How a Well-Connected Israeli Legal Expert Influenced the UN Investigation Into Sexual Violence on October 7Ruth Halperin-Kaddari leveraged her friendship with the UN's special representative to produce a report in Israel's interests.
Before we get to the story, an update on the Gaza ceasefire from Jeremy Scahill: As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his effort to sabotage the deal for a ceasefire in Gaza and exchange of captives, Hamas has begun putting out substantive public proposals of its own. On Tuesday, Hamas’s Gaza chief, Khalil Al-Hayya, said the group was prepared to negotiate a comprehensive deal for Phase 2 that would include the return of all Israeli captives held in Gaza “as one package,” rather than the staggered weekly releases that have marked Phase 1 of the deal. In return, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups would require Israel to completely withdraw all of its forces from the Gaza Strip and for international mediators, including the U.S., to certify a permanent truce. “Hamas and the resistance have demonstrated their seriousness in implementing the agreement with full responsibility, while [the] Israeli occupation and Netanyahu's government respond with procrastination and attempts to evade its implementation,” Al-Hayya said. Israel has largely continued to block the delivery of heavy equipment, mobile homes, and other aid agreed to under the terms of the ceasefire. It has also killed more than 130 Palestinians since the ceasefire took effect on January 19. Among these are two Palestinians shot and killed in front of a UN school on Tuesday in Rafah, according to the city’s mayor. Hamas also announced it would release all six living Israeli captives slated for exchange in Phase 1 on Saturday, saying it was evidence of the group’s flexibility and willingness to reach a viable deal. It also appears to be a concession to President Donald Trump’s demand that all Israeli hostages be released at once. Hamas also said that on Thursday it would be returning the bodies of four Israeli captives. Among these are Shiri Bibas and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, who were taken by Palestinian fighters on October 7 and brought to Gaza. In November 2023, the Qassam Brigades announced the three of them had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. While major media reporting on this story consistently identifies Hamas as the party that took the Bibas family, a different armed faction actually claimed responsibility. The Mujahideen Brigades, which started as an offshoot of the ruling Fatah Party’s armed wing, released a statement on Wednesday affirming they would return their bodies to Israel and said “they were bombed by the Zionist occupation missiles and were killed, along with the captor group” in November 2023. As a result of Hamas’s proposals, Israel has reportedly agreed to begin letting in more heavy equipment to clear rubble as well as a limited number of mobile homes and more tents. Israel is also supposed to release approximately 200 women and children it snatched from Gaza since October 7. In total, some 445 Palestinians from Gaza taken prisoner by Israel are slated to be freed Saturday, along with more than 110 Palestinians who are serving life sentences or lengthy prison terms. Additionally, 47 Palestinians who were “re-arrested” after being freed in the 2011 deal for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit are also scheduled to be released. Netanyahu recently placed his longtime confidant and strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer in charge of the negotiations on Phase 2 of the ceasefire deal, replacing the head of Shin Bet. Netanyahu told cabinet ministers during a recent meeting that Israel’s position on continuing the ceasefire will require Hamas to disarm and have no presence in Gaza. While Hamas has said that it does not want to govern Gaza and would accept a national unity committee, it has dismissed suggestions the movement would disband or disarm as fantasy. —Jeremy Scahill Drop Site News is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe. How a Well-Connected Israeli Legal Expert Influenced the UN Investigation Into Sexual Violence on October 7Story by Ryan Grim On October 8, 2023, a day after Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel, Israeli legal scholar and women's rights advocate Ruth Halperin-Kaddari called in a favor from her longtime friend and former colleague, United Nations Special Representative Pramila Patten. Halperin-Kaddari, who in 2018 was ranked as one of the world's hundred most influential people in gender equality policy, conveyed her conviction that Hamas had orchestrated mass, systematic sexual assaults the previous day, urging that Israel needed UN recognition of these allegations. Patten, as the special representative on sexual violence in conflict and under-secretary-general of the United Nations, was not empowered with a mandate to launch investigations or produce findings. Yet Halperin-Kaddari believed Patten was uniquely well positioned