Gary Willig is a member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.
After five months, the United Nations finally admitted that Hamas terrorists committed large-scale acts of rape and sexual violence on October 7.
Well, mostly. The report released by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten on Monday states that after she and other UN officials visited Israel in January and were exposed to the mountain of evidence, there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas used sexual violence while committing the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Since the victims were mostly Jews, they will have to settle for “it probably happened” rather than “it definitely happened.”
This is a far cry from the rush to believe every accusation leveled against Israel, no matter how spurious or how obviously untrue they are. And this report only occurred because of massive pressure on the UN to do the right thing for once.
Sadly, this is probably the end of it, the limit of how far the UN will be willing to go for the Jewish victims. The General Assembly is so anti-Israel that it is more likely to pass a resolution endorsing the mass rape of Jewish women than condemning it, and Hamas will be defended by Russia and China at the Security Council, which still has not condemned the October 7th massacre.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will likely do his best to ignore the report’s existence. If, after enough badgering, he does acknowledge it, we can expect any condemnation to include an attempt to contextualize the mass rapes from the man who claimed that October 7 “did not occur in a vacuum.”
What’s even worse is that even the report’s warning that these atrocities are ongoing will result in no action. As the report states, there is every reason to fear that the hostages who were kidnapped on October 7 and continue to be held captive in Gaza are being subjected to sexual violence on a regular basis. But aside from some meaningless lip service, there will be no resulting push to save the hostages from this fate.
No. Instead, the focus of Guterres and the rest of the UN will be on saving their captors and tormentors, on protecting the rapists and butchers of Hamas. Reaching a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power and free to commit mass murder and mass rape again is their overriding goal.
In a sane (not to mention moral) world, Hamas would be under pressure from the entire world to unconditionally surrender, release every hostage, and disband. This would not only save the hostages, but save the civilians of Gaza from the ravages of war and from the brutal subjugation of Hamas. But antisemitism drives insanity and perverts and inverts morality.
The sad truth is that Jewish and Israeli victims do not matter. To the UN and even to many international women’s rights groups, the very fact that they are Jewish or Zionist makes them on some level deserving of any crime committed against them. Like the Red Cross patting itself on the back for doing nothing more than serving as a glorified Uber driver for the hostages who have been released after not even attempting to visit or care for the hostages in captivity, they may say that they have gone above and beyond by acknowledging reality many months too late when they have in fact not come close to doing the bare minimum basic human decency requires.
This is why Israel must continue to fight until victory. Israel must ignore the pressure from those who refuse to pressure Hamas. The Jewish State must rescue the Jewish hostages and protect the Jewish people, because the world and the UN sure as hell won’t.