This month, the Dinah Project—an Israeli organization—published a new report widely described in Western media as a thorough look into sexual violence by Palestinian militant groups on October 7, 2023. The document, however, contains scant new evidence and largely aggregates existing reports, many of which have been discredited or called into question. Instead of marshaling new evidence, it argues that less should be needed: The report spends the bulk of its 80 pages presenting a legal argument for a lower evidentiary standard to prosecute Hamas for war crimes over the alleged systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
Prosecutors, the report argues, should not have to rely on the kind of evidence typically associated with prosecutions—witness or victim testimony, forensic reports and the like—but instead should be able to rely on “circumstantial evidence” and general deductions. And in order to find a pattern of systemic sexual violence, it should be sufficient to identify individual cases of such violence and read into them a systemic nature. Completing the circle, those individual cases need not hold up to the standards of typical prosecutions…..more