to lend the UN’s imprimatur to Israel’s allegations. “I called her and said, ‘Pramila, we need you here, what do I need to do?’” Halperin-Kaddari would later recount on a podcast. Patten responded with caution, asking “Do you know if it really happened?” Though not previously reported, this exchange—which Halperin-Kaddari has referenced multiple times in interviews—ultimately led to Patten’s visit in late January 2024. The trip was a controversial one: While Patten and her UN team were hosted and chaperoned by Halperin-Kaddari, they lacked any formal investigatory mandate, and the decision to conduct such an unprecedented mission was met with fierce dissent inside her own office. Patten ultimately published a report that was wielded by Israeli officials as evidence to bolster allegations of systemic sexual violence. Yet a close reading of the text showed it contained far more nuanced language that seemed to undermine those officials’ claims. The report’s central finding—that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks”—fell short of confirming that systemic sexual violence had in fact occurred. Yet media coverage, particularly articles featuring Halperin-Kaddari’s commentary, often presented Patten’s report as definitive proof that backed up Israel’s incendiary claims. In one interview, Halperin-Kaddari called Patten’s report a “game changer” and “unprecedented” not only because it would be included in the UN’s annual report, but because Patten was gathering the information herself rather than information collected by other UN bodies. Patten’s work became the “starting point” for other investigations, she said. Now, according to Halperin-Kaddari’s recent remarks, Israel is pursuing a follow-up visit from Patten in March, with the hopes that she will produce a new report that would land Hamas on an international blacklist of parties that engage in sexual violence. “What we do aim, is that once the next visit of the Under Secretary General [Patten] indeed happens, we hope that eventually Hamas would be blacklisted as an entity, because it employs sexual violence as a weapon, as a tool of war, and then all its allies can also be held liable and be put under sanctions,” Halperin-Kaddari said recently. Patten’s return visit to Israel is complicated, however, by her request to document allegations by human rights organizations of sexual violence meted out against Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody. Israel has refused that request. A Long HistoryHalperin-Kaddari and Patten’s relationship was forged when the two worked for years together at the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. That experience was key for Halperin-Kaddari, she said, because she served at the U.N. in an independent capacity, not as a representative of the state of Israel, which gave her opinion the sheen of independence. “It’s very important to stress the independency, because when we are on human rights committees we are there not as representatives of our countries, we are there as independent experts,” she said. She retained that reputation. “I understood that I was in a very unique position, with connections, both on the international front vis-à-vis the international organizations, the UN, knowing how the UN works, and having some status on that front [as a] recognized independent expert,” she said. Soon after reaching out to Patten, she was invited by the U.S. mission to the U.N. to brief the security council on her claims of sexual assault. China, she said, blocked her appearance, but the overture persuaded Israeli government officials that her connections were key in furthering the country’s narrative. "This made Israel realize they can use me as one of those who can act on the international front,” she acknowledged. During a recent podcast appearance, Halperin-Kaddari stated that she suspected as early as October 8 that sexual assault had taken place, even before probing the question. “As the details of the events began to emerge and I understood that towns and villages in the south had been occupied, and that terrorists were in homes and the [Nova] party area for hours without interruption, I immediately suspected that serious sexual assaults were taking place,” she said. The relationship between Patten and Halperin-Kaddari, who has described her role after October 7th as aimed at “advanc[ing] Israel’s narrative,” has taken on renewed significance amid Israel’s push for Patten’s return to the country, a move Halperin-Kaddari hopes will lead to the blacklisting of Hamas and the sanctioning of “all its allies.” This diplomatic effort dovetails with Israel’s broader targeting of international organizations in the occupied Palestinian territories, most prominently UNRWA—the lead agency bringing food and medicine into the besieged Gaza Strip. On a recent global tour, Halperin-Kaddari relied heavily on allegations made by Shari Mendes, a reservist for the Israeli military who was tasked with preparing the bodies of those killed for burial. Among Mendes’s most widely circulated claims were graphic accounts of brutal, mass rape of grandmothers, women, and children, as well as the mutilation of a pregnant woman and her fetus by Palestinians, an allegation that was later disproved. Patten’s own report, in fact, determined no such thing had happened: “The mission team conducted a visit to Kibbutz Be’eri and was able to determine that at least two allegations of sexual violence widely repeated in the media, were unfounded due to either new superseding information or inconsistency in the facts gathered. These included a highly publicized allegation of a pregnant woman whose womb had reportedly been ripped open before being killed, with her fetus stabbed while still inside her.” No Investigatory MandateIn both her report and interviews, Patten has carefully emphasized that her conclusions do not constitute official findings, as she lacked the legal mandate to conduct a formal investigation—an authority that lies solely with the UN Human Rights Council's Independent Commission of Inquiry, whose efforts to investigate the allegations have been consistently obstructed by the Israeli government. In fact, Israel explicitly did not cooperate with a UN team, accusing them of antisemitism and opening the way for Patten’s instead. Halperin-Kaddari has herself remarked on the unprecedented nature of Patten’s report, which was produced outside the scope of UN protocol. One notable feature of Patten’s report and subsequent statements is the use of terminology that obscures the mission’s limited authority. Despite having no investigative mandate, the aim of the mission was to “gather and verify information.” This language, particularly her reference to finding "reasonable grounds" for various claims, creates a misleading impression of official authority and conclusive findings—despite the mission's limited scope and unofficial status. At the same time, Patten emphasized her report’s tentative and limited nature, while simultaneously speaking with certainty about its findings. The report further acknowledged that the brief mission relied wholly on Israeli sources due to what it said was an “absence of United Nations entities operating in Israel, as well as the lack of cooperation by the State of Israel with relevant United Nations bodies with an investigative mandate.” It added that the mission team “took every step, in line with UN methodology, to mitigate issues of source reliability before drawing conclusions within the scope of this report.” In the wake of its publication, major media outlets published headlines and articles suggesting it represented official UN confirmation of systematic rape by Hamas on October 7. Halperin-Kaddari continues to amplify this misinterpretation in her presentations, portraying the report as definitive proof of Hamas's orchestrated sexual violence. Yet Patten’s report explicitly does not ascribe any act to particular groups, including Hamas, instead stating, “Given the mission was not investigative, it did not gather information and/or draw conclusions on attribution of alleged violations to specific armed groups. Such attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process.” Patten and her report made no definitive conclusions regarding the extent of sexual violence on October 7, and specifically noted it found no evidence of systematic planning: “The mission was neither intended to, and nor could the mission team, in such a short period of time, establish the prevalence of conflict-related sexual violence during and after the 7 October attacks. The overall magnitude, scope, and specific attribution of these violations would require a comprehensive investigation by competent bodies.” In a press briefing the day her report was published, Patten explicitly addressed the disparity between Israeli government claims and her findings: “I don’t have numbers because for me one case is more than enough, and I didn’t go on a bookkeeping exercise. The first letters that I received from the government of Israel talked about hundreds if not thousands of cases of brutal sexual violence perpetrated against men, women and children. I have not found anything like that.” Regarding claims that Hamas had planned systematic sexual violence, Patten's report directly says it could not support key allegations: “Claims were made in the public domain that directives, including pamphlets with instructions on pronouncing phrases in Hebrew such as ‘Open your legs’ or ‘Take off your pants’ and a manual on ‘How to take captives’, were allegedly found by IDF [Israeli military] on bodies of deceased militants. However, the mission team was not able to substantiate any of them.” This finding was later echoed by a UNHCR Commission of Inquiry report, which stated that “The Commission did not find credible evidence, however, that militants received orders to commit sexual violence and so it was unable to make conclusions on this issue.” Become a Drop Site News Paid SubscriberDrop Site News is reader-supported. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. 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