> 2022 in New York City. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.
>
> This month, the Dinah Project—an Israeli organization—published a new
> report widely described in Western media as a thorough look into sexual
> violence by Palestinian militant groups on October 7, 2023. The document,
> however, contains scant new evidence and largely aggregates existing
> reports, many of which have been discredited or called into question.
> Instead of marshaling new evidence, it argues that less should be needed:
> The report spends the bulk of its 80 pages presenting a legal argument for
> a lower evidentiary standard to prosecute Hamas for war crimes over the
> alleged systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
>
> Prosecutors, the report argues, should not have to rely on the kind of
> evidence typically associated with prosecutions—witness or victim
> testimony, forensic reports and the like—but instead should be able to rely
> on “circumstantial evidence” and general deductions. And in order to find a
> pattern of systemic sexual violence, it should be sufficient to identify
> individual cases of such violence and read into them a systemic nature.
> Completing the circle, those individual cases need not hold up to the
> standards of typical prosecutions.
>
> Major news organizations, most prominently the New York Times, have
> promoted the idea of systematic sexual violence at opportune moments to
> justify Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The first major salacious
> headlines and assertions emerged in late 2023, when Israel was campaigning
> to restart its killing during a brief ceasefire. The latest effort to
> revive this narrative follows the same pattern as its predecessors—and,
> indeed, is more overtly political, with the report spending less airtime on
> the well-being of women than on reasons we should roll back what is left of
> international law.
>
> Support reporting you won’t see anywhere else. Subscribe to Drop Site News:
> Upgrade to paid
>
>
> Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the lead author on the report and an Israeli legal
> scholar and activist, appeared at a press briefing on July 9 and said that
> the goal of the report was to get outside organizations to endorse the new
> report, and use that support to pressure the United Nations. “The hope is
> to… set the historical record straight and to have it affirmed by as many
> organizations as possible, and building upon this, continue also on the
> international political level,” said Halperin-Kaddari.
>
> “We are hoping that the Secretary General will indeed follow on and
> blacklist Hamas.”
>
> Halperin-Kaddari has been largely successful in shaping the global
> narrative around sexual violence on October 7. In the immediate aftermath
> of the attack, she recruited
> her
> former colleague Pramila Patten, now the United Nations Special
> Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict and Under-Secretary-General
> of the UN, for a trip to southern Israel last year to produce a report on
> sexual violence. That report is often cited as evidence that the UN
> sanctions the idea that there was a “pattern” of sexual violence. Yet the
> report was not remotely conclusive — it did not even have an investigatory
> mandate—but it still managed to debunk many of the lurid claims being made
> publicly at the time. Those debunked claims have now resurfaced in the
> Dinah Project’s new version despite having been knocked down.
>
>
> The Dinah Project authors understood from the beginning of their project
> that the lack of evidence or witnesses would present challenges, and so
> began thinking early on about a new framework to apply guilt to Hamas. “Our
> goal is to propose a scheme of deducing premeditation from circumstantial
> evidence, including through comparison to forms of violence that are
> typical to CRSV,” reads an early Dinah Project mission statement, referring
> to conflict-related sexual violence. That new evidentiary scheme is fully
> fleshed out in the new report.
>
> The UN, however, has stated multiple times that it does not have evidence
> of systematic sexual abuse by Hamas or any other militant group on October
> 7, 2023. A top United Nations official issued a statement last week that
> stands in direct contradiction to the new Israeli report. Reem Alsalem, the
> UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, affirmed in her
> statement this week that though the UN had not found “systematic” sexual
> violence: "It is my understanding that neither the Commission nor any other
> independent human rights mechanism established that sexual or gender-based
> violence was committed against Israelis on or since the 7th of October as a
> systematic tool of war or as a tool of genocide," Alsalem wrote in the
> statement, first reported by NBC News
>
> .
>
> The demand for lesser scrutiny of evidence comes despite early claims by
> Halperin-Kaddari, repeated uncritically in Western press reports, that
> Israel had collected reams of forensic evidence and eye-witness testimony
> documenting the assaults. Reported The Guardian in January 2024:
>
> Israel’s top police investigations unit, Lahav 433, is still poring over
> 50,000 pieces of visual evidence and 1,500 witness testimonies, and says it
> is unable to put a number on how many women and girls suffered gender-based
> violence.
>
> By cross-referencing testimonies given to police, published interviews
> with witnesses, and photo and video footage taken by survivors and first
> responders, the Guardian is aware of at least six sexual assaults for which
> multiple corroborating pieces of evidence exist. Two of those victims, who
> were murdered, were aged under 18.
>
> *At least seven women who were killed were also raped in the attack,
> according to Prof Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a legal scholar and international
> women’s rights advocate, from her examination of evidence so far.* The
> New York Times and NBC have both identified more than 30 killed women and
> girls whose bodies bear signs of abuse, such as bloodied genitals and
> missing clothes, and according to the Israeli welfare ministry, five women
> and one man have come forward seeking help for sexual abuse over the past
> few months.
>
> None of the seven cases cited by Halperin-Kaddari were substantiated; not
> a single verified case emerged from the alleged 50,000 pieces of visual
> evidence, the 1,500 witness testimonies. Instead, cases that were claimed
> to have been based on photographic evidence were retracted once the photos
> were viewed by United Nations staff. The Dinah Project report argues
>
> that the traditional approach to prosecuting sexual violence therefore
> needs to be adapted when it comes to October 7. The report speculates that
> some victims may have been killed after being assaulted, but the lack of
> forensic evidence to support such a claim leaves the report’s authors
> arguing instead that “circumstantial evidence” should be enough to convict.
