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Hamas Weaponized Sexual Assault to Deliver a Nessage
(The Hill) Paul Becker and Joel Poznansky - The world was shocked on Oct. 7 not just by the scale of the Hamas attack on Israel but by its brutality and the sexual atrocities committed against women. The tactics involving extreme sexual violence and barbarous acts meted out against Israeli women, children and babies were new and deliberate. It is likely that these terrorists, intensively trained and rehearsed, had been purposely instructed to perform outrageous acts of sexual violence and to publish them on social media. Hamas leaders may have believed that these outrages, if publicized graphically, would cause debilitating fear and traumatize all Israelis, and that this new level of horror would persuade a significant segment of the Israeli population to feel defeated and leave their country. We believe it is more likely that Hamas leaders gambled that without the outrage caused by their brutality, they would not succeed in luring Israel into what they believed would be an unwinnable urban war in Gaza. Rear-Adm. Paul Becker, USN (ret.), is a former director for intelligence of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Joel Poznansky served as a captain in the British Army. Both are active with the Jewish War Veterans of America.