PICTURE OF THE DAY: Emily Damari gives “The Finger” to Hamas!
Emily is said to have been “a bastion of strong will” which helped her fellow captives in the Hamas hell.
Emily Damari, 28, was shot on 10/7 and lost two of her fingers – but that never stopped her.
The British-Israeli hostage freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza on Sunday has said she has “returned to life” and is the “happiest person in the world” after being reunited with her family.
Here she is, still helping her fellow hostages showing them in such a simple, but strong way that she, and they, will not be beaten!
Please send your message to Emily Damari in the Comments Section below!
Israelis bring Oct. 7 Hamas sexual crimes report to UN
“If it happened in Israel, and we weren’t prepared for it, it can happen to other countries too,” Yifat Bitton told JNS.
JNS – Jewish News Syndicate — In November, the month before she released a report about the sexual violence that Hamas committed on Oct. 7, 2023, Yifat Bitton, an Israeli law professor, told JNS that the report would focus on “what people missed,” rather than the “hardcore evidence” the police would find.
JNS spoke with Bitton again on Jan. 19 about the report’s takeaways and what response it has drawn.
Bitton told JNS that diplomats and senior officials at the United Nations received her Jan. 16 presentation of the report well, despite the global body’s silence about the sorts of sexual crimes that Hamas committed on Oct. 7 detailed by her work.
“Due to the fact that my report was methodological and completed by an independent agent like myself as an expert in the field with a team of lawyers, who are not just Israeli feminists but global feminists, I was hopeful that the report would get more positive attention than was initially expected,” Bitton said.
“It is heartwarming to have seen that happen in real time,” she said. “It was important for them to understand the new trends of terrorism that are not particular to Israelis and Palestinians.”
“If it happened in Israel and we weren’t prepared for it, it can happen to other countries too,” she added.
As Israel continues to grapple with the aftermath of Hamas’s attacks, Bitton hopes the international community will acknowledge the extent of Hamas’s crimes.
Bitton told JNS that with hostages returning to Israel, “it’s becoming clearer what they endured.”
“This may create a new willingness to speak out about what happened, to recognize the reality of these crimes and to challenge the silence that’s persisted,” she said.
As Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, Bitton realized that evidence of the terror group’s crimes was disappearing in the chaos. Almost immediately, she set out to compile a report—what she would release last December as “Challenges in identifying and documenting sexual crimes committed during a terrorist attack”—which took 10 months to research.
The report draws on interviews with 40 first and secondary responders, who identified victims on that day and thereafter.
“The report emanated from the realization that regardless of the evidence that we did have to prove that sexual crimes were committed against Israelis on Oct. 7, it was still very clear that there was a gap between the amount of evidence that we were able to collect as a state, compared with the gravity and expansive nature of these crimes,” Bitton told JNS.
“I’m a law professor and also a litigating lawyer who has represented victims of sexual violence, and it was clear to me that evidence of assault had gotten lost under a terrorist attack of this type of magnitude,” she said.
Previously, experts assumed that sexual violence as a warfare tactic did not apply in a mass-casualty, terrorist attack, according to Bitton.
“The assumption is that either the terrorist organization has had a dominance over civilian areas for a long time, and they are using their dominance to sexually assault people in the community in order to break them and to destroy them, which is something that we know is always relevant,” she said.
“But what is unknown, and this is the first and only experience in history in this respect, is the occurrence of a singular, organized terrorist attack, in which terrorists are using their limited time not only to cause as many fatalities as possible but also to rape women and sexually assault civilians,” she added.
It can be difficult for a Western state to document this sort of unique sort of terror, she said.
“The ability of any state, but more so of a Western state, to respond to these crimes under chaotic conditions can be distracted, especially countries with a strong adherence to the rule of law and a highly sophisticated legal system,” she said.
‘LOWER THE AUTHORITY THRESHOLD’
“The threshold for proof can be very high, and what my report offers are tools to help states understand what types of evidence can be collected to gain recognition of the occurrence of sexual violence without putting the burden of proof on victims,” Bitton added.
Generally, only specialists identify sexual violence at crime scenes, but Bitton’s report recommends broadening the responsibility to include other first responders, particularly under the chaotic conditions of a terrorist attack.
Only pathologists are authorized to take rape kits, but “we have only six pathologists in Israel throughout the country,” Bitton said.
“In circumstances like these, it makes sense to lower the authority threshold,” she added. “For example, dentists or physicians working in a morgue could be allowed to collect evidence of sexual crimes, given the shortage of pathologists during a time of crisis.”
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EDITORS NOTE: This Newsrael column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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