Sexual violence has a long and well-documented history in warfare and in Jewish history specifically, including its use in pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century and in atrocities committed against Jewish women during the Holocaust. Despite this long history, when the postwar international human rights regime was established in the wake of the Holocaust, rape and gender-based violence went largely unprosecuted.

The unjustifiable blindness to the suffering of women and girls who bore the scars of the war’s legacy of sexual violence created a vacuum of accountability — a vast, systematic gap that prevented countless women, girls and families from gaining the justice and legal closure they deserved. Into this chasm entered a movement of feminists, legal scholars and human rights advocates who built the legal scaffolding needed to address the gap. They gave this long-ignored reality a name — conflict-related sexual violence — and created legal frameworks to prosecute it under international law. They fought to establish that CRSV is not an inevitable byproduct of war, but a severe war crime that demands recognition and accountability.

In the ensuing decades, international law and its institutions evolved slowly. It was only during the 1990s, at the two special tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, that CRSV was recognized as a war crime and as a crime against humanity. Since then, the global community has made profound strides in the decades-long struggle to make wartime sexual violence visible and legally actionable. CRSV was recognized as a stand-alone crime in the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, and the U.N. Security Council adopted a range of resolutions within its Women Peace and Security Framework to create a monitoring and oversight mechanism to facilitate the prevention, protection and prosecution of these crimes. These moments signified real progress, securing justice for victims and setting legal precedents needed to prosecute future crimes.

And then came Oct. 7, 2023, and the horrific sexual violence deliberately perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis, both on that day and during the hostages’ captivity. 

Israeli CRSV victims have been, and continue to be, subjected to a cruel, widespread denialism. Yet the fact that Hamas perpetrated sexual violence against Israelis has been widely recognized among experts. Following a mission by the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative, Pramilla Patten, the U.N. acknowledged “clear and convincing information that some hostages taken to Gaza were subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence during their time in captivity,” and found “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred during the attacks of 7 October 2023 in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape.”

Yet despite this recognition, Hamas’ crimes are stress-testing existing legal CRSV frameworks. As we commemorate three years since Oct. 7, the key question is no longer only whether the sexual violence is recognized, but rather, whether the international legal and human rights systems we have today can translate recognition into accountability and justice. 

This week, our organizations — the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Project on Gender, Culture Religion and the Law and the Dinah Project at the Rackman Center, Bar-Ilan University — are co-convening a conference at Brandeis University to attempt to answer a crucial question: What can the events of Oct. 7 teach us about the future of accountability for conflict-related sexual violence, both in Israel and around the world?

Oct. 7 exposed profound challenges that existing legal mechanisms are ill-suited to address. First, most of the victims of CRSV on Oct. 7 were murdered either during or right after the sexual assaults, making first-person testimony impossible in many cases. Those who were assaulted and survived were left profoundly traumatized, and many have been either unable or unwilling to share the details of their ordeals. Many survivors also feel pressure to remain silent — shame, guilt, fear of stigma and fear of being re-traumatized in court may prevent them from opening up about their experiences. For example, one survivor from the Nova music festival was only able to recount her experience to the Dinah Project team 17 months after the attack took place.

Furthermore, the places where these atrocities took place weren’t ordinary crime scenes; they were war zones. This made the forensic evidence usually needed for a criminal conviction difficult to gather. Bodies were often recovered under fire, which made it impossible to keep an accurate count of victims who showed signs of sexual violence. Additionally, Hamas terrorists deliberately tried to destroy both the crime scenes and the victims’ bodies, burning many sites and bodies.

Israeli institutions were also unprepared for sexual violence on this scale, due to a lack of awareness among leaders that sexual crimes could actually be part of a terror attack; as a result, there were no emergency protocols, specialized training or law enforcement capacity to investigate CRSV. The conventional approach to evaluating evidence, which treats direct victim testimony as the only valid proof, has been a major challenge to securing justice. The tendency for prosecutors to examine each incident on its own and require a direct link between a specific perpetrator, victim and act further hampers prosecution.

These obstacles underscore the urgent need for legal mechanisms capable of establishing responsibility and ensuring justice, especially under the most difficult of circumstances. The question is, given the aforementioned challenges, how can this be done?

We briefly present the following recommendations here, detailed more thoroughly in A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond, the 2025 book published by the Dinah Project (which is about to be published in its second edition).

First, relevant state and international institutions must recognize CRSV as a unique legal category requiring its own evidentiary paradigms, distinct from everyday sexual offenses. Furthermore, rather than maintain the current victim-centered evidentiary model, we must account for the systematic silencing of victims and use a variety of forms of admissible evidence, including eyewitness and earwitness testimonies, res gestae reports (i.e., contemporaneous utterances) and circumstantial evidence. 

Additionally, in cases of mass attacks motivated by genocidal intent, we must also apply joint criminal responsibility to all participants in the attack, rather than requiring direct links between individual perpetrators and specific acts and victims. We also must reflect community harm in evidentiary strategies to capture the broader social damage that CRSV inflicts. 

Finally, we must always maintain high standards of credibility while adapting evidentiary approaches, ensuring all evidence meets rigorous legal scrutiny.

The experience of Oct. 7 must lead us to strengthen the international framework for addressing CRSV and ensure that our institutions measure up to the values they were created to uphold. Doing so would not only honor the murdered and bring a degree of accountability to survivors, but also enable us to set precedents for addressing similar crimes that may take place in the future, both in Israel and around the world.

Lisa Fishbayn Joffe is the Shulamit Reinharz Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and a faculty affiliate in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.

Ruth Halperin-Kaddari is the founding director of The Rackman Center at Bar-Ilan University and a founding member of the Dinah Project. She is also co-author of the book A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond.