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Two and a half years after October 7, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy is preparing to release the document she believes will close the debate over whether Hamas committed systematic sexual violence that day.
In a candid sit-down with The Jerusalem Report editor-in-chief Ruth Marks Eglash, the chair of the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children describes the 300-page report, built on survivor testimonies, forensic analysis, and footage filmed by the terrorists themselves, as “a watershed moment, really a moment of before and after.”
Once it is released, she tells Eglash, “The question won’t be whether this happened, but what are the consequences?”
The conversation moves past the now-familiar denials, including professor Judith Butler’s claim that she had not seen the evidence and a senior UN official’s public dismissal as recently as November 2025, and into the original conceptual work that has come out of the commission’s two and a half years of documentation.
Elkayam-Levy walks Eglash through “kinocide,” the term her team coined with former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, for the systematic weaponization of family bonds, and through the new report’s three phases: the attack, the abduction, and captivity in Gaza.
Kinocide effect
For the first time, she tells Marks Eglash, the report documents cases in which family members were sexually abused or threatened in front of one another on October 7, and a case from captivity in which relatives were forced to commit sexual acts on each other.
Survivors of parallel atrocities in Sudan, Sierra Leone, and the Yazidi communities, she says, asked her commission to record their suffering alongside Israel’s: “Until we heard you, we felt we were living on a different planet.”
What Elkayam-Levy reveals about the human cost of the work is among the interview’s most affecting material. She describes the forensic image-analysis sessions her team has had to absorb, the proofreaders rereading the worst pages again and again, and her insistence that the documentation does not “haunt” them only out of “respect to the victims.”
She tells Eglash she expects the new report to be carried into courts, parliaments, and feminist scholarship by others, as the commission’s earlier Kinocide report was.
The UK Parliament has already cited that one. “We cannot prevent what is not known,” she says, and that line anchors her case for why a 300-page legal document still matters, even as the world’s attention has moved elsewhere.
