Silenced No More

There was no single moment when I decided to establish a civil commission. There was certainly no plan in place. As I watched history being rewritten in real time, before Israelis could even begin to grasp what was happening, I knew something had occurred that would demand more from me than anything I had ever imagined.

As a legal scholar, a feminist, and a human rights advocate, my academic work had long been concerned with gender, international law, and the protection of women’s rights in times of crisis. I believed deeply in the architecture we had built around victims: international human rights institutions, feminist jurisprudence, the painstaking progress that had taught the world to recognize sexual violence not as an inevitable byproduct of war, but as a grave violation demanding recognition and accountability. Then came the October 7 massacre.

In the days that followed, I began receiving accounts of unimaginable violence. Women murdered. Families slaughtered or burned together. People abducted from their homes. Sexual violence. Bodies bearing signs of horrific abuse. The terrorists had filmed and livestreamed the attack, glorifying what they had done and using their victims’ phones and social media accounts to amplify the suffering. Seeing the rampage, I thought the institutions I had grown to trust and rely on would respond with urgency and compassion. I expected urgent actions for the return of the hostages, solidarity with the victims, and acknowledgement of the pain, trauma, and grief. 

What I did not anticipate was that almost immediately, we would have to fight over whether the violence itself—especially the sexual violence—could be established as fact. But within days, a second battle had begun: a battle over the truth.

Victims’ accounts were questioned. Evidence was dismissed. Testimonies were politicized. Even images recorded by the perpetrators themselves became objects of denial or relativization. The sexual violence itself quickly became a tool for political agendas by those who were entrusted with protecting human rights. 

For those of us who had spent years working on gender and sexual violence, this was a devastating violation of responsibility and it challenged one of our deepest assumptions: that the protection of victims of sexual violence transcend politics. The belief system that had shaped our values had fractured at its core. The moral and legal frameworks I had trusted had broken beneath my feet. We were not operating in a sympathetic evidentiary environment. We were not even operating in a neutral one. Though we couldn’t explain it, something was profoundly wrong. 

Seeing all of this, I remember asking publicly, very early after the attack, a question I never imagined that I would ever ask: Does international law apply to Israeli women? Is it going to protect us?  

That may have been my Hineni moment. 

Not because I felt ready, but because I understood that waiting for someone else to act was no longer an option. And so, together with extraordinary colleagues, we established the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.

At first, the task seemed straightforward: to collect and document every piece of available information. But very quickly, we understood that documentation itself had become part of the struggle. We were witnessing atrocities and bearing testimony to trauma that at times made us physically ill, while simultaneously confronting organized and sophisticated efforts to deny the evidence.

I understood that anti-Semitism does not operate only through the hatred of Jews. It operates at the level of perception. It introduces instability at the level of knowledge itself, affecting whose testimony is recognized, which victims are believed, what evidence is considered credible, which suffering is granted moral significance, and ultimately which stories become part of history.

For someone shaped by feminist legal theory, this was particularly painful. For decades, feminist activists fought to establish that victims of sexual violence deserve to be heard and believed; that their trauma can shape testimony; that disbelief can itself become another form of harm.

And yet, I watched those principles become conditional and fragile. Jewish and Israeli victims were questioned, doubted, and asked to cross impossible evidentiary thresholds that seemed to keep moving. 

In that sense, preserving the factual record was not merely a legal exercise. It was an act of resistance. An epistemic resistance. A feminist resistance. A humanistic resistance.

And so, we listened to survivors and their families. We gathered testimonies, photographs, videos, open-source evidence, and other records. We analyzed everything: watching the excruciating materials over and over again and working with lawyers, researchers, and experts from around the world to build an archive not merely for the current moment, but for future generations. Knowing that every factual assertion would be challenged, we adopted rigorous legal methodologies, extensive corroboration, multidisciplinary reviews, and standards drawn from international criminal investigations. That rigor was not only a matter of good legal practice. It was a response to an environment in which truth itself had become contested, and in which every witness, every survivor, and even we ourselves had become targets. That rigor culminated in our published report, Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled—The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity, which provides the most comprehensive legal and factual foundation for understanding Hamas’s crimes.

But as we worked on the report, our attention was drawn to another aspect of the massacre we had yet to consider. We saw families deliberately attacked and tortured as families: parents murdered before their children’s eyes, children harmed before their parents’ eyes, relatives abducted together and intentionally separated, homes turned into sites of torture, and familial bonds themselves weaponized to maximize suffering. They could have killed everyone. Instead, they chose to weaponize familial love itself and to inflict such suffering on victims that would endure long after the violence had ended, ensuring that the pain would be carried by survivors for generations. 

Survivors’ experiences exceeded the vocabulary available to us, forcing us to expand our language. What we were witnessing demanded new words. To describe it, we coined the terms Kinocide—the systematic targeting and destruction of families and the weaponization of the bonds between their members. And I offer the term kinocidal sexual violence—to describe sexual violence deliberately committed through, against, or in the presence of family members to weaponize the most intimate of human bonds. By giving victims—and the law—the language to describe what had been done to them, we gave them the ability to articulate their suffering and, perhaps for the first time, to feel truly seen and understood.

Someone recently asked me whether, after everything we’ve documented—the evidence, the testimonies, the patterns of violence, the legal analysis—there was anything missing from our report. The question stayed with me. Nearly 300 pages long, there is still one line I wish I could add. A line that I want my children to know. A line that I want survivors and families to know. A line I need to be reminded of myself after years of looking directly at what human beings are capable of doing to one another: Always, always remember that there is as much good in this world as there is evil. Cruelty is real, but so are courage, love, compassion, and the goodness that people are capable of. I have seen that, too.

I have seen it in survivors who chose to speak up. I have seen it in families who entrusted us with the most painful chapters of their lives. I have seen it in colleagues who stayed even when the work became almost unbearable. I have seen it in people across countries, professions, religions, and communities who stood with us and refused to look away.

In that sense, for me, the Hineni moment was a moment of calling. What gave it meaning, however, was everything that followed.  It was the decision to remain, to keep showing up, and to continue answering that call day after day. To speak for those who cannot. To stand by the truth even when it becomes uncomfortable, or unbearable. To stay with victims long after the world has grown tired of their stories and to preserve memory when forgetting is simply easier. And lastly, to defend our shared humanity precisely when cruelty and ignorance tempted us to abandon it. Perhaps that is what it truly means to say, hineni: not simply to answer the call, but to remain faithful to it.

The October 7 massacre taught me that truth sometimes requires fierce protection. It does not preserve itself. Human rights do not defend themselves. Institutions do not automatically live up to the principles they proclaim. They depend on people willing to stand up and say, “I see what is happening. I refuse to look away. I will carry what I can.”

Here I am.

Hineni.