Professor Anne Bayefsky, the Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of Human Rights Voices, spoke to Arutz Sheva - Israel National News about the release of a report by Human Rights Watch today detailing the war crimes committed by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 massacre.
Professor Bayefsky is highly critical of the Human Rights Watch report and its significant omissions. "In one of the most despicable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel reports ever produced by Human Rights Watch, the NGO refuses to admit that Palestinians engaged in systematic sexualized torture and rape of Jewish women and girls on October 7th."
She notes, "At no point in its 252-page publication does the organization refer to Hamas's own grotesque video evidence of these sexual atrocities. Somehow, this enormously well-financed human rights investigatory group 'did not document any cases of rape' and claimed that it 'was not able to gather verifiable information' of rapes. On the contrary, Human Rights Watch chose to publicize subsequent Hamas propaganda that 'Hamas officials have denied that their fighters committed acts of sexual violence.' To this fraudulent human rights NGO, #MeTooUnlessUrAJew."
A spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch said on Monday ahead of the release of the report, “Palestinian armed groups committed a widespread attack directed against the civilian population, meeting the definition required for crimes against humanity."
The spokeswoman added, “We have further found that the killing of civilians and taking hostages were all central aims of the planned attack, and not actions that occurred as an afterthought or as a plan gone awry, or as isolated acts, for example, perpetrated by unaffiliated Palestinians from Gaza."
Human Rights Watch refused to admit the videotaped confessions of terrorists captured by Israel as evidence, claiming that such videos have “inherent unreliability.”
NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg has dismissed the Human Rights Watch report on Hamas war crimes as "cynical tokenism" that only serves to provide the organization with an illusion of balance so it can continue to falsely accuse the State of Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity.