Israel probes sexual assaults during Oct 7 attack

Israel says it is investigating several cases of sexual assault and rape from the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.

Israel's national police chief on Tuesday showed a small group of international reporters video testimony from an eye witness at a music festival in southern Israel. This was the first time the police showed international reporters the footage.

The woman in the video, her face blurred, described watching another woman get gang raped and mutilated by militants before one of them shot her in the head while he was assaulting her.

“I couldn't understand what I saw,” she said, saying she had survived the rampage by pretending to be dead.

Police say they're combing through 60,000 videos seized from Hamas, social media and security cameras as well as 1,000 testimonies to try to bring the perpetrators of last month's killings, abductions and sexual assault to justice. They say it is Israel's biggest criminal case in history.

But when it comes to documenting sexual assault, officials said it's been harder to gather evidence and that it's also challenging to get people to come forward. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, first responders were trying to identify the victims in an active combat zone, which lasted for 48 hours, making it hard to properly gather and preserve evidence, they said.

The police wouldn't give details about how many cases they had, beyond saying they have several witnesses as well as testimonies and that investigations could take months. They said they had no cases of rape survivors, further complicating the investigation.

Israel says some 1,500 Hamas militants were killed during the fighting, and many others fled back to Gaza. But Israel says it is holding hundreds of captured militants. (AP)