Posted By admin on July 19, 2024
Early in the morning of October 7, 2023, Sagi Shifroni, 41, like many Israelis living near the Gaza Strip that day, was awakened by sirens. When the attack on Kibbutz Beeri began, he dashed in his sleepwear with his 5-year-old daughter to his homes safe room or mamad. His wife years earlier had persuaded him to remove the doors outside handle, so when Palestinian fighters broke into his house at about 11 a.m., they were unable to open the safe room door. Shifroni told Human Rights Watch:
I heard glass breaking and a few seconds later I heard shots fired at the door of the safe room. The door was not bulletproof, so the bullets came through. The whole room filled with the smell of gunpowder and broken cement. My daughter asked me if they were trying to kill us and I told her, Yes, but they wont manage. They tried to knock the door down for a few minutes but couldnt. They tried to shoot the hinges.
Shifroni said smoke started seeping through the door:
It was pretty clear that we couldnt stay here. If we stayed, we would be dead. At this point I decided to get out, it was more like an instinct. I opened the door of the safe room a bit and saw the whole house was on fire, so I turned to the window and opened it. I saw that the whole patio area outside was also on fire.
Shifroni smashed the window glass and pushed the metal shutters open. He wrapped his daughter in a blanket and told her to hold a pillow to her nose and mouth and breathe through it. Then he jumped out, holding her in his arms. His arms, shoulders, back, and face got severely burned. Only at midnight was he able to get to a hospital to treat his burns.
On the morning of October 7, Palestinian armed groups carried out numerous coordinated attacks including on civilian residences and gatherings and on Israeli military bases in the so-called Gaza Envelope, the populated area of southern Israel bordering the Gaza Strip. The armed groups attacked at least 19 kibbutzim and five moshavim (cooperative communities), the cities of Sderot and Ofakim, two music festivals, and a beach party. Community security called kitot konenut, or rapid response teams, and local police tried to resist the attackers until Israeli military forces arrived, often several hours after the assault had begun. The fighting lasted much of that day and, in some cases, longer.
The assault took place on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, when many soldiers were on leave. Palestinian armed groups began the assault with barrages of indiscriminate rockets and projectiles toward Israel. Fighters breached the physical barrier separating Gaza and Israel and then attacked nearby communities. Early in the attacks, the fighters disrupted and destroyed communications and surveillance equipment, leaving Israeli forces unable to develop an accurate picture of the situation.
The largest number of deaths occurred during the attack on the Supernova Music Festival, where at least 364 civilians were killed. Across many attack sites, fighters fired directly at civilians, often at close range, as they tried to flee, and at people who happened to be driving vehicles in the area. They hurled grenades and shot into safe rooms and other shelters and fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at homes. They set some houses on fire, burning and suffocating people to death, and forcing out others who they then captured or killed. They took hundreds hostage for transfer to Gaza or summarily killed them.
Agence France-Presse (AFP), which cross-referenced numerous data sources to verify the number of people killed, has assessed that 815 of a total of 1,195 people killed were civilians, including 79 foreign nationals. Among them were at least 282 women and 36 children. The Palestinian armed groups took hostage 251 civilians and Israeli security forces personnel and brought them back to Gaza following the attack. Those abducted either remain as hostages in Gaza, have been released, or have been killed or died in the ensuing fighting. These are included in the overall death toll.
National and international media outlets detailed many of the atrocities that took place on October 7. Some reports minimized the extent of the abuses, while others included allegations of abuses that were later proven incorrect.
Hamas, the Palestinian movement that hasgoverned the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007, stated that its armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the Qassam Brigades), led the assault on October 7. Survivor accounts and publicly available digital material from that day show that many of the fighters wore a combination of black or green uniforms or camouflage, some of which resembled Israeli military uniforms. Some wore distinctive headbands or insignia that identified them as members of Hamas or another armed group. Other armed group members wore civilian attire, although some may have been civilians from Gaza who joined the assault.
