It’s been almost two months since the slaughtering of party-goers and farmers in the Gaza corridor, and I am just beginning to collect myself from the shock long enough to wonder why the rest of the world hasn’t noticed that there were mass rapes here.  And then it hit me – we haven’t said how many women were raped and murdered, how many were mutilated, how many were just raped, and so forth.  So I began to look for information, for specific facts.  As a woman who has undergone rape, I found it a more focussed subject than the general slaughter.  Throughout this time, for instance, there have been testimonies and films – often go-pros of the terrorists themselves.  Women gang-raped, women killed in the middle of gang rapes, women mutilated and murdered and raped in front of their children, little girls as well as teen-agers raped. 

I saw a lot on film, but how many actual cases were there?  I could not find evidence.  I wanted to turn to Zaka, the voluntary search and rescue organization which appears wherever there are tragedies, has saved so many lives, and mopped up seas of blood for burial.  But when I got to them, it turned out that the speaker for the organization had just suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized. I shouldn’t be surprised – experienced paramedics broke down on television when questioned about what they had seen.

Who else could tell me?  There weren’t enough pathologists to take care of the bodies at the party and it has taken all this time and we’re still working on identifying all of them. In fact, we had to import pathologists from abroad to help out putting the pieces back together. After all, when you only have parts of bodies it’s hard to identify them, much less know if they were raped, alive or dead.

And as far as I know nobody’s asking the freed hostages what happened to them, whatever their ages are.  They have enough trauma to work through.

I assume this information will be put together before too long, and the truth will come out.  But for the time being, nobody seems to be talking. I myself didn’t talk about a much more civilized rape for fifty odd years.