Why must Jewish women beg to be believed? Why does that sacred mantra of the progressive classes – “Believe women” – suddenly expire when the victims are Jews? Consider the extraordinary events at the UN this week. A former Israeli hostage who was savagely brutalised by Hamas told her harrowing tale as a UN special rapporteur just sat there stony-faced, almost scornful, her face etched with haughty cynicism. It was a sickening spectacle.
“Believe women” died on 8 October 2023
The former hostage was Ilana Gritzewsky. The imperious official was Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur for violence against women and girls. Well, some women and girls. As Ms Gritzewsky recounted the sexual savagery of Hamas, her voice trembling with quiet, dignified fury, Ms Alsalem looked like she would rather be anywhere else. “Please look at me”, said Gritzewsky at one point. It was a truly shaming moment for the UN.
Ms Gritzewsky survived 55 days in the dank, cruel captivity of Gaza’s Islamofascists. She was seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz, along with her partner, Matan Zangauker. She was sexually assaulted as she was kidnapped. A gun-toting brute put his hand up her shirt and grabbed her breast. Such was the level of violence visited on her that she lost consciousness. When she awoke in the hellscape of Hamas-ruled Gaza, she was on a bare floor with her breasts exposed and her pants pulled down. One of her tormentors later hugged her and said she would never be released because “I want to marry you”.
Watch closely new video showing the U.N. reaction: as courageous former hostage Ilana Gritzewsky confronts October 7th denier Reem al-Salem—by recounting the horrific abuse she suffered from Hamas—the U.N. rapporteur on violence against women sits there stone-faced. No empathy. pic.twitter.com/bxx7ZWNo7C
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) June 23, 2026
Her testimony at the UN Security Council in Geneva on Tuesday was chilling and courageous. “They touched me and abused me”, she said of the pogromists who stormed her kibbutz on 7 October. The men were driven by a hellish dream of “murdering, kidnapping and burning” us, she said. She bluntly described the fascist terror she was subjected to: “I was beaten and mutilated before blacking out.” She woke up “half-naked with seven terrorists standing over me”. She still doesn’t know what was done to her in “those lost moments”.
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Even following her release in November 2023, she suffered both physically and emotionally. The pogromists left her with “a broken hip, a broken jaw and a scarred soul”.
Then came the salt of denialism rubbed into her wounds of anti-Semitic violence. Many in the West refused to believe her and the other victims of Hamas’s sexual atrocities. This bigoted unbelief went all the way to the top of the UN. Reem Alsalem herself has indicated that, whilst she does not deny or dispute that sexual violence took place on 7 October, it has not been proven that that violence included rape. Indeed, just six months ago, Alsalem claimed that “no independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October”.
Just imagine that: a global spokesperson on violence against women sowing seeds of doubt about violence against women. Ms Alsalem was flat-out wrong, of course. Numerous investigations – including, belatedly, by the UN itself – have found evidence of extreme sexual horrors, including rape, carried out by Hamas during its carnival of anti-Semitic butchery. Israel has released video confessions from some of the perpetrators of that barbarous misogyny.
So how bracing it was – and moving – to see one of the victims of Hamas’s sexual terror confront the arrogant scoffers of the UN.
“Jewish women were raped, abused and humiliated and you, special rapporteur, chose silence and denial”, said Gritzewsky. Alsalem looked irritated. She seemed visibly irked. Her face calcified into a look of exasperated indifference. At one point she looked down at her laptop. “Please look at me”, said Gritzewsky, her voice and body shaking with emotion.
“Please look at me” – that pained plea was aimed not only at one cold, aloof bureaucrat but at the entire Western intelligentsia. Denialism of Israeli women’s suffering is rife among the keffiyeh classes. The same people who said “Believe women” refused to believe the women who were hunted, beaten, mutilated and violated by modern-day pogromists. Clearly the principles of MeToo do not apply to the women of “the Zionist entity”. Well, you know how slippery and deceitful Those People can be.
Will they now, finally, look at Ms Gritzewsky, as she has pleaded?
There was no other way to explain the activist class’s sudden retraction of belief, their brutish exclusion of Israeli Jews from the MeToo universe, other than as rank, blind bigotry. “Believe women” died on 8 October 2023. After that, progressives adopted a new slogan, one they could never quite bring themselves to say out loud: “Believe fascists.” So mind-fried were they by the paranoia of Israelophobia that they preferred to believe the denials of avowed anti-Semitic terrorists over the testimonies of Jews like Ilana Gritzewsky.
Will they now, finally, look at Ms Gritzewsky, as she has pleaded? Will they listen to her story of sexual degradation, and to all the other women who either experienced or witnessed sexual terror on that grim bloody day? I doubt it. They are so lost to the swirling cult of Israel-hate that even this searing testimony is unlikely to stir them back to decency and truth. I’m starting to understand why so many in 1930s Europe scoffed upon hearing tales of anti-Jewish terror from the East.
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