Most of the victims of the attacks were Jewish Israelis. However, fighters also killed, wounded, or took hostage Israeli dual nationals, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians from Gaza, and foreign workers, including Chinese, Filipino, Nepali, Sri Lankan and Thai nationals, and at least one national each from Cambodia, Canada, Eritrea, Germany, Mexico, Sudan, Tanzania, and the United Kingdom.
This report aims to capture the nature and extent of violations of international humanitarian law, known as the laws of war, and serious international crimes committed by Palestinian armed groups across numerous attack sites on October 7. The report also examines the role of different Palestinian armed groups involved, and their coordination before and during the attacks.
Human Rights Watch has extensively reported elsewhere on violations of the laws of war by Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza and on grave human rights abuses and conditions in Gaza, including since October 7.
Human Rights Watch conducted research in October and November 2023 in Israel, and remote research through June 2024. The research included interviews in person and remotely with 144 people including: 94 survivors of the October 7 attacks; family members of survivors, hostages and those killed; first responders who collected human remains from the attack sites; medical experts who examined the human remains and provided forensic advice to the Israeli authorities; officials from the municipalities affected by the attacks; journalists who visited the attack sites after Israeli forces secured the areas; analysts of Palestinian political and armed groups; and international investigators. Human Rights Watch verified over 280 photographs and videos posted on social media platforms or shared directly with Human Rights Watch, including those recorded by fighters body cameras, cellphone cameras, dashboard cameras, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras from the attack sites. Human Rights Watch also examined satellite images and analyzed dozens of audio recordings, most shared on armed groups Telegram channels.
This report details numerous incidents of violations of international humanitarian lawthe laws of warby Palestinian armed groups on October 7, 2023; it does not include violations since then. These include deliberate and indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects; willful killing of persons in custody; cruel and other inhumane treatment; sexual and gender-based violence; hostage taking; mutilation and despoiling (robbing) of bodies; use of human shields; and pillage and looting.
International humanitarian law recognizes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as an ongoing armed conflict. The hostilities between Israel and Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups are governed by international humanitarian law for non-international armed conflicts, which are rooted in international treaty law, most notably Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and customary international humanitarian law. These rules concern the methods and means of combat and fundamental protections for civilians and for combatants no longer participating in hostilities and apply to both states and non-state armed groups.
The foremost principle of international humanitarian law is that parties to a conflict must distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. Civilians may never be the target of attack. Attacks that deliberately target civilians or fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians, or that would cause disproportionate harm to the civilian population compared to the anticipated military gain, are prohibited.
Members of the organized fighting forces of a non-state party may be targeted during an armed conflict. There is no requirement that members of non-state armed groups wear uniforms or other identifying insignia.
Civilians lose their immunity from attack when and only for such time as they are directly participating in hostilities. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Interpretive Guidance on Direct or Participation in Hostilities provides that civilians who participate in individual self-defense are not directly participating in hostilities. That is, civilians who use necessary and proportionate force to defend themselves against unlawful attack do not become lawful military targets. Otherwise, states the Guidance, this would have the absurd consequence of legitimizing a previously unlawful attack.
Common Article 3 provides a number of fundamental protections for civilians and captured or incapacitated combatants. Violence against such personsnotably murder, cruel treatment, and tortureis prohibited, as well as outrages against their personal dignity and degrading or humiliating treatment, and the taking of hostages.
Serious violations of the laws of war that are committed with criminal intentdeliberately or recklesslyare war crimes. War crimes, listed in the grave breaches provisions of the Geneva Conventions and as customary law, include a wide array of offenses, including deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks harming civilians and civilian objects, torture and other ill-treatment, hostage-taking, and using human shields, among others. Individuals also may be held criminally liable for attempting to commit a war crime, as well as assisting in, facilitating, aiding, or abetting a war crime.
Certain crimes, such as murder, can amount to crimes against humanity, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines such an attack as a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts listed as crimes against humanity, pursuant to or in furtherance of state or organizational policy to commit such an attackthat is, the multiple criminal acts committed. Such a policy includes the state or organization actively promoting or encouraging such an attack, or in certain situations, its deliberate failure to take action.
