“I Can’t Erase All the Blood from My Mind”
Palestinian Armed Groups’ October 7 Assault on Israel
October 7 Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes by Hamas-led Groups
( Human Rights Watch ) Questions and Answers: The Hamas-Led Armed Groups’ October 7, 2023 Assault on Israel
Early in the morning of October 7, 2023, Sagi Shifroni, 41, like many Israelis living near the Gaza Strip that day, was awakened by sirens. When the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri began, he dashed in his sleepwear with his 5-year-old daughter to his home’s “safe room” or mamad. His wife years earlier had persuaded him to remove the door’s outside handle, so when Palestinian fighters broke into his house at about 11 a.m., they were unable to open the safe room door. Shifroni told Human Rights Watch:
I heard glass breaking and a few seconds later I heard shots fired at the door of the safe room. The door was not bulletproof, so the bullets came through. The whole room filled with the smell of gunpowder and broken cement. … My daughter asked me if they were trying to kill us and I told her, ‘Yes, but they won’t manage.’ They tried to knock the door down for a few minutes but couldn’t. They tried to shoot the hinges.
Shifroni said smoke started seeping through the door:
It was pretty clear that we couldn’t stay here. If we stayed, we would be dead. At this point I decided to get out, it was more like an instinct. I opened the door of the safe room a bit and saw the whole house was on fire, so I turned to the window and opened it. I saw that the whole patio area outside was also on fire.
Shifroni smashed the window glass and pushed the metal shutters open. He wrapped his daughter in a blanket and told her to hold a pillow to her nose and mouth and breathe through it. Then he jumped out, holding her in his arms. His arms, shoulders, back, and face got severely burned. Only at midnight was he able to get to a hospital to treat his burns.
Overview of the October 7 Assault
On the morning of October 7, Palestinian armed groups carried out numerous coordinated attacks including on civilian residences and gatherings and on Israeli military bases in the so-called “Gaza Envelope,” the populated area of southern Israel bordering the Gaza Strip. The armed groups attacked at least 19 kibbutzim and five moshavim (cooperative communities), the cities of Sderot and Ofakim, two music festivals, and a beach party. Community security called kitot konenut, or rapid response teams, and local police tried to resist the attackers until Israeli military forces arrived, often several hours after the assault had begun. The fighting lasted much of that day and, in some cases, longer.
The assault took place on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, when many soldiers were on leave. Palestinian armed groups began the assault with barrages of indiscriminate rockets and projectiles toward Israel. Fighters breached the physical barrier separating Gaza and Israel and then attacked nearby communities. Early in the attacks, the fighters disrupted and destroyed communications and surveillance equipment, leaving Israeli forces unable to develop an accurate picture of the situation.
The largest number of deaths occurred during the attack on the Supernova Music Festival, where at least 364 civilians were killed. Across many attack sites, fighters fired directly at civilians, often at close range, as they tried to flee, and at people who happened to be driving vehicles in the area. They hurled grenades and shot into safe rooms and other shelters and fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at homes. They set some houses on fire, burning and suffocating people to death, and forcing out others who they then captured or killed. They took hundreds hostage for transfer to Gaza or summarily killed them.
Agence France-Presse (AFP), which cross-referenced numerous data sources to verify the number of people killed, has assessed that 815 of a total of 1,195 people killed were civilians, including 79 foreign nationals. Among them were at least 282 women and 36 children. The Palestinian armed groups took hostage 251 civilians and Israeli security forces personnel and brought them back to Gaza following the attack.[1] Those abducted either remain as hostages in Gaza, have been released, or have been killed or died in the ensuing fighting. These are included in the overall death toll.
National and international media outlets detailed many of the atrocities that took place on October 7. Some reports minimized the extent of the abuses, while others included allegations of abuses that were later proven incorrect.
Hamas, the Palestinian movement that has governed the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007, stated that its armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the “Qassam Brigades”), led the assault on October 7. Survivor accounts and publicly available digital material from that day show that many of the fighters wore a combination of black or green uniforms or camouflage, some of which resembled Israeli military uniforms. Some wore distinctive headbands or insignia that identified them as members of Hamas or another armed group. Other armed group members wore civilian attire, although some may have been civilians from Gaza who joined the assault.
Most of the victims of the attacks were Jewish Israelis. However, fighters also killed, wounded, or took hostage Israeli dual nationals, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians from Gaza, and foreign workers, including Chinese, Filipino, Nepali, Sri Lankan and Thai nationals, and at least one national each from Cambodia, Canada, Eritrea, Germany, Mexico, Sudan, Tanzania, and the United Kingdom.
This report aims to capture the nature and extent of violations of international humanitarian law, known as the laws of war, and serious international crimes committed by Palestinian armed groups across numerous attack sites on October 7. The report also examines the role of different Palestinian armed groups involved, and their coordination before and during the attacks.
