The Israeli government said some 1,200 Israelis were killed in ambushes as militants invaded the south of the country by land and air, taking many people by surprise, including Israeli troops.
The report is the human rights group’s most sweeping indictment of war crimes in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and four other Palestinian armed groups, including the Al-Quds Brigades, a militant wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The report noted that the killing of civilians and taking of hostages “was a primary objective of the planned attack and not an afterthought.”
In response to questions from Human Rights Watch in April, Hamas said it had instructed militants not to target civilians and blamed unaffiliated Gaza residents for seizing the opportunity to cause chaos in Israel. The influx of unaffiliated Palestinians and other militias “has led to many mistakes,” Hamas wrote in the report.
This report: The war in Gaza In Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks, Israeli forces have continued to kill Palestinian civilians, and Israeli forces have allegedly committed war crimes in the area. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 38,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but says the majority of the dead are women and children.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed Tuesday that they had killed or captured 14,000 fighters since the start of the war and killed half of Hamas’ military leaders, a figure that could not be independently verified.
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Last week, the Israel Defense Forces Results of the first internal investigatione In its response on October 7, the Israeli army blamed the Israelis for failing to defend Kibbutz Be’eri, a town near the border with Gaza. It acknowledged that there had been “serious mistakes and errors” in its response there, but stopped short of criticizing individual commanders.
As investigations continue into the deaths of civilians in firefights between the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian militants on October 7, a Human Rights Watch report has found at least two cases in which militants used civilians as “human shields,” a practice the group said was a war crime.
The report said the militants tortured civilians, including dragging women by their hair and punching and kicking those they abducted.
The report found evidence of “sexual and gender-based violence” perpetrated by the extremists, including forced nudity and the posting of “sexualized images” on social media, but “could not gather verifiable information” about the alleged rape on October 7. The rights group said the Israeli government had rejected its requests for information about such violence.
The group said it “was unable to document any rape cases” but that doesn’t mean there were no rapes on October 7. Sexual violence The report said that the events of that day “will likely never be fully understood” because of the stigma and trauma surrounding the rapes, and the fact that many of the victims were likely murdered.
