FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 5, 2024
Contact: [email protected]
NEW: HAMAS TERRORISTS LAUGHED WHILE RAPING AND MURDERING WOMEN ON OCTOBER 7
WASHINGTON, D.C. – According to a new first-person account by Raz Cohen, a survivor of the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas on October 7th, Hamas terrorists laughed while raping and murdering women and other civilians at the site of the Nova music festival. Cohen recently shared these details with CNN, and the story also cites a paramedic who saw evidence from the bodies of teenage girls in Kibbutz Be’eri that Hamas terrorists raped them. The new eye-witness testimony follows a two-month investigation by the New York Times that uncovered Hamas’s “pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.”
KEY EXCERPTS
- Cohen had gone to the Nova music festival in the desert of southern Israel to be with his girlfriend of two months, Maya. She tried to flee with another friend and was killed, he said. Cohen saw another young woman shot in the head as he ran to hide in a bush – the spot where he witnessed the rape, he told CNN.
- “They catch a girl and they started to pull her clothes off,” he said. “After they pulled the clothes off, one of them started to rape her. It was something like 40 seconds. After he raped her, he take a knife and kill her, murder her. After he did it, he continued to rape the dead body.” The other men around the victim did not seem angry, Cohen said. “They always laugh. I think it was for fun. They murdered a lot of people for fun.”
- After the rape, Cohen told CNN he saw the group go after another woman and a man. He said they were killed with knives and an ax.
- A combat paramedic who did not want his name published also told CNN he saw bodies of two teenage girls in Kibbutz Be’eri and had no doubt at least one of them was raped. “Her pants are pulled down toward her knees and there’s a bullet wound on the back side of her neck near her head,” he recounted. “There’s a puddle of blood around her head and there’s remains of semen on the lower part of her back.”
- Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a human rights law expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has formed a civil commission with colleagues to document evidence of the attacks. She was determined that the atrocities should not be overlooked or forgotten, especially because the victims are unable to speak for themselves, she said. “We’ll never know everything that has happened to them,” Elkayam-Levy told CNN in November. “We know that most women who were raped and who were sexually assaulted were also murdered.”
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