Hamas broke a humanitarian truce last week in order to avoid releasing Israeli women who endured rape or other atrocities in its custody, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s spokesman has suggested.
“It seems one of the reasons they don’t want to turn women over that they’ve been holding hostage, and the reason this pause fell apart, is they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Monday. “Certainly, there is very little that I would put beyond Hamas when it comes to its treatment of civilians and particularly its treatment of women.”
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Miller offered that explanation for the collapse of the truce last week hours after Hamas issued a statement denying that the terrorists engaged in any “raping” despite photo and video evidence of dead women and survivors with apparent signs of sexual assault. Yet he tempered the claim when reporters pressed him to clarify whether the U.S. government has established that Hamas scuttled the truce in order to avoid releasing the women.
“The humanitarian pause, which resulted in a release of hostages, was negotiated with some very clear terms, and that was that children and women would be the first priority to be released,” Miller said. “They broke the deal, came up with excuses why. Ultimately, I don’t think any of those excuses were credible, and I shouldn’t get into any of them here. But certainly one of the reasons that a number of people believe they refuse to release them is they didn’t want people to hear what those women would have to say publicly.”
Miller’s initial explanation went beyond what other senior U.S. officials have been willing to say about Hamas’s refusal to release the women. “We’re gravely concerned about that, but I’m not going to speculate as to their reasoning,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Monday.
The ordeal of such women has emerged as a bone of contention in recent weeks, as United Nations officials hesitated to condemn those attacks for weeks after the Oct. 7 rampage that ignited the war.
“Sadly, the very international bodies that are supposedly defenders of all women showed that when it comes to Israelis, indifference is acceptable,” Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan, the top Israeli envoy to the United Nations, said Monday. “To these organizations, Israeli women are not women. The rape of Israelis is not an act of rape. Their silence has been deafening.”
Hamas dismissed those allegations earlier Monday. “We reject the Israeli lies about raping, which aim to distort the resistance and tarnish our humane and moral treatment of captives,” the terrorist group said, per a Turkish media translation.
Its denial has been belied by footage that has circulated on social media from the earliest hours of the attack, as well as forensic assessments of corpses.
“The world has to decide who to believe,” former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg said during an appearance with Erdan. “Do we believe the Hamas spokesperson who said rape is forbidden, therefore it couldn’t possibly have happened on Oct. 7? Or do we believe the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last minutes of their lives?”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called last week for an investigation into the “numerous accounts of sexual violence,” and UN Women — “the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women,” as it describes itself — followed suit.
“We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks,” UN Women said Friday. “This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.”
Those statements did little to allay Israeli frustration. “The investigation that truly must be carried out is an investigation of UN Women’s indifference to the heinous crimes against Israeli women,” Erdan said.
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Miller, the State Department spokesman, backpedaled from his initial remarks about the collapse of the truce while nonetheless implying that the testimony of those hostages would add to the account of the atrocities.
“I want to be very sensitive in my language when talking about people that continue to be held hostage, who have families on the outside,” Miller said. “We know Hamas has committed atrocities. … They were going to release these women and then suddenly, at the last point, reneged on the deal. … We would like to see them release the hostages so they could talk about whatever treatment or mistreatment they had undergone.”
