This year’s International Women’s Day (marked on March 8) should be about justice for women like Shiri Bibas — a mother whose brutal abduction, with her two red-haired babies, became one of the most haunting images of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. For 503 agonizing days, Shiri’s fate remained unknown. When Hamas finally returned her body, it was only after one final act of cruelty — first handing over the remains of another woman, falsely claiming it was Shiri, along with the bodies of her children. They had been murdered in cold blood.
Hamas’s brutality did not stop at murder; the psychological warfare has continued unabated for all of the hostages — especially women. In a grotesque theater of terror, during the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, Hamas staged “release ceremonies,” parading living young female hostages like trophies through throngs of armed men that pushed, jeered, and cheered their torment. And yet, the international community, including leading women’s rights organizations, continue to meet these horrors, and Shiri’s death, with silence. (RELATED: Israeli Hostages Turn Humiliation into Victory)
For this year’s International Women’s Day, many activists are galvanizing around the theme of “Accelerate Action,” meant to emphasize the importance of taking swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality. How can anyone who actually cares about women call for accelerating action when international institutions, NGOs, and the human rights community utterly failed Shiri Bibas and the hundreds of Israeli women who were taken hostage, raped, mutilated, and murdered on Oct. 7? The refusal to acknowledge these horrors is not an oversight; it is a pervasive, deliberate practice.
“Believe All Women,” Except an Israeli Woman
Survivors and rescue teams have provided undeniable evidence of the brutal sexual violence inflicted upon Israeli women on that horrific day and on female hostages during captivity. The horror was broadcast by Hamas itself, and later, captured Hamas terrorists revealed that they had been explicitly ordered to rape Israeli women. (RELATED: Mistreatment of Hostages and Prisoners Fracture the Ceasefire)
Despite this overwhelming evidence, the United Nations and global women’s advocacy groups blatantly avoid acknowledging Jewish and Israeli women as victims. Nearly two months passed after Oct. 7 before the U.N. Women executive director even mentioned what she called “disturbing reports” of gender-based violence — without specifying Hamas or acknowledging Israeli victims. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres waited a full eight weeks and only acted under pressure before condemning Hamas’s sexual violence.
Even more alarming is the ongoing denial of feminist organizations and advocacy groups, many of which still refuse to condemn Hamas’s atrocities — or worse, continue to justify them. Following the lead of organizations such as the Palestinian Feminist Collective and Samidoun in dismissing the reports of sexual violence as “Israeli propaganda,” activists, including senior faculty at major universities in the U.S. and Europe, have openly celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre as an act of “resistance.” Some feminist groups, including signatories of the Feminists for Justice in Palestine statement, have outright denied the rapes, claiming there is “no credible evidence.”
More disturbing is the fact that taxpayer money from democracies, including the United States and European countries, support and enable many of the NGOs and U.N. agencies that have been whitewashing these crimes.
For example, EU-funded Palestinian NGO MIFTAH has continued to deny the systematic rapes of Israeli women on Oct. 7, referring to them as “Israeli allegations and misinformation, used to justify this genocide.” And Mustafa Barghouti, president of the the Swedish-funded Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), has tweeted: “The Israeli establishment and government are conducting a black media campaign spreading the false propaganda about rape of Israeli women on the 7th of October to justify the horrific war crimes they are committing in Gaza.” Ultimately, governments are enabling these falsehoods, shielding perpetrators from accountability.
Similar patterns were seen among U.N. agencies, which receive U.S. and European funding. The U.N.’s “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory” demonstrated an immoral double standard in its reporting. While it acknowledged “patterns indicative of sexual violence” committed by Hamas, it absurdly claimed there was no evidence that militants were ordered to commit such crimes.
In an absurd attempt at “balance,” in the same report, the Commission asserted — purely on the speculative and baseless allegations of anti-Israel propaganda groups — that IDF strip searches of detainees were “intended to humiliate and degrade Palestinians.” This blatant bias delegitimizes real victims and erodes the credibility of international human rights institutions.
Hypocrisy of the Feminist Movement
If Shiri Bibas had been a mother from any other country or of any other background, if her children had been anyone else’s, all of these groups would have reacted differently.
For decades, women’s rights organizations have prided themselves on championing justice for all victims of sexual violence, regardless of nationality, race, or creed. In contrast, their selective outrage about the Gaza war reveals an ugly truth: their advocacy is not about universal human rights but political convenience. The same organizations that demanded “believe all women” during the #MeToo movement still refuse to believe Israeli women, despite overwhelming forensic, testimonial, and visual evidence.
Adding to the disgrace, many of the NGOs that deny Hamas’s crimes receive funding from Western democracies. This means taxpayer money is directly supporting organizations that erase the suffering of Israeli women. This is unacceptable. Governments must immediately reassess and change their funding policies to defund any group that engages in rape denial.
This International Women’s Day, it is imperative that advocacy groups — and the governments and organizations that fund them — hold accountable the institutions that have failed Israelis. True feminism does not cherry-pick which victims deserve justice. If the international community truly cares about gender-based violence, it must accelerate action by demanding accountability from global women’s organizations, defund NGOs that refuse to recognize Israeli victims, and hold the U.N. to account for its double standards.
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Israel Barely Escapes Another Oct. 7
