By Nandita Bose
BOSTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden stated on Tuesday that Hamas had repeatedly raped girls and mutilated their our bodies throughout its Oct.7 assault on southern Israel, citing survivors and witnesses of the assaults.
Talking at a political fundraiser in Boston, Biden stated accounts of “unimaginable cruelty” had been shared over the previous few weeks.
“Reviews of girls raped — repeatedly raped — and their our bodies being mutilated whereas nonetheless alive, of girls’s corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as a lot ache and struggling on girls and women as attainable after which murdering them. It’s appalling,” Biden stated.
The president known as on worldwide organizations, civil society and people to sentence sexual violence “with out exception.”
Israeli police are investigating attainable sexual crimes by a few of the few hundred people who they arrested after the Oct. 7 assault. Israel’s justice ministry has stated “victims have been tortured, bodily abused, raped, burned alive, and dismembered.”
Hamas vigorously denies the allegations of sexual assault or mutilation by members of its armed wing on Oct. 7 or after that.
Israel held an occasion on the United Nations in New York on Monday centered on sexual violence in opposition to girls throughout the Oct. 7 assault. Israel has been crucial of the world physique’s response to the assaults.
“As a worldwide group we should reply to weaponized sexual violence, wherever it occurs, with absolute condemnation. There will be no justification and no excuses. Rape as a weapon of warfare is against the law in opposition to humanity,” former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advised the occasion in a pre-recorded video.
On Tuesday, Biden blamed Hamas for the collapse of a truce final week that had halted Israel’s retaliatory army marketing campaign in opposition to Gaza, saying the militant group’s “refusal to launch the remaining younger girls is what broke this deal”.
Israel and Hamas have accused one another of wrecking negotiations to increase the week-long pause in preventing, which resumed on Dec. 1.
Since then, Israeli forces have expanded their floor operations on Hamas-run Gaza and stormed its most important southern metropolis. Gaza well being officers say 16,248 individuals have been killed in Israel’s assaults.
Hamas fighters who rampaged via Israeli cities on Oct. 7 killed 1,200 individuals and seized 240 hostages, in keeping with Israel’s tally. Greater than 100 hostages have been freed throughout the truce.
Through the fundraiser, Biden stated: “Everybody nonetheless being held hostage by Hamas should be returned to their households instantly. We’re not going to cease.”
(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Boston and Michelle Nicholas on the UN; Modifying by Rami Ayyub and Rosalba O’Brien)