Israel’s First Lady, Michal Herzog met at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on Monday with Pramilla Patten, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, who was visiting Israel with a team of senior UN legal and medical experts on a fact-finding mission investigating the wide-spread and systematic sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th.
Ahead of the meeting, the First Lady and President Isaac Herzog held a private meeting with Under-Secretary Patten.
President Herzog said: “The scenes we saw on 7th October continue to reverberate. They must be told and must be investigated, and most of all, the victims must be cared for.”
First Lady Herzog said: “As a woman to a woman, I want to thank you very much for coming to Israel with an open heart and open mind to listen and to see, and to help the survivors.”
Under-Secretary Patten thanked the First Lady for her welcome and said: “I'm here to express my solidarity with the Government of Israel, the people of Israel, the survivors, the families of victims, and the families of hostages.”
She added, “I have one important message: Sexual violence is one of the most heinous crimes with devastating consequences that echo across generations. Sexual Violence used as a tactic of terrorism, as a tactic of war, is intended to destabilize, to instill fear, to humiliate, to dehumanize not only the victims, but also the families, the societies, the nation, or the perceived enemy. And it is the silence of survivors, who out of shame and stigma do not report, that makes sexual violence so potent and cheap and effective: Cheap because perpetrators are under the belief that victims will not report and they will walk free in total impunity, and effective because they do shatter lives and livelihoods of the victims, their families, and societies.”
She stressed, “I have a message for survivors, I have a message for families of victims, and another message for witnesses: Please come forward, please break your silence because your silence will be the license of those perpetrators, and would-be perpetrators, to continue to do these heinous crimes. There's no place in the 21st-century battlefields for such crimes. My team and I, we are here to listen to you in all safety and confidentiality. I'm here for a week, I'm prepared to meet you in a safe and enabling environment and to listen to your stories, the world needs to know what really happened on 7th October. The stigma should not be on you. The stigma, the shame, is on the perpetrators. And you have to join us in shifting the stigma and the shame on the perpetrators.”
She concluded, “I just want to say that survivors and victims, we owe you more than solidarity. We really want to ensure that you have justice so that we put an end to this to this heinous act.”
The First Lady and Under-Secretary then went on to meet a range of leading Israeli civil society, legal, and medical experts in the field of women's rights. The meeting was also attended by Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, and representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.