BOSTON: US President Joe Biden stated on Tuesday (Dec 5) 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.
“Stories 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 ladies as attainable after which murdering them. It’s appalling,” Biden stated.
The president referred to as on worldwide organisations, civil society and people to sentence sexual violence “with out exception”.
Israeli police are investigating attainable sexual crimes by among 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”.
In a press release on its Telegram channel, Hamas stated it denounced Biden’s “try and falsely accuse” its fighters of committing sexual violence and rape on Oct 7.
The group stated Biden was becoming a member of Israel’s effort to cowl up warfare crimes in Gaza dedicated with US help and to mislead public opinion.
Israel held an occasion on the United Nations in New York on Monday centered on sexual violence towards girls through the Oct 7 assault. Israel has been essential of the world physique’s response to the assaults.
“As a world neighborhood we should reply to weaponised sexual violence, wherever it occurs, with absolute condemnation. There may be no justification and no excuses. Rape as a weapon of warfare is a criminal offense towards humanity,” former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed 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 towards Gaza, saying the militant group’s “refusal to launch the remaining younger girls is what broke this deal”.
