The Rackman’s Centre ‘Dinah Project’ has published its first report into the sexual violence committed on October 7th.
“A Quest for Justice, October 7 and Beyond” is the first comprehensive legal and evidentiary framework to analyse the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war during the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
Unlike prior reports that focused on documenting atrocities, this book builds a legal blueprint for prosecuting these crimes – even when direct attribution to individual perpetrators is impossible. Drawing on survivors’ and other testimonies, forensic evidence, international law, and criminal responsibility doctrines (including joint criminal enterprise and derivative liability), the book argues that sexual violence was not incidental, but part of a deliberate genocidal strategy.
This is not “another human rights report.” This is the first global legal blueprint explaining how to prosecute sexual violence as a weapon of war- even when evidence is messy, survivors are gone, and individual perpetrators can’t be tied to individual acts.
Led by an all-women team of globally recognized experts in law and gender, “A Quest for Justice, October 7 and Beyond” challenges governments, the ICC, the UN, and human rights bodies to act:
• To prosecute Hamas for crimes against humanity
• To blacklist Hamas under UN mechanisms for using sexual violence as a war tactic
• To shift international legal standards for how conflict-related sexual violence is addressed- in Israel and beyond
This is not only a book about Israel, it is a global legal test case for addressing CRSV in conflicts worldwide.