The Foreign Ministry's digital division has launched a first-of-its-kind campaign presenting evidence of sexual violence committed by Hamas since October 7, in Arabic. The campaign will be shared through over 20 of the ministry's channels in Arabic and various embassies in the Middle East, which altogether have more than five million followers and a weekly exposure of about 10 million views.
Digital campaign of Israeli women reading testimonies in Arabic
(Video: Foreign Ministry)
For the campaign, dozens of articles about sexual assaults, testimonies of survivors and released captives, as well as stories of emergency teams who witnessed the atrocities, were translated into Arabic. Additionally, the report of the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Pramila Patten, confirming the evidence of sexual assaults during the massacre, was also translated.
Israeli women read the testimonies in Arabic to the camera, not skipping any gruesome detail. One of the testimonies recorded was from a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre: "It was an apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes, no tops, no bottoms. People cut in half, decapitated heads. There were girls whose pelvis was simply shattered from being raped, girls in positions of splits, with broken legs."
The project emphasizes the comparison between Hamas's crimes against Israeli women and those of ISIS against Yazidi women in Iraq, since the Arab world was aware of the crimes against humanity by the Islamic State. Both terrorist organizations share similar modus operandi including abduction, captivity, human trafficking, sexual abuse, rape, and violence.
All translated materials would be posted on an Arabic language website, to serve as a source of knowledge and to facilitate public discourse regarding the massacre. According to the Foreign Ministry, anyone who is currently watching television channels in the Arab world or browsing leading news sites in the Middle East will not find any mention of Hamas's sexual crimes on October 7. For example, the UN report, which presents evidence, was suppressed and did not receive any exposure in the mainstream Arab media.
Additionally, a debate has been ongoing for several months regarding the Qatari network Al-Jazeera's shielding of Hamas. The network has accused the IDF of committing sexual crimes against Palestinians and later had to retract the statement without apologizing for their mistake.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz addressed the campaign, saying, "The sexual crimes committed by Hamas on October 7 must be known internationally. The Arab media refrains from covering Hamas's crimes at all, let alone the sexual crimes in particular, creating a void and perpetuating an anti-Israeli narrative among Arabic-speaking audiences. Our goal is to combat the deniers of the massacre and to bring the crimes to the attention of wider audiences worldwide."
Director of the Digital Diplomacy Bureau in the Foreign Ministry, David Saranga, added: "Until October 7, we dealt with 'soft' topics that focused on coexistence, innovation, history, and culture. In the past six months, we realized that our lives will not be the same. We feel a wrench in the stomach every time we hear testimony like this and so should the Arab world. This is a sensitive topic that includes cultural nuances that are taboo in the Arab world, requiring great sensitivity from the digital team."
The Foreign Ministry operates on several social media platforms - Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, with more than five million followers from the Arab world. Since the beginning of the war, more than 5,000 posts in Arabic have been published, receiving over half a billion views.