The bestial crimes carried out by thousands of Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023, were unspeakable – but the authors of a newly released 79-page report want the world to speak about them and spread the word.
Writing for the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, they have even given it a name because at no time in history had this exact type of crime been committed. They called it “kinocide” – the targeting of families, calling it a new crime against humanity.
In preparation since February 2024, the report is authored by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, Dr. Michal Gilad, and Dr. Ilya Rudyak from the civil commission. The Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights (RWCHR), under the leadership of former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler, with whom Elyakim-Levy decided on the term “kinocide.”
The horrific assault in southern Israel resulted in over 1,200 deaths and the kidnapping of more than 250 people, including men, women, children, infants, the elderly, and disabled people, all in one day. The heinous acts of murder, torture, gender-based violence, and abduction spurred the immediate formation of the commission.
The commission’s goal is to advocate for the victims of sexual and gender-based violence and atrocities on October 7, as well as for their loved ones and communities.
What is Kinocide?
By coining the term kinocide, the report exposes the deliberate, widespread exploitation and destruction of familial bonds to intensify victims’ suffering, highlighting the profound and lasting harm inflicted on individuals, communities, and societies. She noted that the Dvora Institute calls for urgent international recognition of the term as it describes a new, distinct international crime against humanity and presents legal and policy recommendations to close gaps in international criminal law, ensure accountability, and prevent such atrocities in the future.
GENOCIDE, AS practiced by the Nazis, is directed against a group of people – “national, ethnical, racial or religious,” according to the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention – but kinocide is a specific type of assault against a group, using the relationship between family members and their emotional, identity, cultural, symbolic, material and other bonds, as a way to maximize the intended harm of the attack.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Elkayam-Levy – a leading international law expert who teaches at Reichman University in Herzliya and who founded and chairs the commission – said that the world must know. This includes government and religious leaders, the UN, parliamentarians, legislators, and members of the Hague International Criminal Court, which has castigated and “tried” in absentia Israeli leaders and threatened them and IDF officers with imprisonment.
She has already presented the report to 300 very influential leaders at the Halifax International Security Forum, an annual summit for international government and military officials, academic experts, authors, and entrepreneurs, held in Nova Scotia, Canada.
The acts of terrorist inhumanity included cutting women in their homes, murdering them, forcing their children to watch or coercing parents to watch what was done to their children, and then sending photos and videos to all the contacts on the victims’ mobile phones. There were 17 minutes of video in which families were murdered at a balloon-and-blood-filled party for a daughter’s 18th birthday.
Elkayam-Levy said that the commission is assembling an archive of videos, texts, photos, and more – many produced by Hamas – to document these crimes, giving a voice to the victims and raising awareness of war crimes committed against women, children, and families. For this work, she was awarded the prestigious 2024 Israel Prize, Israel’s highest civilian honor in the field of Solidarity, topping many other prestigious awards she has received.
The archive, she declared, will serve as a vital resource for research, education, and advocacy, ensuring that the stories of those impacted are preserved, recognized, and remembered for generations to come. “We will bear witness! The murders weren’t random but carried out systematically to create the most vicious effects,” she said.
The report has received widespread support from leading international figures such as Sheryl Sandberg, a member of the Civilian Commission’s Advisory Board; Prof. Yuval Shany of Hebrew University; and Prof. David Crane, the founding prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
“In an Age of Mass Atrocity, the systematic brutalization of families by Hamas – horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened – constitute the Crime Against Humanity of Kinocide,” said Cotler from Canada. “There have been, tragically enough, too many mass atrocities in our time, but this one harbors an unprecedented evil: the glorification and celebration of these genocidal atrocities in real time on digital media, amidst the call to commit these mass atrocities ‘again and again and again.’ This must serve as a wake-up call for the community of democracies to combat such mass atrocities whatever their source.”
SHERYL SANDBERG, a leading technology executive and the founder of Lean In (which empowers women and girls to take the lead and pursue their dreams), stated that “On October 7, Hamas struck at the heart of the Jewish community: the family unit. Hamas’s atrocities against families were designed to break one of life’s strongest bonds. They tried, but they must never be allowed to succeed. The commission’s report serves as a clarion call to the international community to stand up and take action to protect families across the globe from future acts of violence.”
Mukesh Kapila, a former special adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and emeritus professor of Global Health & Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Manchester, said: “Our world is not short of atrocity crimes but lacks adequate remedies despite established legal frameworks. [Is this] perhaps because we tend to lump together all the myriad cruelties that humans inflict on each other, and we stop trying to understand the all-important gruesome detail of what perpetrators do in particular circumstances and why? That way, the broad-brush labels of international criminal law short-change accountability and ill-serve justice.
“This original study challenges that laziness through a forensic focus on Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis,” Kapila said. “A compelling case is made that the weaponization of families and the uniquely horrible mental, emotional, and physical destruction this wreaks deserves recognition and penalization as a specific war crime, and a crime against humanity that sometimes could also be a constituent act of genocide.”
“What the Civil Commission on Oct 7 Crimes has done is what Jews have done throughout the centuries in the aftermath of tragedy – bring insight to anguish [in order] to light a path through it,” commented Roya Hakakian, an author and co-founder of Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. “But most importantly, the commission has taken a major step toward eradicating evil by giving it a name.
Lawyer Merav Israeli Amarant, CEO of the civil commission, concluded that “the report reflects months of meticulous and dedicated work by the civilian commission team. From the moment we recognized a new war crime unfolding, we committed ourselves to entering the most sacred and intimate spaces of the families affected – places of safety that became scenes of unimaginable violence.
“We gathered and examined every piece of documentation from these sites, listened to heart-wrenching testimonies from family members, and walked among the broken glass, children’s toys, and bloodstains that marked the devastation,” she said. “We employed every tool at our disposal to amplify the voices of those silenced, to demand international recognition of this nameless cruelty, and to pursue justice for the victims.”
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