Human Rights Watch: Hamas attacks specifically targeted civilians

According to the Israeli government, about 1,200 Israelis were killed in the ambush as the militants entered the south of the country by land and air, taking many, including the Israeli military, by surprise.

The report is the human rights group’s most comprehensive allegation of war crimes related to the October 7 attack by Hamas and four other Palestinian armed groups, including the Al-Quds Brigades, the militant wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The killing of civilians and the hostage-taking were “central objectives of the planned attack and not subsequent actions,” the report says.

In a response to questions from Human Rights Watch in April, Hamas wrote that it had instructed militants not to attack civilians and blamed independent Gazans for seizing the opportunity to create chaos in Israel. The influx of independent 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 October 7 attack – continues to kill Palestinian civilians and Israeli forces are accused of committing war crimes in the enclave. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 38,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7. The ministry makes no distinction between civilians and fighters, but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

The Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday that they had killed or arrested 14,000 militants and killed half of Hamas’ military leaders since the war began. The figures could not be independently confirmed.

Last week, the Israeli army released the results of its first internal investigation into its October 7 response, which said it failed to defend Kibbutz Beeri, a town near the Gaza border. While it acknowledged “serious errors and mistakes” in its response there, it did not condemn individual commanders.

As part of its ongoing investigation into the deaths of civilians in the crossfire between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants on October 7, Human Rights Watch’s report found that there were at least two cases in which militants used civilians as “human shields,” which the organization called a war crime.

The report found that militants also tortured civilians, including dragging women by their hair and beating and kicking the 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. However, “no verifiable information” could be gathered about the alleged rape on October 7. The human rights organization said the Israeli government had rejected its request for information about that violence.

The organization said that while it was unable to “document any rape cases,” that does not mean there were no rapes on October 7. The full extent of the sexual violence that day “will likely never be fully known,” the report said, citing dynamics such as stigma and trauma surrounding rape, as well as the fact that many of those victims were likely killed.