Criminal responsibility may fall on persons responsible for war crimes or crimes against humanity, including those planning or instigating or assisting the commission of the crimes. In addition, commanders and civilian leaders may be prosecuted for war crimes or crimes against humanity as a matter of command responsibility when they knew or should have known about the commission of war crimes or crimes against humanity by persons within their chain of command and took insufficient measures to prevent them or punish those responsible.
States have an obligation to investigate and fairly prosecute individuals within their territory implicated in war crimes or crimes against humanity.
The laws of war prohibit deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the killing of civilians or captured combatants in custody, which are war crimes.
Palestinian fighters repeatedly attacked civilians and summarily executed individuals in their custody. The killings of civilians appear planned because of the many similarities in how killings took place across the attack sites: the armed groups directed many of their attacks at residential areas, fighters began to shoot civilians immediately after the assault began at 6:30 a.m., and the armed groups audio recordings and videos of the assault posted on their Telegram channels were indicative of a modus operandi. The Hamas leadership issued some statements after the assault saying its fighters had been instructed to spare women, children and older people, something contradicted by events. Some statements also made no mention of men who, if civilians, are also protected from attack.
Fighters also often extensively damaged peoples property, including by smashing and vandalizing, as well as by burning some buildings to the ground, putting civilians inside at grave risk.
Palestinian fighters committed acts of torture and ill-treatment against individuals they had captured, including those being taken as hostages. Committing torture and other ill-treatment is a violation of the laws of war and a war crime.
Verified videos show fighters hitting and kicking those they took into custody. In one video, a fighter is dragging a woman by the hair. Another depicts a female hostage with visible injuries being pulled out of the trunk compartment of a vehicle by a fighter who drags her by her hair and, together with another man, forces her as she resists into the vehicles back seat. One verified video posted to the South First Responders Telegram channel shows men wearing Qassam Brigades headbands taking a man from a bomb shelter at a bus stop near Kissufim. Fighters direct the man toward a car parked next to the bus stop and one hits the man repeatedly with the butt of a rifle. A second fighter approaches with zip ties and proceeds to kick the man twice in the head before another fighter gets him to stop.
Rape and other severe forms of sexual violence are crimes under international law. Acts of sexual and gender-based violence may also constitute the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity. Human Rights Watch found evidence of acts of sexual and gender-based violence by fighters including forced nudity, and the posting without consent of sexualized images on social media. Human Rights Watch was not able to gather verifiable information through interviews with survivors of or witnesses to rape during the assault on October 7. Human Rights Watch requested access to information on sexual and gender-based violence in the possession of the Israeli government, but this request was not granted.
The office of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict visited Israel on the invitation of the government. The team interviewed people who reported witnessing rape and other sexual violence, concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the October 7 attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel (UN Commission of Inquiry) conducted an investigation into crimes including those committed during the October 7 assault. In the commissions June 2024 report it wrote that it had documented cases indicative of sexual violence perpetrated against women and men in and around the Nova festival site, as well as the Nahal Oz military outpost and several kibbutzim, including Kfar Aza, Reim and Nir Oz,[6] and found indications that members of the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed gender-based violence (GBV) in several locations in southern Israel on 7 October.
The extent to which acts of sexual and gender-based violence were committed during the October 7 assault will likely never be fully known: many victims may have been killed; stigma and trauma often deter survivors from reporting; and Israeli security forces and other responders largely did not collect relevant forensic evidence from the attack sites or the recovered bodies.
Hostage-taking has been defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross as the seizure, detention or otherwise holding of a person (the hostage) accompanied by the threat to kill, injure or continue to detain that person in order to compel a third party to do or to abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release, safety or well-being of the hostage. Hostages can include civilians and captured military personnel. Hostage-taking is a violation of the laws of war and a war crime.
