UN official Reem Alsalem denies evidence of Hamas sexual violence despite UN’s own report

The UN official Reem Alsalem, who currently serves as the organization’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, denied on Friday the existence of well-documented evidence of Hamas sexual violence and rape against Israeli women during the October 7, 2023 massacre.

“No independent investigation found that rape took place on October 7,” Alsalem falsely claimed, despite a UN report that explicitly recognized Hamas’ systematic use of sexual violence during the atrocities against Israeli civilians.

Alsalem, who was born in Jordan, also denied the widespread support among Gazans for the Hamas massacre of Israeli women, children and the elderly.

“No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza,” she claimed in a social media post. However, some Gazan civilians actively joined Hamas during the Oct. 7 atrocities.

In August, human rights lawyer Anne Herzberg, a legal advisor for NGO Monitor, criticized the UN report on Hamas’ use of sexual violence as symbolic and largely ineffective.

“You don't need a UN report to tell people what happened. If you're in court, you have the evidence – I don't need it filtered through a UN official to know that someone has been the victim of egregious international crimes,” Herzberg explained. The UN also controversially put Israel on notice for alleged sexual crimes against Gazan civilians.

While the value of the UN’s 2025 report on Hamas sexual violence is debated, it nevertheless represents an improvement compared to 2024, when the UN was criticized for excluding Hamas from its sexual-violence blacklist.

Alsalem has a history of denying documented facts that contradict what critics describe as her anti-Israel narrative. In March 2024, she claimed she was not aware of the systematic missile attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas against primarily Israeli civilian communities. Both groups fired thousands of rockets and missiles at Israeli towns following the Oct. 7 attack.

Even as she denied well-documented evidence of Hamas sexual violence and rape, Alsalem co-authored a February UN report with UN official Francesca Albanese accusing Israeli soldiers of sexually abusing Gazan females — a claim strongly rejected by the Israeli military.

When asked by Israel’s Channel 13 what she based the accusations against the IDF on, Alsalem said she had obtained “reasonably credible information” from unnamed sources she could not reveal, as well as the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. That NGO is chaired by Richard Falk, a controversial anti-Israel conspiracy theorist who has falsely claimed that Israel was behind the Boston Marathon bombing.

In January 2024, the UN dispatched Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, on a fact-finding mission to Israel. Patten’s visit resulted in a 24-page report stating that there was “clear and convincing” evidence of systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women during the Oct. 7 attack, as well as against female Israeli hostages in Gaza.

“The mission was a difficult one in terms of what we heard and the details,” Patten told reporters. The report drew on more than 50 hours of footage, 34 independent interviews and 5,000 documents detailing Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli women.

“Nine experts drawn from the UN, including… specialists trained in safe and ethical interviewing of survivors/victims and witnesses of sexual violence crimes, a forensic pathologist, and a digital and open-source information analyst,” concluded that Hamas terrorists had indeed raped and sexually violated Israeli women.

The expert team also assessed “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the October 7 attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: The Nova music festival site and its surroundings, route 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”

In March, the UK released a Parliamentary Commission Report on the Hamas Oct. 7 attack, led by prominent British historian Andrew Roberts.

Roberts described the massacre as “one of the most evil crimes in history” and emphasized the need to document Hamas’ unprecedented crimes. He explained why he accepted the task of documenting the attack.

"But when it came to being asked to do this, I accepted immediately because I’m an historian and I believe in historical truth. And the idea that in 50 or 100 years time, people might say that the massacres didn’t take place, rapes didn’t take place, torture didn’t take place," Roberts said in an interview with Christian journalist Paul Calvert.

"In future generations, when people come up and say, ‘Oh, it never happened...,’ they will whack this 319-page report down on the table, with all of the endless footnotes and facts, and evidence and witness statements, that shows beyond any doubt whatsoever that one of the most evil crimes against humanity did indeed take place on October 7, 2023," he concluded.