The Dinah Project
[WARNING: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS] The Dinah Project was established to achieve recognition and justice for victims and survivors of sexual violence during the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and for those taken hostage. This report represents the most comprehensive assessment to date of the sexual violence that occurred during and after the attack. It goes beyond documenting what happened to provide theoretical and practical legal frameworks for accountability and prosecution. Summary of findings and analysis by Andrew Fox:
The findings presented in this report point not only to the gravity of the crimes committed, but also to the urgent need for systemic, legal, and policy responses—both in Israel and globally.
According to the report, sexual violence by Hamas was neither isolated nor incidental; it was intentional, widespread, and systematic. The attacks on 7 October were coordinated to maximise terror and humiliation on Israeli civilians
Sexual atrocities were documented at at least six locations on 7 October: the Nova music festival, Route 232, Nahal Oz military base, and the communities of Re’im, Nir Oz, and Kfar Aza. In each of these places, Hamas terrorists used rape and sexual violence as part of their attack strategy, targeting both women and men. Most victims did not live to tell their stories; many were murdered during or after the assaults. Others remain too traumatised to speak. As the report notes, sexual violence in war is often a “perfect crime”. The perpetrators either kill their victims or rely on their silence, born of trauma and shame. This has made gathering evidence extraordinarily difficult, but not impossible.
Seventeen eyewitnesses described gang rapes, sexual mutilation, and victims left naked, bound, and brutalised.
Medical teams at the Shura morgue recorded genital injuries, including gunshot wounds, and signs of torture too graphic to describe.
Hamas’s own GoPro footage and intercepted communications captured moments of rape and sadistic boasting. Distinct patterns emerged: victims were raped, mutilated, executed, humiliated. The horror did not end on 7 October: in captivity, male and female hostages were groped, stripped, threatened with rape, and subjected to sexualised humiliation over weeks and months.
These acts were not random incidents by crazed individuals; they were integral to the operation's overall strategy. The terrorists were motivated by an extreme genocidal ideology that utterly dehumanised Jews, seeing Jewish women’s bodies as just another battlefield. By weaponising rape, they sought not only to kill, but to destroy the dignity and soul of a people. This was a war crime, systematically planned and approved, and it must be treated as such by the world.
Why were so many so keen to deny the rapes? Because acknowledging these atrocities would shatter their narrative. If they admitted Hamas terrorists brutally raped and mutilated Jews on 7 October, then they would have to face the true barbarity of that day and a barbarity that undermines any attempt to romanticise or justify Hamas’s actions. Acknowledging the truth would also humanise the Israeli victims in a way that some anti-Israel activists did not want. It is much easier for them to chant slogans when they convince themselves that stories of raped women are just propaganda.
Out of basic human decency and respect for the dead, Israel chose not to release the most graphic images and footage to the general public. Think about what that would entail: broadcasting pictures of Israeli women who had been raped, mutilated, and butchered. These are someone’s daughters, wives, and mothers.
Israeli officials rightly worried that publicising such images would be too graphic, too disrespectful to the dead and the survivors, trying to rebuild their lives, not to mention deeply traumatising for the wider public.
The Dinah Project report provides detailed descriptions and aggregated data that convey the scale and nature of the sexual violence without splashing explicit gore all over social media. It allows us to discuss the facts in a dignified manner, grounded in research and testimony
In the biblical story, Dinah was a woman who survived a horrific rape, and her brothers sought justice (albeit violently) against the perpetrators. Today, the Dinah Project carries on that legacy in a more enlightened way, through truth and law. Now that the truth is in the open, we must not let it be ignored.
The report concludes with a call to action:
This report demonstrates the existence of substantial evidence of sexual violence crimes committed during the October 7 attacks and in captivity, as part of a premeditated mass assault aimed at the destruction of the State of Israel and its people.
We call upon the Israeli prosecution authorities to ensure that sexual violence crimes are fully addressed through criminal charges. Prosecuting these crimes is not only a reflection of the significant evidence gathered, but a moral and legal imperative. It is essential for delivering justice to victims and the entire community, for acknowledging the historical and national dimensions of the sexual crimes committed on October 7, and for reflecting the role these crimes played in the overall course of the attack.
Based on the findings of this report, we urge the UN Secretary-General to immediately list Hamas among the entities designated in the UN’s annual report as using sexual violence as a weapon of war. The absence of such designation constitutes a distortion of justice, fails to uphold the UN’s commitment to victims, and sends a dangerous message that may inadvertently encourage the continued use of sexual violence in armed conflicts
Our work reveals that with the passage of time since the October 7 attack, new accounts and findings related to sexual violence continue to surface. As survivors and witnesses gradually process their trauma, more testimonies are being shared. This reinforces the importance of an additional international fact-finding mission…
The October 7 attack…underscores the need for tailored legal and evidentiary approaches to sexual violence in conflict, especially when such crimes are part of ideologically motivated campaigns of destruction.
Link to the Full Report: Dinah Project
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[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: Ron Dermer, Minister of Strategic Affairs (Two-Part Interview)
For a real-time update on the current situation in Israel and the broader Middle East, I highly recommend listening to Dan Senor’s most recent two-part podcast with Ron Dermer
[WATCH] The IDF announced that troops from the 188th Armored Brigade and the Golani Brigade, under the 36th Division, have completed the opening of the 15-kilometer-long “Magen Oz” Corridor in the Khan Yunis area of Gaza. The corridor, which runs east to west, is a key strategic objective aimed at dismantling Hamas infrastructure and defeating the group’s Khan Yunis Brigade, the IDF said.
According to Israeli journalist Doron Kadosh, the potential in creating this new area is:
A bargaining chip in negotiations - from now on, it is possible to argue not only about withdrawing from the Murg axis but also about withdrawing from the "Magen Oz" axis.
Possible expansion of the future "humanitarian city" - more territory that can accommodate more Gazan civilians in the future.
Israel/Middle East Related Articles
A Region Reordered - Perhaps by former Ambassador Michael Oren
…if there is anything I have learned from my time in Washington at meetings behind closed doors it's that there is another, strategically crucial, reason to keep the meeting low profile and to say little about it afterward. Likely discussed in the White House was nothing less than the total transformation of the Middle East.
…beyond a Gaza ceasefire, the key to the regional transformation remains America’s continued commitment to deter Iranian aggression. Though badly battered by Israel and the United States, Iran will certainly try to recover from Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer—first by sending armed bands across our northern border and soon by trying to rebuild Fordow.
Trump can preempt such aggression by determining the parameters that would allow Israel to hit the head of the snake and continuing to provide us the tools to do so.
Free for the first time in decades from Iranian rule, Lebanon can receive assurances from Trump that Hezbollah will never again threaten its sovereignty.
Trump can also guarantee Syria’s continued independence from Iran along with further relief from U.S. sanctions.
[REPORT] Illusions of Genocide: A Critical Study of the Israel-Gaza War (2023-2025) and the Pitfalls of Humanitarian Reporting by Danny Orbach, Jonathan Boxman, Yagil Henkin, Jonathan Braverman with Bar-Ilan University:
Conducted by a team of Israeli academics and legal experts, and published by Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, the study examines allegations of war crimes and genocide made against Israel during Operation Iron Swords. It concludes not only that these accusations lack evidentiary basis, but also that many of the data sources driving international outrage are methodologically compromised or manipulated.
1.A. The claims of starvation prior to March 2, 2025 were based on erroneous data, circular citations (creating a media “echo chamber”), and a failure to critically review sources. These claims are not based merely on ethical or legal interpretation of disputed data but rather continuously rely on empirically inaccurate information, unfulfilled predictions, and a failure to acknowledge errors, even after false data was debunked and withdrawn by those who introduced it.
In fact, throughout most of the war more foodstuffs were delivered into Gaza than prior to October 7, by a margin greater than any conceivable loss of Gazan agricultural production.
2.A. A central flaw in the body of research outlining accusations of severe and deliberate war crimes by Israel in Gaza is the complete omission of any discussion about Israel’s adversary in the conflict, namely Hamas, and its tactics.
2.B. Through a historical comparative analysis, we demonstrate that the war in Gaza represents one of the most complex military challenges ever faced by any Western army.
2.C. Hamas has used civilian homes, hospitals, and schools to store weapons, launch rockets, house combatants, and establish operational positions. Its operatives also wear civilian clothing to blend in with the population in areas designated as safe zones. Most notably, Hamas has focused on booby-trapping a vast number of buildings, leading to widespread devastation in the Gaza Strip—destruction that surpasses that typically seen in high-intensity urban warfare in other conflicts.
3.A. There is no evidence to suggest a systematic Israeli policy of targeting or massacring civilians.
3.D. It is important to emphasize that, throughout the Israeli-Gaza War, no credible forensic evidence has been provided to substantiate claims of close-range mass killings of civilians or executions of helpless noncombatants.
4.A. We have found no evidence to support claims of deliberate bombing of civilians by the IDF during the war, nor any indication of carpet bombing intended to inflict mass civilian casualties in Gaza.
4.B. One common claim is that the IDF uses a so-called “convertibility quota” for permissible collateral damage, such as a standard of 20 civilian deaths for every junior Hamas operative or 100 for a senior operative. However, this claim has never been substantiated.
5.A. Reports from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) are unreliable, and this data is inevitably tainted by the “illusion of certainty”—the unfounded assumption that a single existing source is inherently trustworthy.
5.B. By analyzing original Hamas documents, we demonstrate that since 2014, Gaza authorities have mandated the classification of all fallen combatants as “innocent civilians.”
6.D. However, following the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, it was revealed that this data was entirely false. There was no significant increase in child mortality in Iraq during the 1990s under the sanction regime.
8.A. Specifically, we identify the following problems:
The failure to critically evaluate information by compiling a large number of sources without assessing their reliability.
The “inverted information funnel”: A situation in which a small number of biased sources are “fragmented” into an outwardly large corpus of seemingly reliable sources.
The “echo chamber” syndrome refers to the tendency to rely on reports that appear “verified” but simply echo one another.
The “Burden of Proof” Syndrome assumes that all information from Israeli military sources is inherently unreliable... while Gazan claims are automatically accepted.
Catastrophic proclamations and muted retroactive corrections describe the phenomenon where harsh accusations against Israel… have all been conclusively refuted. In most cases, the claimants themselves retracted their reports. However, while accusations… are widely echoed by the media… the retractions of these false reports were made with minimal publicity and complete lack of transparency.
Finally, we feel compelled to express our deep concern about the widespread use of the term “genocide” by certain parties we have reviewed. Much like currency losing value through inflation when printed recklessly, certain terms lose their significance when used indiscriminately... If all high-intensity urban military conflicts in the future... are labeled as acts of genocide simply because of the immense human suffering they cause... the outcome will be fundamentally contrary to the objectives of international humanitarian law.
Lessons of the Middle East War by Michael Mandelbaum in The Jewish Strategic Tribune
All wars teach lessons. The war that began with the murderous assault on southern Israel by the governing organization of Gaza, Hamas, on October 7, 2023, and ended – at least for now — on June 22, 2025 with the American bombing of three major parts of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, demonstrates the importance of five basic features of political life:
Military power matters.
The war in the Middle East proved that proposition wrong. Over twenty months, the precisely calibrated and devastatingly effective use of land and air power by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) saved the State of Israel from a mortal threat, transformed the balance of power in the Middle East, and created diplomatic possibilities that would not have come into existence without it. War – known to the proponents of soft power as “hard power” — showed itself to be a supremely useful instrument of foreign policy.
Military strategy matters.
Israel’s feats of arms will no doubt be studied, and appreciated, for as long as any human society takes an interest in war, which is likely to be a very long time indeed. A shift in the country’s basic approach to its enemies opened the way for its military accomplishments.
Once Israel discarded its reliance on deterrence and went on the offensive, all these assumptions collapsed under the weight of its military skill.
Democracy matters.
In fact, Israel’s democracy was and is a military asset. Public support for the war was all the stronger because it was not coerced, and the morale of the armed forces was all the higher for that reason. (The deep commitment to Zionism also, of course, played a crucial role here.) Israel’s democratic, open society also produced the military innovations that gave it a large advantage over its enemies.
Regime change matters.
In fact, only regime change in Iran will reliably guard against a recurrence of the war. Its outcome has given rise to the hope that a negotiated agreement with the still-standing Islamic Republic can put an end to its effort to obtain nuclear weapons. That, however, would require a program of continuing and highly intrusive international inspections of all the relevant facilities involved in the bomb-making process, and this in a country of 90 million people three times the size of France that has already rejected such inspections. The kind of government that would not only tolerate but affirmatively cooperate in such a system of inspections would be the kind of government that would not have as its central goal the annihilation of another country. To put it differently, if the system of inspections that is required to assure the world that Iran is no longer pursuing nuclear weapons were possible, it would not be necessary.
Political goals matter.
It took place because Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran devoted hundreds of billions of dollars over decades for one purpose: the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of its eight million Jewish inhabitants because of their religion. Eight decades after the defeat of Nazi Germany, one of the animating purposes of the Third Reich remains alive and well in the Middle East. Any decent person who does not find that fact uncomfortable is incapable of discomfort.
In the modern era, the appearance of what they were promoting – virulent, murderous anti-semitism – has often served as a harbinger of the erosion, and even the end, of democratic norms and practices. From this it follows that those who have made it their business to worry about the health of American democracy would be well advised to pay less attention to Donald Trump, and more attention to Zohran Mamdani.