The Hamas leadership has said that taking hostages was core to their assault plans. The Qassam Brigades and other armed groups took 251 people hostage on October 7, including 40 who were taken from the Supernova Music Festival, and 39 children. As of July 1, 116 hostages were still in Gaza, at least 42 of them dead.
The Qassam Brigades and other armed groups have released multiple videos showing hostages asking to be released and demanding action from the Israeli government to secure their release. The broadcast of these videos of people in captivity are forms of inhumane treatment that constitute the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity.
Pillage has been defined as the forcible taking of private property. Pillage, as well as destruction of property without military justification, are war crimes.
Palestinian fighters and unarmed people, some of whom may have been civilians from Gaza, stole from homes during the October 7 assault. In some cases, they demanded money and other possessions from civilians sheltering inside their houses.
Human Rights Watch has found that the Palestinian armed groups involved in the assault on October 7 committed a widespread attack directed against a civilian population, according to the definition required for crimes against humanity. This is based on the numerous civilian sites that were targeted for the commission of crimes. The attack directed against the civilian population was also systematic, based on the planning that went into the crimes. Human Rights Watch has further found that the criminal acts of the killing of civilians and the taking of 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 solely by the actions of unaffiliated Palestinians from Gaza, and as such there is strong evidence of an organizational policy to commit multiple acts of crimes against humanity.
Given, therefore that on October 7, 2023, there was an attack directed against a civilian population and that the murder of civilians and the taking of hostagesimprisonment in violation of fundamental rules of international lawwere part of it, these amount to crimes against humanity.
Based on the evidence set out in this report, Human Rights Watch calls for the investigation of other crimes against humanity, including persecution against any identifiable group on racial, national, ethnic or religious grounds; rape or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; and extermination. These would amount to crimes against humanity if criminal acts meeting the respective definitions of the crimes were committed, and these crimes were committed as part of the attack directed against a civilian population.
Evidence collected and analyzed by Human Rights Watch, including statements by witnesses, statements by Hamas officials, and verified video and social media content, demonstrates that the October 7 assault was organized and planned well in advance. The consistent patterns of behavior of the fighters during the attacks and their armaments, vehicles and attire, also indicated a high degree of planning and organization.
Human Rights Watch was able to confirm the participation of various Palestinians armed groups based on headbands the fighters wore to indicate their group affiliation and based on posts that armed groups issued on their Telegram channels claiming responsibility for their actions, including acts of abuse.
Human Rights Watch found strong evidence of the participation of at least five Palestinian armed groups from Gaza in the attacks: Hamass armed wing, the Qassam Brigades; the Palestinian Islamic Jihads armed wing, the Quds Brigades; the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestines armed wing, the National Resistance Brigades or Omar al-Qasim Forces; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestines armed wing, the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades; and the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, formerly linked to the Fatah political faction.
These groups participation was largely confirmed through a detailed analysis of the attackers visible in videos taken during the attacks, including CCTV and body camera footage, some wearing colored headbands linked to specific armed groups, as well as an identification of the Telegram social media channels belonging to specific armed groups on which the footage of abuse was posted, with captions claiming responsibility for the acts shown.
All of these groups were members of a Joint Operations Room in Gaza that during escalations in hostilities engage in training, planning and carrying out armed operations against Israel.
The Qassam Brigades led the attack and was the most active armed group on October 7. The group carried out 10 of the 13 breaches of the physical barrier separating Gaza and Israel that Human Rights Watch documented. Their presence is visible in at least 14 different locations across southern Israel, where verified videos show the Qassam Brigades fighters taking hostages and killing civilians and members of the Israeli security forces.
The footage analyzed also shows that the Qassam Brigades and the other armed groups involved in the assault coordinated with, and integrated into it, some individuals who appear to be Palestinian civilians from Gaza who committed abuses in conjunction with these forces.
Hamas responded on April 14, 2024 with a nine-page letter that is attached as an annex and cited throughout this report to questions submitted by Human Rights Watch on February 28. The main assertions made in the letter are that: its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, planned the operation, which it called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and led the October 7 assault; Hamas is committed to respecting international and human rights law; the Qassam Brigades was clear in directing its members and fighters not to target civilians; and it has a military doctrine not to target civilians.
