An Israeli expert leading a civilian commission on sexual violence by Hamas and Israeli soldiers has called on international institutions to recognize a “new crime against humanity,” including violence against families. is
Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world must take a stand against the destruction of families as a specific, identifiable conflict weapon, aimed at terrorizing one's relatives. She is proposing to call this crime “kinocide”.
In an interview, he also said that Canadians can demand that Hamas be brought to justice and held accountable when Israeli soldiers commit sexual violence against Palestinians, without drawing a false equivalency.
“We have to see Canadian leadership in addressing the lack of moral clarity of international institutions,” Elkiam Levy said in an interview during a visit to Ottawa last month.
Elkiam Levi is a professor of international law at the Hebrew University who will chair Israel's civilian commission on crimes against women and children on October 7.
The NGO originally set out to document patterns of sexual violence by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 invasion and against hostages in the Gaza Strip.
It was not intended to come up with statistics on assaults, but instead to document the systemic factors in how women were raped, tortured and mutilated. The idea was to gain an understanding that would help victims and their descendants deal with the trauma of generations to come, and to create an archive for researchers and prosecutors to use for possible investigations.
Elkiam-Levy's team collected hours of footage from closed-circuit cameras recording “extreme forms of violence” and the militants themselves. Reviewed.
They began looking at six patterns of violence in the situations of more than 140 families.
These include using the victim's social media to torture the person's friends and family, including hostages and victims. Another involved killing parents in front of their children or vice versa, while another involved the destruction of family homes.
“We began to understand that there was something here, a unique form of violence,” he said. “The abuse of family ties to intensify harm, to intensify suffering.”
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Elkiam Levy said he coined the term with the help of experts, including Canadians like former Attorney General Irwin Kotler. He noted that the statutes governing the International Criminal Court only mention families as a procedural matter, but not as an element of war crimes.
“It's a crime without a name,” he said, arguing that healing for victims is hindered.
He said experts on past conflicts agreed with him, saying that genocide should be a factor in how the world perceives and seeks justice for atrocities on different continents, such as how Islamic State. Militants targeted Yazidi families from 2014 to 2017.
“Justice begins with recognition. Healing begins with recognition,” she said.
Elkiam Levy notes that “gender-based violence” existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.
It also targeted “the silence of many international organizations, and the lack of moral clarity” in calling out sexual violence globally.
Notably, UN Women did not condemn Hamas' sexual violence until nearly two months after the attack, a move Elkiam Levy said set a bad precedent for upholding international norms.
“They have fueled the denial of sexual atrocities,” he said, adding that the constant demand for physical evidence spread on social media in a “very anti-Semitic way”.
Israeli police have said that forensic evidence was not preserved in the chaos of the attack, and that people believed to be victims of sexual assault are often killed and immediately buried.
The acts of sexual violence were not part of the 43-minute video that Israel's Foreign Ministry screened for journalists, including the Canadian press, from security footage and videos filmed during the October 2023 attack by the militants. was obtained.
In March, the UN envoy said it was “reasonable” to believe Hamas committed rape and “sexual violence” during the attack, “including rape and gang rape”, despite the group's denials. “Foundations” exist.
That same month, freed hostage Amit Susanna opened up about her captors holding her and forcing her into “sexual acts” that she asked not to elaborate on.
As part of its declared feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. Yet conservatives have criticized liberals for not condemning Hamas' sexual violence until five months after the attack.
In March, Ottawa pledged $1 million to groups helping Israeli victims of sexual violence by Hamas and $1 million to Palestinian women facing “sexual and gender-based violence” by unspecified actors. What was promised?
World Affairs did not say whether it referred to domestic abuse or sexual violence by Israeli authorities, which has been criticized by a senior Israeli envoy.
Human rights organizations have long accused Israeli authorities of sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank. In July, these concerns were heightened when Israeli soldiers were accused of a filmed gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers voiced support for the mob trying to free the soldiers under investigation.
Elkiam Levy said Canadians can call out Hamas' patterns of sexual violence against Israelis, and demand that the Israeli state investigate and prosecute its soldiers who commit acts of sexual violence against Palestinians.
“The fact that (Western leaders) are trying to make the right political decision, rather than the right moral decision, is creating confusion. are, creating a moral fog – rather than making room for all victims to be heard for what they have endured.” he said.
To him, a “false parallel” is being drawn between individual cases of sexual abuse by soldiers who should be held accountable, and a group that uses patterns of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.
Elkiam Levy said that people should uphold the principles of international law.
She knows that many have argued instead that Israel's military campaign has broken international law and undermined the system upholding human rights.
Elkiam Levy has been critical of the Israeli government, arguing before the conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had attempted anti-democratic reforms in the country's judiciary.
She has been critical of the lack of women on her war cabinet and has highlighted widespread media reports that female military personnel have discovered that Hamas is planning a major offensive to oust only male leaders. .
He said that the world needs to condemn violence against families and take legal action against those responsible. Otherwise, he fears that fighters in other countries will adopt his brutal tactics.
Otherwise, “we're going to see an international system that won't last long,” he said.