Biden calls on world to forcefully condemn rape of women during Hamas attack

US president decries ‘unimaginable cruelty; of reported sexual violence and says we ‘can’t just look away’

Joe Biden has called on the world to condemn the rape and mutilation of women and girls by Hamas during its deadly attack inside Israel on 7 October.

Speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Boston, the US president said female survivors and witnesses to the attacks have shared "horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty" during the Hamas attack, that killed 1,200 people and saw 240 others taken into Gaza as hostages.

Mr Biden said: "Reports of women raped - repeatedly raped - and their bodies being mutilated while still alive - of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling."

He called said that such alleged crimes should be condemned "without equivocation" and "without exception" and that the world "can't just look away at what's going on”.

"It's on all of us - government, international organisations, civil society and businesses - to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation. Without equivocation, without exception," Mr Biden said.

Mr Biden's comments come as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has sought to put greater focus on the sexual violence it says Hamas committed. Recently released hostages have shared testimonies of sexual violence and abuse during their time in Gaza. Hamas has denied that militants committed sexual assaults.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Mr Netanyahu railed against the lack of international response.

He said: "I say to the women's rights organisations, to the human rights organisations, you've heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation – where the hell are you?"

On Monday, hundreds of people including women’s activists and diplomats representing about 40 countries took part in an event to lay out testimony from those who saw the aftermath of the Hamas attack and their accounts of the sexual violence carried out. The former US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg were among at the event who criticised what they called a global failure to support women who were raped, sexually assaulted and in some cases killed.

“Silence is complicity,” Ms Sandberg said.

Israel has said it is investigating several cases of sexual assault and rape from the Hamas attack, with witnesses and medical experts saying militants committed a series of rapes and other attacks before killing the victims during the October 7 attack.

Experts have been piecing together evidence in a complicated case because there are no known victims to testify, and there is limited forensic evidence.

Last month, Israel’s police chief presented videotaped testimony of a rape witness at the Supernova music festival, where Israel says hundreds were killed in the Hamas attack. Her face blurred, she said she watched militants gang-rape a woman as she lay on the ground. The woman in the video described watching the militants as she pretended to be dead.

“I couldn’t understand what I saw,” she said.