Key Points

Darin Komarov was just a regular attendee at the open-area Nova Music Festival held in southern Israel’s Kibbutz Re'im region. Her moment of delight turned into a matter of survival as in midst of the reveling, armed Hamas Militants broke inside and opened fire, massacring around 300 festival-goers and wounding more. 

The Nova Festival Massacre forms part of the larger military ambush undertaken by militant group Hamas in Israel. 

On 7th October, 2026, Hamas, a Gaza-based terrorist organization, launched a surprise, coordinated strike on Israel. A barrage of rocket missiles were fired, militants broke through the Gaza-Israel border, and massacred civilians and security forces. Over 1200 people were killed, a lot more injured, and 251 were taken hostage to the Gaza strip. The group maintained that the attacks were in retaliation of persistent Israeli occupation in the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.

But the horrors did not cease. Hamas militants also, “purportedly,” raped and killed thousands of Israeli women, men, and children. This is something that Hamas has repeatedly denied, for the lack of substantial and incriminatory evidence. 

Until now. 

A comprehensive detailed report, titled “Silenced No More” was published on Tuesday, 12th May 2026, by the Civil Commission, a non-profit Israeli organisation, that pieces together incriminatory evidence of Hamas’s misconduct. Hundreds of testimonies from survivors, thousands of visual records, and years of analysis have culminated into the 300-page report that stands as the most damning evidence of Hamas’s horrific war crimes and sexual violence that happened during the October 7th attack and in its aftermath. 

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The reports reiterates that the militant group "systematically and deliberately" used rape and sexual torture to “maximize pain” and inflict and “psychological devastation”.

Speaking to reporters, lead author of the study and human rights expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the most important finding of the study is the that the sexual violence on October 7 and against hostages in captivity was a calculated strategy by Hamas. 

Elkayam-Levy said the purpose of the report — and the accompanying digital archive of evidence— is to ensure that the victims’ suffering “could not be denied, erased, or forgotten.” 

What does the report entails?

The report includes firsthand testimonies from more than 10 survivors who suffered extreme sexual violence and abuse during the October 7 attack, during their abduction, or while in captivity in Gaza. Some of the survivors, including former Hamas hostages Romi Gonen, Rom Braslavski, Arbel Yehud, Amit Soussana, and Ilana Gritzewsky, have spoken publicly about their ordeal. Others have shared their experiences only confidentially with investigators, experts, and medical professionals.

The report deduced that sexual and gender-based violence was not random or isolated but formed a deliberate, widespread, and systematic component of Hamas’s strategy. Perpetrators employed recurring patterns of extreme brutality, including rape and gang rape, sexual torture involving burning, mutilation, and the insertion of objects into victims’ bodies, shootings to the face and genital areas, and executions carried out alongside or immediately after sexual assaults.. In several cases, perpetrators desecrated and violated bodies after death.

The report also contains previously unreported allegations, including the case of two minors who were allegedly sexually abused and forced by their captors to perform sexual acts on each other while held hostage in Gaza.

Some of these details surfaced only after earlier reports were published and following the release of hostages. The information was gathered through direct testimonies to researchers as well as from meetings with medical experts, lawyers representing the victims, and other sources.

The Nova incident

In one particularly harrowing account, the report describes three separate incidents of rape at the Nova Music Festival site near the Gaza border. A survivor, Darin Komarov who was hiding close to the area recounted hearing one of the assaults:

The survivor’s account is corroborated by another witness who also heard the rapes, as well as by others who later saw the victims’ bodies with tattered clothes, legs spread, and signs of mutilation in intimate areas.

The report documents at least six other incidents in which witnesses directly saw rapes and gang rapes. In all these cases, the victims were shot dead afterward. In one instance, a witness described seeing a young woman being raped by several men, mutilated, and then killed.

In another harrowing survivor accounts, Nova festival survivor Raz Cohen described how militants pulled a woman from a vehicle, raped her, stabbed her to death, and continued to assault her body afterward. 

When Israeli first responders reached the Nova Music Festival site hours later, it was evident that extreme violence, sexual humiliation, and mutilation were deliberate and widespread tactics used on that day. Eran Masas, a first responder who reached the site, recalled encountering a bonfire of five or six bodies.

Such sadism as described by Masas was widespread. First responders reported finding aluminum cans, grenades, nails, blunt objects, rods, household tools, and spike-like instruments inserted into the genitals and other parts of the victims’ bodies.

In one of the most disturbing sections, the report details cases where victims were sexually abused in front of their relatives, or where perpetrators broadcast images and footage of the atrocities in real time to the victims’ family members via social media. The researchers have termed such acts “kinocidal violence.”

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In at least one instance, the report says family members were forced to commit sexual violence against each other.

Perpetrators further amplified the terror by filming their crimes and disseminating the footage widely on social media and through victims’ own phones, turning the atrocities into tools of psychological warfare. Families often learned of their loved ones’ fates through graphic videos posted or sent directly to them. The report describes how militants paraded women and children publicly, abducted mothers with their children, and used digital platforms to celebrate and glorify the horrors.

The way forward

The Commission’s legal analysis determines that these acts committed by Hamas militants amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity — including rape, sexual slavery, torture, and persecution — and genocidal acts under international law. It stresses that the sexual violence was an integral part of a coordinated campaign targeting civilians.

The Civil Commission has urged for justice and accountability in this matter. It urges Israel to set up special courts and prosecution teams trained to handle sexual violence cases with care for survivors. It also asks the international community to impose sanctions on the perpetrators, support investigations, and help victims with compensation and trauma healing. 

The Civil Commission describes the report as both a memorial to the victims and a foundation for justice. Many of those who suffered these crimes did not survive to tell their stories. By preserving testimonies and evidence, the Commission aims to ensure their voices are heard and that the atrocities are neither denied nor forgotten.

Find the full report below: