Warning: Contains graphic descriptions of Hamas’s sexual atrocities.

The world will never know the full scale of evil unleashed on the innocent men, women, and children of Israel on October 7, 2023 — but we know enough. The blood-soaked images of so many bodies, maimed beyond recognition, are seared on the memories of survivors and others who rushed in to make sense of the miles of carnage Hamas left behind. Now, two years removed from the nightmare that left 1,200 Israelis dead, the horror for the Jewish people isn’t just in gruesome pictures of that day — it’s in the denial that the suffering ever happened.

Despite a chilling explosion of anti-Semitism on the global stage, the idea that anyone would publicly contradict what hundreds of morgue workers, forensic experts, first responders, and investigative teams witnessed in the aftermath of Hamas’s massacre is unfathomable. And yet, Reem Alsalem, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, dared to suggest that the sexual savagery that so many wives, mothers, and little girls experienced was made up. “No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza,” Alsalem insisted to everyone’s shock. “No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”

Enraged, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon called for Alsalem’s dismissal. “Any UN representative who denies Hamas rape must be removed from their post. Period,” he demanded. “It is a stain on the UN’s reputation that Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, denies the sexual violence that took place on October 7. This is a moral disgrace,” Danon fumed, “an insult to the victims and their families, and a violation of every basic international standard. Israel will not allow Hamas’ horrific crimes to be whitewashed. Antonio Guterres, your silence is complicity.”

Alsalem’s allegation is all the more jaw-dropping based on the U.N.’s own findings, which members admitted were difficult to stomach. After combing through 50 hours of video, 5,000 photographs, and dozens of interviews, Pramila Patten, the U.N.’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said her team had “found clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualised torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” just from the hostages taken back to Gaza. After dozens of interviews with survivors and eye-witnesses, Patten admitted that the mission was gut-wrenching “in terms of what we heard and the details of the most shocking brutality of the attacks by Hamas and other armed groups that we received. We saw a catalog of the most extreme and inhumane forms of torture and other horrors.”

In one of the BBC’s more harrowing accounts, Israeli leaders had trouble putting into words the impact this had on them and the others they talked to. “I spoke with at least three girls who are now hospitalized for a very hard psychiatric situation because of the rapes they watched,” Minister May Golan told me. “They pretended to be dead, and they watched it and heard everything. And they can’t deal with it.” Another 18 young men and women were admitted to mental health hospitals “because they could no longer function.”

It’s not difficult to understand why. The last moments of so many of these helpless teenagers and women were so traumatizing that since that day, Sapir, a 26-year-old accountant who helped police piece together some of the most demonic acts of that day at the music festival site, said that she struggles with rashes and can’t sleep — when she does, she wakes up with her heart thudding hard in her chest, drenched in sweat.

“That day, I became an animal,” she said through haunted eyes. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”

From her hiding place, the cloud of armed terrorists, about 100, she guesses, pulled young women in and out of motorcycles and cars. Carrying rifles, grenades, and RPGs, the men created a “sort of assembly point.” There, Sapir saw victim after victim raped and sodomized, some “shredded to pieces” afterward. Others, crouched on the ground like Raz Cohen, silently screamed as men dragged around one young girl, “naked and screaming.” “They all gather around her,” Raz remembered emotionally. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words. Then one of them raises a knife,” he told The New York Times, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Shoam Gueta, one of Raz’s friends lying in the same streambed still hears the men “giggling and shouting” as they violated her, grabbing a knife and stabbing her repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”

From kibbitzes to wide stretches of highway, teenagers, young women, even grandmothers were found without pants or underwear, legs spread apart — ravaged with signs of genital torture and mutilation. Some were tied up to each other or trees, others were hunted and murdered alone. One paramedic can’t unsee the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri. “One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.”

The festival scene, one witness described it later, was “an apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.” The BBC talked to dozens of concertgoers who heard “the noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated.” “Some women were raped before they were dead, some raped while injured, and some were already dead when the terrorists raped their lifeless bodies,” one man remembered. “I desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do.” On the scene, medics were sickened by the blood they found pooling in girls’ pants and the broken pelvises, signs of sadistic cruelty.

Of the sexually assaulted, only three women and one man were believed to have lived through the inhumanity, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “The majority were brutally murdered. They aren’t able to talk,” she lamented in the immediate aftermath, “not with me, and not to anyone from the government [or] from the media.” Photos from the attack sites are strewn with the dead. The small shelters were “filled with piles and piles of women.” “We see the bruises, we learn about the cuts and tears, and we know they have been sexually abused.” Asked how many of these bodies were violated, volunteer Nachman Dyksztejna could only reply, “Abundant.” She paused and repeated, “[An] abundant amount of women and girls of all ages.”

Dr. Elkayam-Levy, who led a civil commission, stressed, “It wasn’t incidental, it wasn’t random. They came with a clear order. It was … rape as genocide.”

And the monsters who hurt and slaughtered these women admitted as much. A father from Gaza confessed that he grabbed a girl and he and his son both raped her. “She was screaming, she was crying. I did what I did — I raped her. I threatened her with my gun to take her clothes off. I remember she was wearing jean shorts, that’s about it. I don’t know what happened to her, I was there for fifteen minutes, and then I left.” His son, Abdallah, raped her again, then his cousin did. “… Before this woman, we had raped another girl as well, I killed two people, I raped two people, and I broke into five houses,” Abdallah bragged.

The “lucky ones,” hostages who were taken to an underground hell, describe situations of being stripped nude, forced into a sexual act, and enduring “unwanted physical contact in private parts.” Six were threatened with forced marriages. At the same United Nations Reem Alsalem claims to represent, the mission team “received clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time in captivity.” This is the kind of “rape jihad,” Andrew McCarthy warns, that’s happening all around the world in Islamic areas.

“It really feels like Hamas learned how to weaponize women’s bodies from ISIS [the Islamic State group] in Iraq, from cases in Bosnia,” Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a legal expert at the Davis Institute of International Relations at Hebrew University, told the BBC. “It brings me chills just to know the details that they knew about what to do to women: cut their organs, mutilate their genitals, rape. It’s horrifying to know this.”

Know. Not speculate, not believe, or suspect. This barbarity happened over and over again, and the personal testimonies the world would have heard were silenced by the men this Hamas apologist defends.

In the swell of backlash against Alsalem — a comforting development given the world’s outrage at Israel’s war to avenge these women — she claims that her statement is being “deliberately misrepresented.” Alsalem pointed to a podcast she’d joined about October 7, where her Palestinian sympathies were even more on display. In it, she undermined the U.N.’s report because investigators weren’t able to speak to the victims. “The victims,” Hen Mazzig fires back, “who, the vast majority of the time, were murdered. Really.”

Even now, their blood cries out from the earth, where the most unconscionable sin should be forgetting what they suffered. “As the scars in our heart refuse to heal,” Dr. Carmit Klar-Chalamish and Noga Berger wrote in their detailed account of the tragedies that took place, “… a significant portion of those we considered partners responded in silence and denial of these horrors. We call on you,” they implored, “to raise your voices and not allow the cries of these victims to fade away.”