Israel blasts UN for excluding Hamas from sexual violence blacklist

The United Nations has decided to remove Hamas from its blacklist of states and non-state actors that committed acts of sexual violence in 2023.

The UN claimed it excluded Hamas due to a lack of credible evidence. Russia was also excluded from the list, despite evidence of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against women in Ukraine.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said he was “disgusted” by the report. The UN blacklist and wider annual report, authored by UN Sec.-Gen. António Guterres was debated on Tuesday, the first day of Passover.

“Guterres has turned the UN into an extremely antisemitic and anti-Israel institution during his tenure, which will be remembered as the darkest in the organization's history,” Katz said in a statement.

“If the crimes of the Nazis had come up for debate, he [Guterres] would have refused to denounce them if it suited his political interests,” he added.

In January, Pramilla Patten, the UN's under-secretary-general and special representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, visited Israel to meet with victims of the terror attack on Oct. 7 and listen to firsthand accounts of the atrocities that Hamas terrorists committed. At the time, she urged Israeli women to 'break the silence' and reveal the truth so their accounts could be documented.

“I’m here for a week, I’m prepared to meet you in a safe and enabling environment and to listen to your stories; the world needs to know what really happened on October 7,” Patten said at the time.

“Please come forward, please break your silence because your silence will be the license of those perpetrators.”

Following Patten’s visit to Israel, the UN published a report concluding there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Hamas terrorists did commit rape and sexual violence, both on Oct. 7 and later on, against female Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

However, Israel then accused the UN of trying to downplay the magnitude of the Hamas atrocities, something that the UN officially denies. It took about seven weeks for UN Women, a women’s rights group to post a condemnation of the Oct. 7 onslaught. which was deleted shortly after.

In March, Israeli President Isaac Herzog welcomed Patten's report as an important international recognition of the sexual crimes committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women.

“The report issued by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, and her team is of immense importance. It substantiates with moral clarity and integrity the systematic, premeditated, and ongoing sexual crimes committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women,” Herzog wrote on 𝕏.

The president's wife, Israel’s First Lady Michal Herzog, joined the chorus of women’s rights groups lobbying on behalf of all the women who have suffered at the hands of the Palestinian terrorists, including those who were murdered.

“I’ve been advocating around the world on the issue of the gender-based violence of October 7,” she said at a press conference in February.

“We, Israeli women, Jewish women, felt betrayed by the deafening silence of the human rights organizations and women’s rights organizations around the world, that did not respond or address the October 7 atrocities in any way or framework," she added.

“The first step is to believe the women. Moreover, there is ample evidence: unfortunately, we all watched and witnessed. This was a shockingly photographed and recorded series of events. The atrocities were shown and flaunted with glee by the people who actually took part in this horrible attack.”