Michael Higgins: Report on October 7 sexual atrocities shames the world

People take part in a gathering at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on October 11, 2025(Photo by JOHN WESSELS / AFP)

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A shocking new report that for the first time reveals in full the grotesque and gruesome horrors of October 7 is headlined: Silenced No More.  

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It is an appalling truth that after October 7, 2023 the world was mostly silent to what happened, indifferent to what happened, denied what happened, or accused Israel of making up what happened. 

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Canada was not immune from this denialism. 

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For instance, Susan Kim, a city councillor in Victoria, and Sarah Jama, a member of the Ontario parliament, wrote a letter criticizing then NDP leader Jagmeet Singh for repeating “the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence” on October 7. The letter was also signed by Samantha Pearson, at the time the director of the sexual assault centre at the University of Alberta. She was later fired. 

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What prompted these three women to disavow so quickly and publicly the barbarity that was already established is known only to their consciences.  

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“Atrocities do not begin with the machinery of killing,” Irwin Cotler, former attorney general of Canada, wrote in a forward to the report. “They begin with a failure to believe victims. In the months following October 7, that failure has repeated itself with alarming speed: the silencing of testimony, the politicization of sexual violence, the grotesque inversion in which perpetrators are valourized and survivors shamed into silence. 

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“As Elie Wiesel taught us, ‘Silence in the face of evil is complicity with evil itself.’” 

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Rape as a weapon in war is as old as conflict. But sometimes the scale, deliberateness and depravity of the sexual violence suggests that rape is the primary means of conducting that war, such as the Rape of Nanking by Japanese soldiers or the Rape of Berlin by the Red Army. 

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Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the chairman and founder of The Civil Commission, an NGO that conducted the investigation into the October 7 attacks and produced the report, wrote, “There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves. Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood. 

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“October 7, 2023 was such a moment.” 

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The Commission conducted over 430 interviews with survivors, witnesses, returned hostages and family members and reviewed 10,000 photographs and video segments of the attack. 

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It identified 13 recurring patterns of sexual abuse across multiple locations. 

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“The repetition of these patterns demonstrates that the crimes were not isolated acts of brutality but formed part of a broader operational method used during the attack and its aftermath,” it said.