It blamed unaffiliated Palestinians from Gaza, who it said crossed through the breached border opportunistically, for committing some of the abuses: People rushed out, along with Palestinian groups that were not participating in the military operation, resulting in chaos in the field and, thus, changing the plan to conduct an operation against military targets. It added that after the initial, planned attack occurred, the subsequent stage, in which Gaza residents and armed forces rushed in without coordination with Hamas, led to many mistakes.
Several Hamas leaders have spoken publicly about the October 7 assault, including praising the operation overall that day but distancing the group from abuses committed. An English-language document titled Our Narrative... Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, issued by the Hamas Media Office on January 21, 2024, states that the attacks only targeted Israeli military sites and fighters avoided harming civilians, and cites chaos on the breached fence areas.
Human Rights Watch has found that based on the information presented in this report, the Hamas claim that on October 7 its forces did not seek to harm Israeli civilians is falserather, it was part of the plan from the outset. Accounts from survivors along with photographs and verified videos from the attacks show Palestinian fighters seeking out civilians and killing them across the attack sites from the first moments that the assault began, indicating that the intentional killing and hostage-taking of civilians was planned and highly coordinated.
A number of the civilian casualties on October 7 occurred during the fighting between Israeli armed forces and Palestinian fighters. Some of those killed and injured appear to have been killed or injured while in the custody of Palestinian forces, who were holding them as hostages.
There were ongoing government probes into the role the Israeli armed forces played in contributing to the civilian death toll at the time of writing.
Israeli media reports indicate that Israeli forces responding to the assault injured or killed some civilians during attacks on Palestinian fighters in and around the fences separating Gaza and Israel. In one case that the Israeli military investigated, it concluded that its forces killed an Israeli civilian who had been taken hostage near the Gaza and Israel border.
Human Rights Watch is aware of at least two incidents in which Palestinian fighters appear to have used civilians as human shields. Using human shields is a violation of the laws of war and a war crime.
The scale and intensity of the Palestinian armed group attacks and the subsequent fighting, the taking of scores of hostages to Gaza, and the number of bodies and wounded dispersed across a large area complicated the task for Israeli authorities of promptly recovering and identifying the victims. The initial number of civilians pronounced as killed was later lowered, which Israeli authorities attribute to the confusion in identifying the recovered human remains and determining whether they were victims or attackers.
On October 7, Israeli authorities did not prioritize the gathering of forensic evidence. This has made it more difficult to know with precision the scale and nature of the abuses committed. Members of ZAKA, an umbrella group of voluntary community emergency response teams in Israel, arrived at sites soon after the attacks in some cases as they were ongoing and the military had arrived. ZAKA members collected many of the bodies from the attack sites. Their priority was to, in accordance with Jewish law, preserve Jewish human remains, identify the dead, and allow families to bury their loved ones quickly and with dignity in accordance with Jewish law. Remains were placed in body bags and transported to the Shura Military Base, after which the authorities handed them over to the families for burial.
Within days of the Palestinian armed groups attacks, Israeli authorities cut off essential services, including water and electricity, to Gazas population and blocked the entry of all but a trickle of fuel and humanitarian aid, acts that amount to war crimes. Immediately after the attacks in southern Israel, Israeli forces began an intense aerial bombardment and a later ground incursion, which have continued until the present, reducing large parts of Gaza to rubble. Israeli forces have been responsible for an undetermined number of unlawfully indiscriminate attacks and displaced the vast majority of Gazas population. More than 37,900 Palestinians, most of them civilians were killed between October 7 and July 1, according to Gazas Health Ministry. The October 7 assault cannot justify the atrocities and war crimes committed by Israeli forces in Gaza, just as no act, policy or crime attributable to Israeli authorities can justify the unlawful killing, ill-treatment, hostage-taking, and other crimes that the Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian armed groups carried out in Israel on October 7.
