Israel’s government says about 1,200 Israelis died in the ambush as militants infiltrated the country’s south by land and air, catching many — including Israel’s military — by surprise.
The report is the rights organization’s most extensive allegation of war crimes in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and four other armed Palestinian groups, including the al-Quds Brigades, the militant wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The killing of civilians and the taking of hostages were “central aims of the planned attack, and not actions that occurred as an afterthought,” the report found.
Hamas wrote in an April reply to questions from Human Rights Watch that it had instructed militants not to target civilians, and blamed unaffiliated Gazans it said had seized the opportunity to wreak havoc in Israel. The influx of unaffiliated Palestinians and other armed groups “led to many mistakes,” Hamas wrote, according to the report.
The report comes as the war in Gaza — Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack — continues to kill Palestinian civilians, with Israeli forces alleged to have committed war crimes in the enclave. More than 38,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.
The Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday claimed to have killed or apprehended 14,000 militants and to have killed half of Hamas’s military leaders since the start of the war. The figures could not be independently confirmed.
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Last week, the IDF released the findings of its first internal probe into its response on Oct. 7, saying that it failed to defend Kibbutz Beeri, a town near the border with Gaza. It admitted to “severe mistakes and errors” in its response there, but it stopped short of condemning individual commanders.
Amid ongoing investigations into the deaths of civilians in crossfire between IDF troops and Palestinian militants on Oct. 7, the Human Rights Watch report found at least two instances of militants using civilians as “human shields,” an act the organization said is a war crime.
Militants also tortured civilians, the report found, including actions such as dragging women by their hair and hitting and kicking people they abducted.
The report found evidence of “sexual and gender-based violence” by militants such as forced nudity and the posting of “sexualized images” on social media. But it was “not able to gather verifiable information” about alleged rape on Oct. 7. The rights organization said the Israeli government denied its request for information on such violence.
The organization said that although it was unable to “document any cases of rape,” that did not mean that rape did not occur on Oct. 7. The full extent of sexual violence that day “will likely never be fully known,” the report said, citing dynamics such as stigma and trauma surrounding rape and the fact that many such victims were probably killed.
