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Prominent human rights campaigners in Israel say the most important women’s organizations within the United Nations have failed to give proper recognition to the massacre and mass rape carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7.
The UN Women statement from Oct. 13, failed to mention any of the atrocities and the U.N.’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) talked amorphically about “the gendered dimensions of conflict” without laying out the brutality inflicted on women during the horrific attack.
“The silence of the international human rights and women’s rights community is deafening,” Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former vice president of CEDAW, told The Daily Beast. “For those of us who believe in the power of international human rights institutions and in solidarity between women, it is a particularly devastating blow. The betrayal is not only to the victims of sexual abuse, but to the very integrity of the institutions.”