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The Israeli expert who leads a civilian commission on sexual violence by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling on global bodies to recognize “a new crime against humanity”, in which violence is directed at families.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world must take a stand against the destruction of families as a specific, identifiable weapon of conflict, aimed at terrorizing the relatives. She suggests that the crime be called “kinocide”.
In an interview, she also said Canadians can demand that Hamas be brought to justice while also seeking accountability when Israeli forces commit sexual violence against Palestinians, without drawing a false equivalence.
“We need to see Canada’s leadership in addressing the lack of moral clarity of international institutions,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview during a visit to Ottawa last month.
Elkayam-Levy is a professor of international law at the Hebrew University who chairs the Israeli Civil Commission on October 7 crimes against women and children.
That non-governmental body originally aimed to document patterns in sexualized violence by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 attack and against hostages it took in the Gaza Strip.
The aim was not to come up with a number of attacks, but to document systemic factors in how women were raped, tortured and abused. The idea was to have an understanding that could help victims and their descendants to deal with intergenerational trauma, and to create an archive for researchers and prosecutors to use for possible investigations.
Elkayam-Levy’s team reviewed hours of footage showing “very extreme forms of violence” from closed-circuit cameras and what militants themselves recorded.
They began to notice six patterns of violence in the circumstances of more than 140 families.
These include using victims’ social media to broadcast that person being tortured to their friends and family, including hostage takers and the murdered. Another involved the murder of parents for their children or vice versa, while another involved the destruction of family homes.
“We began to understand that there is something here, a unique form of violence,” she said. “The abuse of family relationships to amplify harm, intensify suffering.”
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Elkayam-Levy said she developed the term with the help of experts, including Canadians such as former Attorney General Irwin Cotler. The rules governing the International Criminal Court only mention families in procedural contexts, but not as a factor in war crimes, she said.
“It’s a crime without a name,” she said, arguing that it hinders the healing of the victims.
She said experts in past conflicts agreed with her, saying that genocide should have been a factor in how the world understood and sought justice for atrocities on different continents, such as how Yazidi Islamic State militants – families from 2014 to 2017 targeted.
“Justice begins with this recognition; healing begins with recognition,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy noted that “gender-based violence” existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.
She also took aim at “the silence of many international organizations, and the lack of moral clarity,” in calling out sexual violence on a global scale.
In particular, UN Women did not condemn Hamas’ sexual violence until nearly two months after that attack, a move that Elkayam-Levy said sets a bad precedent for upholding global standards.
“They have fueled the denial of the sexual atrocities,” she said, adding that a constant demand for physical evidence permeates 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 people believed to be victims of sexual assault were often killed and immediately buried.
Acts of sexual violence were not part of a 43-minute video the Israeli Foreign Ministry screened for journalists, including The Canadian Press, which came from security footage and videos filmed by militants during their October 2023 attack.
In March, a UN envoy said there are “reasonable reasons” to believe Hamas committed rape and “sexualized torture” during the attack, “including rape and gang-rape”, despite the group’s denials.
That same month, released hostage Amit Soussana went public about her captors who understood her and forced “a sexual act” that she asked not to be specified.
As part of its recognized feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. Still, the conservatives lambasted the liberals for not condemning Hamas sexual violence until five months after the attack.
In March, Ottawa came under fire for pledging both $1 million to groups supporting Israeli victims of sexual violence by Hamas and $1 million to Palestinian women facing “sexual and gender-based violence” from unspecified actors.
Global Affairs did not say whether that referred to domestic abuse or sexual violence by Israeli officials, drawing a rebuke from a senior Israeli envoy.
Human rights groups have long accused Israeli officials of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank. In July, those concerns escalated when Israeli soldiers were accused of preserving the filmed gang-rape of a Palestinian prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers expressed support for mobs trying to free soldiers under investigation.
Elkayam-Levy said Canadians can call out the patterns of sexual violence by Hamas against Israelis, as well as 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, instead of the right moral decision, creates confusion, creates moral haze — instead of making room for all the victims to be heard for what they’ve been through,” she said .
For her, there is a “false parallel” made between individual cases of sexual assault of soldiers that should be held accountable, and a group that uses patterns of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.
Elkayam-Levy said that people should uphold the principles of international law.
She is aware that many have instead argued that Israel’s military campaign has broken international law and undermined the systems meant to uphold human rights.
Elkayam-Levy has been critical of the Israeli government, arguing before the conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought anti-democratic reforms to the country’s judiciary.
She has been critical of his war cabinet for the absence of women and highlighted extensive media reports that female military personnel had discovered that Hamas was planning a major attack only to be dismissed by male leaders.
She said the world must condemn violence against families and try to prosecute those responsible. Otherwise, she fears fighters in other countries will adopt her brutal tactics.
Otherwise, “we will see an international system that will not last long,” she said.
