TRIGGER WARNING: The following story contains graphic descriptions that may be distressing to some readers as it tackles topics such as murder, sexual violence, torture, mutilation, and gore.
A female soldier of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) told a United Nations event in New York that Hamas committed atrocities towards fellow servicewomen who fell on October 7.
Shari Mendes, a Jerusalem-based architect and IDF reservist whose unit was tasked to recover and bless the bodies of people killed during Hamas's sabbath strike said that some of the bodies of the female soldiers who died fighting were left with agonized looks on their faces as they died.
"Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast," she said. "This seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims."
During the first weeks of the war between Israel and Hamas, Mendes was assigned to a unit in an IDF base in Shura that prepared bodies for burial.
The base has since become a morgue to store the Israeli dead, numbering about 1,200.
Letting the World Know
The Daily Mail reported that Mendes was at the UN headquarters in New York to reveal to the public the mutilations Hamas made on many bodies of female victims, both civilian and military, who arrived in Shura "in bloody shredded rags or just in underwear."
The event, entitled "Hear Our Voices: Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the October 7 Hamas terror attack," was aimed at highlighting stories of Hamas rapes and gender mutilation during the attack, which have been ignored by the international community, including the United Nations itself, as Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the organization's commission for women issued condemnations of such acts only last week.
"These women arrived with their eyes opened, their mouths in grimaces, their fists clenched," she added.
Mendes recalled that the deceased soldiers they dealt with had expressions of agony still on their faces post-mortem.
"I remember one young woman whose arm was broken in so many places it was difficult for us to lay her arm in the burial shroud, her leg too," she described one body she had to attend to, adding that the female body's entire left side was most likely "shredded" by a grenade.
Other bodies were found with their heads shot and bashed multiple times that they were barely recognizable.
For such cases, Mendes explained, her unit made the difficult decision not to show the families of dead soldiers their bodies, as Hamas's mutilation of bodies was "an objective of their murders."
"The smell of death was already unbearable," she described the makeshift morgue. "It is impossible to overemphasize the number of bodies we were dealing with, the sense of shock and despair."
While new agencies like Reuters have matched some of the images it reviewed with some of the descriptions or attesting to other possible atrocities, not all accounts could not be independently verified.
Washington Official Claims Hamas Hides Atrocities to Hostages
Meanwhile, the US also accused Hamas of treating living hostages poorly as much as they treated those they killed.
US State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said that the terror group's refusal to release ten female hostages because they do not want them to reveal what they have been subjected to while being held captive was the reason why the week-long truce between Israel and Hamas, which facilitated the release of some of the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, ended.
"It seems that one of the reasons Hamas doesn't want to turn women... that they've been holding hostage, and the reason this pause fell apart, is they don't want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody," he said.
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