The BBC has obtained evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the October 7 Hamas attack.
WARNING: The text contains explicit and painful descriptions of sexual violence and rape
Several people involved in collecting the remains and identifying victims of the attack told us they found evidence of sexual assault - broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and lacerations.
Among the victims are women of various ages, as well as children and teenagers.
In a video testimony from the Nova music festival, which was shown to journalists by the Israeli police, a woman describes in detail the gang-rape, mutilation and execution of the victim.
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Videos of naked and bloodied women taken by Hamas on the day of the attack, as well as photographs of the bodies taken at the location after the event, indicate that the women were the targets of planned sexual attacks.
It is believed that a small number survived, and we learn about what their last moments looked like from the survivors, the people who carried the bodies, the employees of the morgues and the footage from the scene.
Israeli police showed reporters a chilling testimony from a woman who was at the Nova music festival during the attack.
She describes seeing Hamas gang-rape and mutilate a woman, before the last assailant shot her in the head, continuing to rape her.
In the video, a woman known as Witness S showed the attackers picking up the victim and passing it to each other.
"She was alive," says the witness.
"She had a wound on her back, she was bleeding."
She describes in detail how the men cut off parts of the victim's body during the attack.
"They cut off her breast and threw her on the street," she says.
"They played with it."
The victim was passed on to another man in uniform, she continues.
"He penetrated her and shot her in the head. He didn't even pull up his pants; he shot and ejaculated."
A man who was at the festival we spoke to said he heard "sounds and screams of people being killed, raped and beheaded".
When asked how he can be so sure, because he did not see it, he says that the screams he heard indicated a sexual assault, and not some other kind of violence.
He adds that he is convinced that what he heard could only be rape.
In a statement issued through an aid organization, he described it as "inhumane".
"Some women were raped before they died, some were raped while they were injured, and some were already dead when the terrorists raped their lifeless bodies," the statement said.
"I desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do."
Police say they have "multiple" eyewitness accounts of the sexual assault, but have declined to say exactly how many there are.
When we spoke to the police, they had not yet heard from any surviving victims.
Israel's Women's Empowerment Minister, May Golan, told the BBC that very few victims of rape or sexual violence survived the attacks and that all are currently receiving psychiatric treatment.
"But very, very few of them. Most were brutally killed," she said.
"They couldn't talk - not to me, not to anyone else in the government or the media."
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The footage taken by Hamas includes a video of a woman handcuffed and taken hostage with cuts on her hands and a large bloodstain on the back of her pants.
In others, the women being taken away by fighters appear naked or half-naked.
In many photographs from the locations after the attack, the bodies of women can be seen naked from the waist down or with their panties torn on one side, with their legs spread, with marks of blows on their genitals or legs.
"It really seems like Hamas learned to use women's bodies as a weapon in war from the Islamic State in Iraq or from the Bosnia cases," says Dr. Kochav Elekayam-Levi, a legal expert at the Davis Institute of International Affairs at the Hebrew University.
"I shudder just when I hear the details of how they knew what to do to women: cut off their organs, mutilate their genitals, rape them. It's scary to know all that."
"I have spoken to at least three girls who are now in hospital with serious psychiatric conditions after being raped," Minister May Golan told me.
"They pretended to be dead and saw and heard everything. And they can't deal with it."
Israeli police chief Yaakov Shabtai said many survivors of the attack have difficulty speaking and he thinks some of them will never testify about what they saw or experienced.
"Eighteen young men and women have been hospitalized in mental institutions because they can no longer function," he said.
Others are allegedly suicidal.
One of those working with the teams around the victims told the BBC that some had already committed suicide.
Much of the evidence came from volunteer body collectors hired after the attack and those who handled the bodies when they arrived at the Shura military base for identification.
Watch the video:
One of the body collectors who volunteers for the Zak religious organization described to me the signs of torture and mutilation that included, he said, a pregnant woman whose womb had been opened before she was killed and her fetus stabbed while still inside.
Another, Nahman Dickstein, attached a written statement that he saw the bodies of two women in Kibbutz Beri with their hands and feet tied to the bed.
"One was sexually terrorized with a knife stuck in her vagina and with all her internal organs removed," he says in his statement.
“At the festival site, he says the small shelters were packed with women in the crowd.
"Their clothes were torn in the upper part, but their lower parts were completely naked. Lots and lots of women. […]
"If you looked closely at their heads, you'd see a single bullet entry wound on each one."
Volunteers carried away hundreds of bodies from the sites of the attacks.