A Regime Collapse Strategy for Iran by Blaise Misztal with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)
The 12-Day War and President Trump’s conclusion of it did little to resolve a range of non-nuclear Iranian threats. These include drones (which attack American allies from Kyiv to Tel Aviv), terrorist proxies, and assassination plots inside America. If past is prologue, then Tehran will again seek to bloody America wherever and however it can, both to reconsolidate power at home and reestablish some measure of leverage against Washington.
Dealing with these threats requires a policy not of regime change but of regime collapse…Regime collapse differs from regime change in three key ways.
First is objectives. While regime change seeks to oust a government from power, regime collapse focuses on making it harder for a government to carry out functions and maintain authority.
Second is timing. Regime change is about a specific moment in time; regime collapse strategy accepts that it cannot know when its efforts might bear fruit.
Third, regime collapse leaves the actual task of toppling and replacing existing power structures to the people inside that country. . By weakening a government’s ability to exercise power, regime collapse is like the game of Jenga—the goal is to set the regime teetering while others make it finally topple.
Even if a worse regime did somehow emerge, Israel’s significant reduction of Iranian military assets precludes their ability to pose a significant threat. With many proxies decimated, half of their ballistic missile launchers destroyed, some ground, air, and naval assets struck, and their military leadership decapitated, were the Iranian regime to collapse, whoever replaces it would struggle to project power at home or abroad for the foreseeable future.
And while the nature of a post-Islamic Republic Iran is unknown, there is reason to believe the risks of regime collapse might well be lower than in a country lacking the preconditions that contributed to the chaos of Syria or Libya.
Nor is Iran as deeply divided along ethno-sectarian cleavages as is Syria. While there are national minorities, such as the Kurds, Azeris, and Baloch, that seek greater cultural rights or autonomy, it is usually countries governed by autocratic minorities, not majorities, (the Alawites in Syria, the Sunnis in Iraq) that seem to have the most brutal civil conflicts.
Additionally, Iranian society has broad support for democratic governance and normalized relations with the United States. This suggests that a secular, democratic opposition could emerge in Iran in a way that it was not present in other Middle Eastern countries.
…unlike in Syria, there is no organized opposition waiting in the wings. Steps to weaken the regime will not be enough unless the Iranian people are ready and able to oppose the regime.
To address this weakness, the United States, working with international partners, should seek out, engage with, and offer training to any democratic, secular opposition that arises organically inside Iran…The United States has taken tentative steps toward supporting the goal of regime collapse—providing Starlink access to Iranians otherwise cut off from the internet and recalling journalists for its Persian-language broadcasting service.
The nature of a regime collapse strategy is that it does not choose who will replace the mullahs in Tehran. It is impossible to predict where and when the impetus to stand up to the regime, or a leader brave enough to do it, will emerge.
Antisemitism
The Teddy Bear in the Rubble: The Image That Keeps Returning in Gaza by Rachel O'Donoghue with Honest Reporting
You’ve probably seen it before, not just in Gaza, not just in this war, but in war zones around the world. Amid the twisted metal and shattered concrete, there it is: a teddy bear. Soft, childlike, absurdly out of place.
Amid the twisted metal and shattered concrete, there it is: a teddy bear. Soft, childlike, absurdly out of place.
The implication is immediate and visceral. An innocent child has died here.
The grim truth is that war is horrific, and the innocent often suffer most.
But in Gaza, as HonestReporting has documented repeatedly, Hamas not only puts civilians, including children, in harm’s way, it also manipulates the narrative.
It inflates the civilian death toll, especially that of women and children, as part of a broader propaganda war against Israel.
The media has helped enable this strategy, often by repeating Hamas-supplied data without question, or worse, by using imagery that advances a one-sided emotional message.
These images tend to surface soon after Israeli airstrikes and spread quickly across international news outlets and social media.
A review of the Getty Images archives, which supplies photographs to the world’s major news outlets, raises doubts.
On January 21, 2025... the same bear appears in multiple shots, handled by different children, raising questions about how the scene was presented.
This is not an isolated case.
The bears are often clean, carefully positioned, and stand out starkly against the grey rubble around them.
But the repeated appearance of carefully placed toys should raise questions. Not about whether tragedy exists, but about how it is presented and by whom.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
And the cumulative effect of these carefully curated images is to build a false narrative.
One in which Israel is cast as reckless or cruel, while Hamas’ tactics and responsibility are overlooked.
Because sometimes, a teddy bear on a pile of rubble is more persuasive than the truth.
