The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, officially condemned the sexual violence committed by Hamas militants during their surprise attack in Israel on October 7.
“The use of sexual violence as a tactic of war is a crime,” insisted Mme Joly on the social network X, Thursday.
In her publication, the head of Canadian diplomacy directly referred to the brutal incursion of Hamas militants into Israel, during which around 1,200 people were killed.
Canada strongly condemns sexual and gender-based violence, “including rape,” she wrote, “perpetrated by Hamas against women in Israel on October 7.”
“We believe Israeli women,” she stressed.
Opposition parties have been pushing for several weeks for the government to denounce sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas, sometimes arguing that denouncing the violence as a whole is not enough.
During his party’s congress on October 14, New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh said that “nothing can justify the torture, murders and sexual violence committed by Hamas.”
In Parliament, conservative MPs raised the issue of rapes committed by Hamas on October 16.
Two weeks ago, in the House of Commons, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner called on Liberals to denounce the fact that the United Nations had still not condemned sexual violence committed by Hamas — which the organization has ended up doing it a week later.
At that time, Parliamentary Secretary Pam Damoff responded that Canada condemned Hamas’s “actions against women and other civilians.”
On Thursday, the Bloc Québécois foreign affairs spokesperson, Stéphane Bergeron, also wrote that the details emerging on the “terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas” add to the horror of what happened on October 7.
“Murders, rapes and other abuses must be denounced without the slightest equivocation,” he wrote in a statement sent to The Canadian Press.
In Israel, women’s rights organizations have been calling for several weeks on the international community to speak out on this subject. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized other countries on Tuesday for not having done so.
Yet Israeli police are still investigating what happened two months ago, after authorities prioritized identifying bodies over preserving evidence, the Associated Press reported.
Authorities say they have had difficulty finding rape survivors because many of those suspected of being victims of such acts were killed by their attackers.
Israeli embassies showed journalists videos of the atrocities committed by Hamas during the October 7 attack. One scene notably showed the body of a woman without pants or underwear, but none of the videos compiled on social networks, security cameras and Hamas fighters showed sexual assaults.
The Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, which has long advocated for Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip suffering under Israel’s blockade, released an initial assessment on the issue in November.
“What we know for sure is that there was more than one incident and it was very widespread, in that it happened in multiple locations and on multiple occasions,” said Tuesday the organization’s director of policy and ethics, Hadas Ziv.
“What we don’t know, and what the police are investigating, is whether this was ordered and whether it was systematic. »
Hamas has rejected allegations that its men committed sexual assaults.
— With information from the Associated Press