Around 2,300 members of armed groups arrested during the October 7 attacks are currently being held in Israeli prisons, all awaiting prosecution, according to the Israel Prison Service.
Now, a group of legal experts and advocates is pushing to ensure they are not only charged with acts of terror, but also with the brutal sexual crimes committed against Israeli women that day.
“They should all be accountable for all these crimes,” said Halperin-Kaddari, a founding member of The Dinah Project and head of the Rackman Center at Bar-Ilan University. She said that accountability must apply even to those who didn’t directly commit sexual assault but were “just there.”
The Dinah Project’s campaign draws on the legal doctrine of joint criminal enterprise (JCE), a principle in international law that holds individuals responsible not only for crimes they personally committed, but also for crimes committed by others in the group if those crimes were a foreseeable result of the group’s shared plan.
This legal framework has become a critical tool in prosecuting atrocities such as sexual violence during conflict. It reflects a growing recognition that rape in war is not incidental but often part of the strategic plan. Under JCE, leaders and commanders can be found guilty of failing to prevent or punish these crimes.
Halperin-Kaddari said the group is calling on Israeli prosecutors to use this framework to ensure all potential perpetrators and enablers face justice.
“If it is not adopted, the message is that there is no accountability for perpetrating these crimes,” she said.
Examples of the JCE doctrine in action already exist in international courts.
A landmark ruling from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established a precedent. In The Prosecutor v. Édouard Karemera and Matthieu Ngirumpatse, two senior officials from Rwanda’s 1994 interim government were convicted of rape and sexual assault as crimes against humanity. The court found that widespread sexual violence was a foreseeable outcome of the genocide they helped orchestrate and that their continued involvement made them criminally liable.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia also applied the principle in the late 1990s, further cementing its role in international criminal law.
The Dinah Project’s efforts are laid out in a newly released report titled "Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond," which argues that Hamas used rape and sexual violence as tools during the October 7 massacre.
The report was authored by Halperin-Kaddari along with retired judge Nava Ben-Or, Col. (res.) Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, and Ita Prince-Gavison. Halperin-Kaddari said the team spent hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours reviewing open-source materials, gathering testimonies of rape and sexual assault, and cross-checking them to ensure each case was distinct.
Many of the testimonies came from eyewitnesses and earwitnesses who survived and shared what they observed in real time. The team compiled 17 witness accounts spanning at least 15 different cases. These were corroborated with evidence from first responders, photographs of victims positioned in ways indicating sexual violence, images showing genital injuries, and information from therapists treating survivors.
“The ingenuity of what we did is to actually expose what has been known but for the first time is aggregated, cross-checked and analyzed from a legal perspective, using evidentiary rules that are accepted in legal proceedings,” Halperin-Kaddari said.
She acknowledged that this kind of evidence is sometimes seen as “less than optimal” because it often does not come directly from the victims. Still, she insisted that its credibility is strong.
“All of these pieces together leave no doubt about the actual facts,” she added. “These crimes occurred.”
Halperin-Kaddari said prosecuting sexual violence during conflict poses major challenges. For October 7, one of the biggest obstacles is the lack of living victims; many were murdered during the attacks and cannot testify.
Others who survived are often too traumatized to speak publicly or participate in legal proceedings.
Another major hurdle is the nature of the crime scene, which is an active war zone.
In the days after the attacks, Halperin-Kaddari said it was nearly impossible to collect evidence, especially forensic evidence, due to ongoing fighting.
“The usual building blocks for prosecution, which are used for prosecuting regular acts of sexual crime, were not available,” she said. That makes it almost impossible to link specific attackers to specific victims.
Complicating matters further is Israel’s burial practice. Bodies were buried quickly, in line with Jewish tradition. Authorities did not initially realize the need to preserve potential forensic evidence for future trials.
“Israeli authorities were not prepared for that,” Halperin-Kaddari said. “This has never been part of terrorist attacks in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least not since the establishment of the State of Israel.”
Looking beyond criminal prosecution, Halperin-Kaddari said the next crucial step is achieving what she calls “historical justice” by having Hamas added to the United Nations blacklist of groups credibly suspected of rape and sexual violence in conflict.
“This is the most important one now, to have the Security Council of the UN include Hamas on the blacklist,” she said.
As of 2024, the list includes actors in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Islamic State in Iraq, Myanmar’s armed forces, and state and nonstate actors in Sudan, Syria, and Haiti.
Halperin-Kaddari said placing Hamas on the list would require diplomatic pressure on the UN Security Council.
“We have to bear in mind that the UN has to date not designated Hamas as a terrorist organization,” she said. “This is obviously because of political reasons. … Blacklisting Hamas would be one step in finally remedying this totally unacceptable situation, and it would encourage more countries to sanction Hamas.
“Blacklisting Hamas will finally expose them as rapists and not as freedom fighters,” she concluded.
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This article is written by Maayan Hoffman and reprinted with permission of The Media Line