Link: The Teddy Bear in the Rubble: The Image That Keeps Returning in Gaza
How Humanitarian Aid Became a Weapon of War by Netta Barak-Corren and Jonathan Boxman with Newsweek
At its best, humanitarian aid is a lifeline—keeping civilians alive in war zones, famine-struck regions, and disaster zones.
But what happens when that aid, instead of alleviating suffering, ends up prolonging it?
Recent history shows that humanitarian assistance, as currently structured by the United Nations and many Western organizations, is too often hijacked by the very actors responsible for the crises it seeks to resolve.
Aid, to borrow from Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, has become a continuation of war by other means.
From Syria to Somalia, Yemen to Gaza, aid diversion is now routine—and too often enabled by the very institutions tasked with preventing it.
U.N. agencies and the World Food Program (WFP), in particular, have tolerated systematic abuse of aid pipelines.
Worse still, they have consistently downplayed or concealed the extent of the problem, even when their own internal reports document extensive diversion, fraud, and abuse.
In Gaza, the relationship between UNRWA and Hamas has become so symbiotic that 49 percent of UNRWA employees were tied to Hamas.
These are not accidental lapses.
They are part of a systemic pattern in which oppressive regimes, armed militias, and terrorist organizations use aid strategically—and are quietly accommodated by humanitarian organizations, rather than confronted.
Yet this silence only ensures that the aid continues to empower the very actors responsible for mass suffering.
What's especially alarming is how little has changed, despite repeated failures.
Even when diversion is acknowledged, it is rarely punished.
The principle of "humanity"—delivering aid no matter what—often overrides the principles of neutrality, independence, and impartiality.
But aid is a resource like any other, and in war zones, resources mean leverage, power, and control.
The more desperate the population, the more valuable the aid becomes to local power brokers.
In reality, most humanitarian operations now maintain covert accommodations with these power brokers.
The question is no longer whether diversion exists, but whom it benefits.
This must change.
A principled humanitarian model cannot survive by empowering tyrants and terrorists.
To serve humanity, aid must cease serving tyranny and terror.
Hostage Update (no change)
There are now currently 49 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 50 hostages remaining in total)
Of the 50 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
28 hostages have been confirmed dead and are currently being held in Gaza
Thus, at most, 22 living hostages could still be in Gaza. It has been reported that only 20 are actually alive.
Hamas is now holding the body of 1 IDF soldier who was killed in 2014 (Lt. Hadar Goldin’s body remains held in the Gaza Strip)
20 hostages remain in captivity and have not been declared dead.
2 hostages are Americans: Meet the Two American Hostages Still Held By Hamas:
Itay Chen died on October 7 defending civilians living in an agricultural area near the Gaza borde
Omer Neutra was killed when his team drove two miles to the border, where Hamas militants ambushed his tank with rocket-propelled grenades.
On October 7th, a total of 251 Israelis were taken hostage.
During the ceasefire deal in November of 2023, 112 hostages were released.
38 hostages were released in the first phase of the 2025 cease fire agreement (including 5 Thai nationals)
202 hostages in total have been released or rescued
The bodies of 47 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
8 hostages have been heroically rescued by troops alive
Casualties (+4)
Staff Sgt. Shoham Menahem, 21, Sgt. Shlomo Yakir Shrem, 20, Sgt. Yuliy Faktor, 19 were killed when, according to an initial IDF probe, the soldiers were in a tank that was hit by an explosion in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia at around noon Monday.
Shalev Zvuluny, 22, was killed in a terror attack at a shopping complex at the Gush Etzion Junction in the West Bank last Thursday, the military, police, and medics said. The two Palestinian terrorists who carried out the attack were shot dead by a soldier and another armed civilian in the area per the Times of Israel.
1,945 Israelis have been killed including 893 IDF soldiers and police since October 7th
Iran: 29 Israelis have been killed in Israel from missiles attacks from Iran
The South: 454 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed. The toll includes three police officers (two of which were killed in a hostage rescue mission) and two Defense Ministry civilian contractors.
The North: 133 Israelis (85 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel
The West Bank: 67 Israelis (27 IDF and Israeli security forces)
Additional Information (according to the IDF):
6,099(+23 since Thursday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 910 (+4 since Thursday) who have been severely injured.
2,800 (+19 since Thursday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 539 (+3 since Thursday) who have been severely injured.
The Gaza Casualty Count: According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 58,386 total deaths have been reported, with a civilian/combatant ratio: 1:1.
[MUST READ] Report: Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza by Andrew Fox with The Henry Jackson Society
Regular sources include JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, algemeimer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, Tablet Magazine, Mosaic Magazine, Commentary, The Free Press, The Jewish Institute for Strategy and Security, and the Times of Israel