>
> It is important to emphasize that we are not referring here to eyewitness
> identification of specific perpetrators. Rather, these testimonies directly
> establish the occurrence of sexual violence during the attack. Under the
> model we have set forth regarding the attribution of criminal
> responsibility, criminal liability of those who took part in the mass
> attack is understood as joint responsibility, *and there is therefore no
> need to prove a direct link between a specific perpetrator and a specific
> act of sexual violence or a specific victim.* [emphasis in original]
>
> The harm is communal, they argue, and therefore the responsibility is
> joint.
>
> Though they go to great lengths to stress that there is enough evidence to
> call sexual violence “systematic,” despite the UN and others rejecting
> this, they also argue that even one isolated act of sexual violence would
> be a war crime because the “overall attack” itself was “widespread or
> systematic”:
>
> Therefore, from a strictly legal perspective, within the definition of
> Article 7(1)(g) of the Rome Statute, even one act of sexual violence, when
> perpetrated “as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against
> any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack”, can constitute a
> crime against humanity.17 It is important to note that, in this definition,
> the element of “widespread or systematic” refers to the nature of the
> overall attack and not necessarily to the acts of sexual violence committed
> as part of it. *Thus, in order to label CRSV as a crime against humanity,
> there is no need to prove that the sexual assaults were systematic and
> premeditated.* [emphasis added]
>
> It also doesn’t seem to matter that such standards have not been necessary
> in other instances of violent conflict. “Traditional approaches to
> prosecuting sexual violence rely heavily on direct victim testimony, which
> is often unavailable in conflict settings,” the report claims. That,
> however, is simply not true. Whether the violence has been carried out in
> Sudan
> ,
> Rwanda
> ,
> Myanmar
> ,
> or in Israeli detention centers
> ,
> investigators are indeed able to find direct victims when the sexual
> assault is systemic.
>
> In a move that is highly unusual, the Dinah Project report is now hosted
> on the UN’s website among its own reports on sexual violence and global
> conflict. Drop Site News asked Patten why she was hosting the report, but
> she did not respond.
>
> Screenshot
> of “A Quest for Justice” on the UN website.
>
> The argument, if taken up by the UN, “carries concrete implications,” the
> authors say, principally that it would implicate UN Resolution 1960 and
> lead to Hamas being added to a UN blacklist for entities that use sexual
> violence as a weapon of war. Another goal, they say, is also to “impose
> targeted sanctions.”
>
> “We have to bear in mind that the UN has to date not designated Hamas as a
> terrorist organization,” Halperin-Kaddari told Ynet
> .
> “This is obviously because of political reasons. … Blacklisting Hamas would
> be one step in finally remedying this totally unacceptable situation, and
> it would encourage more countries to sanction Hamas. Blacklisting Hamas
> will finally expose them as rapists and not as freedom fighters.”
>
> UN official Alsalem noted that Israel thwarted any official investigation.
> The UN’s commission investigating possible sexual violence “was also unable
> to independently verify specific allegations of sexual and gender-based
> violence due to Israel’s obstruction of its investigations,” she said.
>
> The UN fact-finding mission led by Patten and so dearly held by the Dinah
> Project, at times, directly contradicts what the Dinah Project argues.
>
> The [UN] mission team concluded that there were reasonable grounds to
> believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the October 7
> attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and
> gang rape in at least three locations, and that there is clear and
> convincing evidence that hostages in Gaza were subjected to sexual assaults
> that were probably still ongoing.
>
> *The SRSG [Patten, the Special Representative of the Secretary General]
> clarified that the mission team could not ascertain whether sexual violence
> was used as a tactic of war or in a widespread and/or systematic manner,*
> due to the limited time at their disposal and because this determination
> would require a comprehensive, full-fledged investigation.
>
> *Nevertheless, the report contains sufficient findings to establish the
> systematic nature of the sexual violence.* Furthermore, it provides
> enough information to determine that the acts of sexual violence committed
> by Hamas on October 7 constitute crimes against humanity." [emphasis added]
>
> The push to lower standards of evidence isn’t necessary for some news
> organizations. NBC News, in its coverage of The Dinah Project, claimed the
> report includes “testimony from a rape survivor from the Nova music
> festival.” Yet the Dinah Project does not include such testimony. It does
> say investigators spoke to a victim of attempted rape, but it is unclear if
> that assault is what NBC is referring to. NBC News did not respond to a
> request for explanation.
>
> Leave a comment
>
>
> Share
>
> * Become a Drop Site News Paid Subscriber *
>
> Drop Site News is reader-supported. Please consider becoming a paid
> subscriber today.
> Upgrade to paid
>
> *A paid subscription gets you:*
>
> ✔️ 15% off Drop Site store
>
>
> ✔️ Access to our Discord, subscriber-only AMAs, chats, and invites to
> events, both virtual and IRL
>
> ✔️ Post comments and join the community
>
> ✔️ The knowledge you are supporting independent media making the lives of
> the powerful miserable
>
> *You can also now find us on podcast platforms
>
> and on Facebook
> ,
> Twitter
> ,
> Bluesky, Telegram, and YouTube.
> *
>
> Like
>
> Comment
>
> Restack
>
>
>
> © 2025 Drop Site News, Inc.
> Drop Site News Inc., 4315 50th St. NW
>
> Ste 100 Unit #2560, Washington, DC 20016
>
> Unsubscribe
>
>
> [image: Get the app]
> [image:
> Start writing]
>
>
