Foreign Minister Israel Katz plans to join Monday’s United Nations Security Council debate a report which found that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed acts of sexual violence during its October 7 invasion of Israel.
Katz will head a delegation of relatives of the hostages to underscore the message that the United Nations must condemn Hamas and do more to help ensure the release of the remaining 134 hostages in Gaza.
"I intend to come with the families of the hostages and demand the immediate release of all the hostages,” Katz stated on Friday.
The meeting will mark the first time the UNSC has dealt with the sexual violence against victims of the October 7 attack in which over 1,200 people were killed and another 253 seized as hostages.
At Katz’s urging the US, France, and the UK had requested an emergency session on the matter. Israel is not a member of the UNSC and cannot request a debate on its own.
Pramila Patten's report on Hamas sexual violence
The meeting comes after Pramila Patten, the UN special representative of the secretary-general on Sexual Violence in Conflict, issued a report last week at the request of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The report concluded, “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”
Katz believes that Guterres, who has been highly critical of the high civilian cost of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to destroy Hamas, has not been outspoken enough on Hamas’s atrocities.
The foreign minister said Friday, ”I congratulate all the countries that supported our request to convene an emergency discussion of the Security Council” and expect that others will join them.
The aim is for the UNSC to discuss the report’s “serious findings” and to issue an “explicit condemnation of Hamas for its sexual crimes,” as well as “an unequivocal call for the immediate release of all the hostages in Gaza.
Such a move would be “a great victory for justice and morality and an important step on the way to returning the abductees home.”
He emphasized the specific importance of the immediate release of the remaining 134 hostages particularly as the report found substantial credible evidence that some of them had been raped in captivity.With every passing moment, the hostages are in mortal danger, Katz said.
He charged that the “UN secretary-general continues to close his eyes and cover his ears as if nothing happened. Precisely on International Women’s Day, his continued silence is a disgrace and casts a stain on his head that will not be erased.”
Israel had hoped that the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres would use a rare mechanism to push the Security Council to focus on the issue, but he did not do so.
The United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council have adopted a number of resolutions on Gaza but have yet to condemn Hamas for the brutality of its October 7 invasion of Israel, in which victims were raped, dismembered, and burned alive.
Guterres’s spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, has responded in the past week to attacks Katz has made against Guterres, stating that the “secretary-general has fully supported the work of Pramila Patten in her visit to Israel to look into conflict-related acts of sexual violence linked to the 7 October terror attacks.
“The work was done thoroughly and expeditiously. His only instruction to her was “tell the truth.” In no way, shape, or form did the secretary-general do anything to “bury” the report,” Dujarric said.
On Friday in honor of International Women’s Day, Gutters appears to equate the plight of October 7 victims with those of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails.
There were “accounts in the recent report by Pramila Patten – my Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict– of sexual violence and indications of sexualized torture during the terror attacks carried out by Hamas in Israel,” Guterres said, adding that there were also “reports of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.”