Israeli expert urges justice for both Israeli, Palestinian victims of sexual violence

The Israeli expert leading a civilian commission into sexual violence by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling for global bodies to recognize "a new crime against humanity."

The Israeli expert leading a civilian commission into sexual violence by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling for global bodies to recognize “a new crime against humanity,” involving violence targeted at families.

Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world should take a stance against the destruction of families as a specific, identifiable weapon of conflict, aimed at terrorizing one’s kin. She is proposing the crime be called “kinocide.”

In an interview, she also said Canadians can demand Hamas be brought to justice while also seeking accountability when Israeli troops commit sexual violence against Palestinians, without drawing a false equivalence.

“We have 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 an international-law professor at Hebrew University who chairs Israel’s Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes Against Women and Children.

That non-governmental body originally set out to document patterns in sexualized violence by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 attack and against hostages it took into the Gaza Strip.

The aim wasn’t to come up with a tally of assaults, but to instead document systemic factors in how women were raped, tortured and mutilated. The idea was to have an understanding that could help victims and their descendants cope 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 featuring “very extreme forms of violence” from closed-circuit cameras and what militants themselves recorded.