HRW Video: “Overview of the October 7 Assault”
Human Rights Watch has extensively reported elsewhere on violations of the laws of war by Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza and on grave human rights abuses and conditions in Gaza, including since October 7.[2]
Methodology
Human Rights Watch conducted research in October and November 2023 in Israel, and remote research through June 2024. The research included interviews in person and remotely with 144 people including: 94 survivors of the October 7 attacks; family members of survivors, hostages and those killed; first responders who collected human remains from the attack sites; medical experts who examined the human remains and provided forensic advice to the Israeli authorities; officials from the municipalities affected by the attacks; journalists who visited the attack sites after Israeli forces secured the areas; analysts of Palestinian political and armed groups; and international investigators. Human Rights Watch verified over 280 photographs and videos posted on social media platforms or shared directly with Human Rights Watch, including those recorded by fighters’ body cameras, cellphone cameras, dashboard cameras, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras from the attack sites. Human Rights Watch also examined satellite images and analyzed dozens of audio recordings, most shared on armed groups’ Telegram channels.
Violations of International Humanitarian Law
This report details numerous incidents of violations of international humanitarian law—the laws of war—by Palestinian armed groups on October 7, 2023; it does not include violations since then. These include deliberate and indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects; willful killing of persons in custody; cruel and other inhumane treatment; sexual and gender-based violence; hostage taking; mutilation and despoiling (robbing) of bodies; use of human shields; and pillage and looting.
International humanitarian law recognizes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as an ongoing armed conflict. The hostilities between Israel and Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups are governed by international humanitarian law for non-international armed conflicts, which are rooted in international treaty law, most notably Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and customary international humanitarian law. These rules concern the methods and means of combat and fundamental protections for civilians and for combatants no longer participating in hostilities and apply to both states and non-state armed groups.
The foremost principle of international humanitarian law is that parties to a conflict must distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. Civilians may never be the target of attack. Attacks that deliberately target civilians or fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians, or that would cause disproportionate harm to the civilian population compared to the anticipated military gain, are prohibited.
Members of the organized fighting forces of a non-state party may be targeted during an armed conflict. There is no requirement that members of non-state armed groups wear uniforms or other identifying insignia.
Civilians lose their immunity from attack when and only for such time as they are directly participating in hostilities. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) “Interpretive Guidance on Direct or Participation in Hostilities” provides that civilians who participate in “individual self-defense” are not directly participating in hostilities. That is, civilians who use necessary and proportionate force to defend themselves against unlawful attack do not become lawful military targets. Otherwise, states the Guidance, “this would have the absurd consequence of legitimizing a previously unlawful attack.”[3]
Common Article 3 provides a number of fundamental protections for civilians and captured or incapacitated combatants. Violence against such persons—notably murder, cruel treatment, and torture—is prohibited, as well as outrages against their personal dignity and degrading or humiliating treatment, and the taking of hostages.
War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
Serious violations of the laws of war that are committed with criminal intent—deliberately or recklessly—are war crimes. War crimes, listed in the “grave breaches” provisions of the Geneva Conventions and as customary law, include a wide array of offenses, including deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks harming civilians and civilian objects, torture and other ill-treatment, hostage-taking, and using human shields, among others. Individuals also may be held criminally liable for attempting to commit a war crime, as well as assisting in, facilitating, aiding, or abetting a war crime.
Certain crimes, such as murder, can amount to crimes against humanity, when committed as part of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.” The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines such an “attack” as a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts listed as crimes against humanity, pursuant to or in furtherance of state or organizational policy to commit such an “attack”—that is, the multiple criminal acts committed. Such a policy includes the state or organization actively promoting or encouraging such an attack, or in certain situations, its deliberate failure to take action.
Criminal responsibility may fall on persons responsible for war crimes or crimes against humanity, including those planning or instigating or assisting the commission of the crimes. In addition, commanders and civilian leaders may be prosecuted for war crimes or crimes against humanity as a matter of command responsibility when they knew or should have known about the commission of war crimes or crimes against humanity by persons within their chain of command and took insufficient measures to prevent them or punish those responsible.
States have an obligation to investigate and fairly prosecute individuals within their territory implicated in war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Violations on October 7
Violations of International Humanitarian Law and War Crimes
Killings
The laws of war prohibit deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the killing of civilians or captured combatants in custody, which are war crimes.
Palestinian fighters repeatedly attacked civilians and summarily executed individuals in their custody. The killings of civilians appear planned because of the many similarities in how killings took place across the attack sites: the armed groups directed many of their attacks at residential areas, fighters began to shoot civilians immediately after the assault began at 6:30 a.m., and the armed groups’ audio recordings and videos of the assault posted on their Telegram channels were indicative of a modus operandi. The Hamas leadership issued some statements after the assault saying its fighters had been instructed to spare women, children and older people, something contradicted by events. Some statements also made no mention of men who, if civilians, are also protected from attack.