For the survivors of the October 7 attacks, their communities remain in tatters. Rotem Holin from Kfar Aza, who had moved with her two young children to a hotel repurposed as a temporary shelter, described the impact of the attack on her kibbutz in late October:
We lived through hell and 32 hours of not knowing whats happening to our families and friends and neighbors. Now we will need to build ourselves new homes- there is nothing left. I cant even think of living near Gaza because I cant imagine living through this again. We never thought it would happen. Every person who you see [in the hotel] is broken. They have all probably lost one of their best friends or a family member. Everyone is going from funeral to funeral, and looking at name after name of people killed, and name after name of people taken to Gaza. Our brains havent even fully processed this loss. We have to tell our kids that they have friends and teachers who are never coming back. My son recently told me that the father of one of his friends was shot dead, and another friends mother, the same.
All parties to the armed conflict in Gaza and Israel should fully abide by international humanitarian law. The Palestinian armed groups in Gaza should immediately and unconditionally release civilians held hostage. They should take appropriate disciplinary measures against armed group members responsible for war crimes, and should transfer for prosecution any individuals facing warrants from the ICC.
Turkey, Iran, Qatar and other countries that have relations with Hamas, its armed wing, and the other armed groups involved in the assault should seek the immediate release of the remaining civilian hostages. Countries providing arms to the Palestinian armed groups who participated in the assault, including Iran, should suspend arms transfers so long as these groups continue to commit violations of the laws of war that go unpunished.
To facilitate independent documentation of abuses by all parties, Israeli and Palestinian authorities and armed groups should cooperate with and provide unhindered access to all of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the UN Commission of Inquiry; the ICC; relevant UN special procedures; and independent human rights organizations.
Since the October 7 assault and Israels ongoing military operations in Gaza, Human Rights Watch has issued numerous reports containing recommendations to the Israeli authorities and the international community. The recommendations included in this report stem from Human Rights Watchs research into the October 7 assault and violations of international law.
Publish a complete list of all the people being held hostage and bodies they are withholding;
Immediately release all civilians held hostage;
So long as they hold hostages, ensure that all hostages are treated humanely; held in humane conditions, with access to adequate medical care, food, and shelter; and are allowed to communicate privately with their families and receive visits from an impartial humanitarian agency;
Ensure that any hostages who are particularly at risk, including older people, any survivors of sexual violence, and those injured or otherwise requiring medical treatment, are immediately given access to adequate and appropriate treatment and services, and are prioritized for release to facilitate their access to medical and psychosocial support services and mental health care;
Immediately cease unlawful attacks, including indiscriminate attacks and targeted attacks against civilians, including the launching of unguided rockets and projectiles toward Israeli population centers;
Take appropriate disciplinary actions against members responsible for ordering or carrying out serious violations of international law;
Cooperate with international authorities, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), UN Commission of Inquiry, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other relevant UN mechanisms and experts, including in order to ensure justice and reparations for victims for crimes committed during the October 7 assault;
Provide prompt and appropriate compensation to victims and their families for deaths, injuries, acts of sexual violence, and property damage resulting from unlawful attacks.
Publicly call on all groups holding civilian hostages in Gaza to release them;
Conduct transparent, credible, and impartial investigations into credible allegations of laws-of-war violations committed by persons under their jurisdiction, including those violations detailed in this report, and prosecute in fair, transparent proceedings, those credibly implicated in the abuses at all levels;
Make public the findings of the investigations including into the intended military targets of attacks, if any, that resulted in civilian casualties, and attacks that directly or indirectly damaged civilian infrastructure and other protected objects;
Cooperate with international authorities, including the ICC, UN Commission of Inquiry, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other relevant UN mechanisms and experts, including in order to ensure justice and reparations for victims for crimes committed during the October 7 attacks, including for acts of sexual and gender-based violence;
Do not cooperate or coordinate with or support armed groups credibly found to perpetrate systematic abuses against civilians; and in particular the Qassam Brigades, Quds Brigades, National Resistance Brigades or Omar al-Qasim Forces, Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, and Aqsa Martyrs Brigades;
Publicly condemn all targeted, indiscriminate and otherwise unlawful attacks against civilians.
Ensure that all investigations into abuses committed on October 7, particularly sexual and gender-based violence, are conducted in a manner that is victim-centered, fully informed by best practices, respects victims and their families autonomy and privacy, and connects survivors with comprehensive support services and assistance;
Share with international bodies including the ICC, UN Commission of Inquiry, and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights any evidence collected on abuses committed by Palestinian armed groups linked to the October 7 attacks, in line with victims rights including the right to privacy, for the purpose of pursuing accountability;
Provide the ICC, UN Commission of Inquiry, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, other relevant UN mechanisms and experts, and independent human rights organizations with immediate cooperation and unhindered access to all of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory;
Continue to ensure that any survivor of the October 7 assault or of subsequent abuses committed while being held hostage, and in particular children and any survivor of sexual and gender-based violence, has immediate and ongoing access to comprehensive and appropriate services including psychosocial support, health care, and evidence collection and preservation, and that services are delivered in a survivor-centered and confidential manner that respects their autonomy and privacy;
Treat all Palestinians detained on suspicion of participating in the October 7 attacks in accordance with humanitarian and human rights law including by refraining from any form of ill treatment during interrogation, providing families with up-to-date information on their relatives location while in custody and allowing them to communicate directly, and granting them all due process guarantees.
Demand unimpeded access throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the ICC, UN Commission of Inquiry, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, other relevant UN mechanisms and experts, and independent human rights organizations investigating the events of October 7 and subsequent hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.
Impose or keep in place targeted sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans, against officials and entities responsible for ongoing grave abuses, while ensuring that these measures do not harm civilians and nongovernmental organizations performing internationally protected activities in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. All those targeted with sanctions should have the opportunity to challenge such decisions in fair, prompt proceedings by independent courts and judges;
Suspend arms and military assistance to the Palestinian armed groups credibly implicated in grave abuses, so long as they systematically commit abuses amounting to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity with impunity;
Investigate and prosecute those credibly implicated in international crimes committed as part of the October 7 assault, under the principle of universal jurisdiction and in fair, transparent proceedings in accordance with international due process standards;
Support UN investigations into the October 7 assault and urge that the armed Palestinian armed groups involved and Israel cooperate with the ICC, UN Commission of Inquiry, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, other relevant UN mechanisms and experts, and independent human rights organizations;
Protect the ICCs independence and publicly condemn efforts to intimidate or interfere with the courts work, its officials, and those cooperating with the institution;
Express support for any arrest warrants the ICC may issue, commit to working to ensure the execution of such warrants, and press Palestinian and Israeli authorities to cooperate with the court;
Support independent justice mechanisms;
Demand unimpeded access throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory for UN and international justice mechanisms and independent human rights investigators into the events of October 7 and the subsequent hostilities between Israeli force and Palestinian armed groups.
Use influence over Palestinian armed groups that hold civilian hostages to push for their immediate and unconditional release.
Use influence over Palestinian armed groups that participated in the October 7 assault and other attacks on civilians to respect international humanitarian law, in particular Common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, as per their obligations under Common Article 1.
Human Rights Watch interviewed 144 people for this report, most in person in Israel in October and November 2023. Other people were interviewed remotely between October 2023 and June 2024. This includes 94 survivors and witnesses from the October 7 assault. Human Rights Watch also spoke to seven family members of victims and survivors, some of whom went to the attack sites during evacuations or immediately afterward.
Human Rights Watch spoke to two medical experts hired by the Israeli government to examine the remains collected by ZAKA (see below) and provide forensic advice. We also interviewed 17 service providers, investigators, and advocates who were collecting information about acts of gender-based violence reported to have been committed during the attacks.
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I Cant Erase All the Blood from My Mind: Palestinian Armed Groups October 7 Assault on Israel - Human Rights Watch
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