Investigators acknowledge that in those first chaotic days after the attack, while some areas were still active combat zones, opportunities to carefully document crime scenes or obtain forensic evidence were not always great or were missed.
"In the first five days, we still had terrorists on the ground in Israel," says May Golan.
"And there were hundreds, hundreds of bodies everywhere. They were burned, without organs, completely massacred."
"It was a mass casualty event," police spokesman Dean Elsdun told reporters at a briefing.
"The most important thing was to identify the victims, not necessarily in the crime scene investigation. People were waiting to hear what happened to their loved ones."
Staff at the Shura military base, where the bodies arrived for identification, provided investigators with some of the key evidence.
This evidence came from a makeshift center with tents and refrigerated shipping containers set up at the base to identify the bodies.
When we visited, hospital carts, with iron skeletons on which they were stretchers, stood neatly lined up in front of the containers in which the dead were placed; the white plastic coveralls of those on shift glistened under the spotlights.
Military fighter jets thundered above us, drowning out the screams, as Israel's bombardment of Gaza continued.
Watch the video: "What are their children to blame for this war?"
The teams here told us that they saw clear evidence of rape and sexual violence on the bodies that were arriving, among them broken pelvises from the constant violent abuse.
"We saw women of all ages," Captain Majan, one of the reservists from the forensic team, told the BBC.
"We saw rape victims. We saw women who were persecuted.
"We have pathologists and we've seen bruises, we've seen cuts and lacerations, and we know they were sexually assaulted."
I ask her what percentage of the bodies that passed through her hands had these signs.
"A large number," she says.
"A large number of women and girls of all ages."
It is difficult to count the victims, partly because of the condition of the bodies.
"There were definitely more," said another active duty soldier who asked that only her name, Avigail, be published.
"It's hard to say. I've dealt with quite a few burned bodies and I have no idea what they went through before that.
"And the bodies that are missing the lower half - I also don't know if they were raped.
"But women who were obviously raped? There are quite enough of them. More than enough."
"Sometimes we only have a very small part of the body left," Dr. Elkayam-Levi tells me.
"Maybe a finger, a foot or a hand they're trying to use to identify the body. People were burned to dust. There is nothing left of them. […]
"I mean we'll never know exactly how many cases there were."
Privately, some of those working on this talk about "dozens" of victims, but are quick to warn that the evidence is still being collected and compiled.
The civilian commission led by Dr. Elkayam-Levi is working on collecting statements about sexual crimes and calls for international recognition that what happened on October 7 is systematic violence, which falls under crimes against humanity.
"We're definitely seeing a pattern," she told me.
"So it didn't happen by chance, it wasn't random. They came with a clear order. It was rape like genocide."
Avigail agrees that there was a similarity in the violence inflicted on the bodies that arrived at the Shura base.
"There are patterns in those groups of women from the same places, they were treated in a similar way," she said.
"There was a group of women who were raped in one way and we can see similarities in their bodies; and then another group that was not raped but was shot multiple times in the same way. So it seems that different groups of terrorists had different kinds of brutality."
"This was a systematic event with premeditation," police chief Jakov Shabtai told reporters.
David Katz of Israel's cybercrime unit, which is involved in the investigation, told reporters that it was too early to prove that sexual violence was planned as part of the attack, but that data extracted from the phones of the Hamas attackers indicated that "everything was systematic." .
"It would be frivolous to say that we can already prove it, but everything that was done was done systematically," he said.
"Nothing happened by chance. The rape was systematic."
The Israeli government points to documents it claims were found on Hamas fighters that appear to support the idea that sexual violence was planned.
She published inserts of recordings of interrogations of captured fighters in which they say that women were targeted for this very purpose.
Last week, UN Women issued a statement saying they "unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas" and are "concerned by the numerous testimonies of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during these attacks".
Dr. Elkayam-Levi said before issuing this statement that international women's rights organizations were taking too long to respond to her calls for support.
"This is the most documented atrocity that humanity has ever encountered," she told me.
"Since October 7, Israel is not the same country that woke up the next morning," said police chief Yakov Shabtai.
Amidst the horrors that have happened to women here, Captain Majan of the identification unit in Shura says the hardest moments are when she sees "the mascara on the eyelashes or the earrings put on that morning."
I ask her how she feels about it, as a woman.
"Terror," she replies.
"It's tearing us apart."
Additional reporting by Scarlett Barter
Watch the video: And the eagle searched for the bodies of those killed in the Hamas attack
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