Fighters also often extensively damaged people’s property, including by smashing and vandalizing, as well as by burning some buildings to the ground, putting civilians inside at grave risk.
Torture and Ill-treatment
Palestinian fighters committed acts of torture and ill-treatment against individuals they had captured, including those being taken as hostages. Committing torture and other ill-treatment is a violation of the laws of war and a war crime.
Verified videos show fighters hitting and kicking those they took into custody. In one video, a fighter is dragging a woman by the hair. Another depicts a female hostage with visible injuries being pulled out of the trunk compartment of a vehicle by a fighter who drags her by her hair and, together with another man, forces her as she resists into the vehicle’s back seat. One verified video posted to the South First Responders Telegram channel shows men wearing Qassam Brigades headbands taking a man from a bomb shelter at a bus stop near Kissufim.[4] Fighters direct the man toward a car parked next to the bus stop and one hits the man repeatedly with the butt of a rifle. A second fighter approaches with zip ties and proceeds to kick the man twice in the head before another fighter gets him to stop.
Crimes Involving Acts of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence
Rape and other severe forms of sexual violence are crimes under international law. Acts of sexual and gender-based violence may also constitute the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity. Human Rights Watch found evidence of acts of sexual and gender-based violence by fighters including forced nudity, and the posting without consent of sexualized images on social media. Human Rights Watch was not able to gather verifiable information through interviews with survivors of or witnesses to rape during the assault on October 7. Human Rights Watch requested access to information on sexual and gender-based violence in the possession of the Israeli government, but this request was not granted.
The office of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict visited Israel on the invitation of the government. The team interviewed people who reported witnessing rape and other sexual violence, concluded that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the October 7 attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.”[5]
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel (UN Commission of Inquiry) conducted an investigation into crimes including those committed during the October 7 assault. In the commission’s June 2024 report it wrote that it had “documented cases indicative of sexual violence perpetrated against women and men in and around the Nova festival site, as well as the Nahal Oz military outpost and several kibbutzim, including Kfar Aza, Re’im and Nir Oz,”[6] and “found indications that members of the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed gender-based violence (GBV) in several locations in southern Israel on 7 October.”[7]
The extent to which acts of sexual and gender-based violence were committed during the October 7 assault will likely never be fully known: many victims may have been killed; stigma and trauma often deter survivors from reporting; and Israeli security forces and other responders largely did not collect relevant forensic evidence from the attack sites or the recovered bodies.[8]
Taking of Hostages
Hostage-taking has been defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross as “the seizure, detention or otherwise holding of a person (the hostage) accompanied by the threat to kill, injure or continue to detain that person in order to compel a third party to do or to abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release, safety or well-being of the hostage.” Hostages can include civilians and captured military personnel. Hostage-taking is a violation of the laws of war and a war crime.
The Hamas leadership has said that taking hostages was core to their assault plans. The Qassam Brigades and other armed groups took 251 people hostage on October 7, including 40 who were taken from the Supernova Music Festival, and 39 children. As of July 1, 116 hostages were still in Gaza, at least 42 of them dead.
The Qassam Brigades and other armed groups have released multiple videos showing hostages asking to be released and demanding action from the Israeli government to secure their release. The broadcast of these videos of people in captivity are forms of inhumane treatment that constitute the war crime of “outrages upon personal dignity.”
Pillage, Looting and Destruction of Property
Pillage has been defined as the forcible taking of private property. Pillage, as well as destruction of property without military justification, are war crimes.
Palestinian fighters and unarmed people, some of whom may have been civilians from Gaza, stole from homes during the October 7 assault. In some cases, they demanded money and other possessions from civilians sheltering inside their houses.
Crimes Against Humanity
Human Rights Watch has found that the Palestinian armed groups involved in the assault on October 7 committed a widespread attack directed against a civilian population, according to the definition required for crimes against humanity. This is based on the numerous civilian sites that were targeted for the commission of crimes. The attack directed against the civilian population was also systematic, based on the planning that went into the crimes. Human Rights Watch has further found that the criminal acts of the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages were all central aims of the planned attack, and not actions that occurred as an afterthought, or as a plan gone awry, or as isolated acts, for example solely by the actions of unaffiliated Palestinians from Gaza, and as such there is strong evidence of an organizational policy to commit multiple acts of crimes against humanity.
Given, therefore that on October 7, 2023, there was an attack directed against a civilian population and that the murder of civilians and the taking of hostages—imprisonment in violation of fundamental rules of international law—were part of it, these amount to crimes against humanity.
Based on the evidence set out in this report, Human Rights Watch calls for the investigation of other crimes against humanity, including persecution against any identifiable group on racial, national, ethnic or religious grounds; rape or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; and extermination. These would amount to crimes against humanity if criminal acts meeting the respective definitions of the crimes were committed, and these crimes were committed as part of the “attack” directed against a civilian population . . .
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