The Israel Defense Forces' Military Intelligence Directorate released footage on Thursday of a captured Palestinian terrorist admitting to interrogators that he violently raped an Israeli girl on Oct. 7.
Manar Mahmoud Muhammad Kasem, identified as a member of Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad's "naval forces," was arrested by IDF troops in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Yunis earlier this month.
Asked by an interrogator from the military's 504 intelligence unit about the events of Oct. 7, Kasem describes crossing into Israel from Gaza with a handgun and two grenades alongside other Islamic Jihad terrorists.
"I entered the kibbutz and went inside the nearest house. When I first entered, there was no one, and then I entered a room and someone was there who was scared," he says in the video.
The girl begged for help, but Kasem instead "laid her down, started undressing her and did what I did," he then reveals. "I raped her. … She pushed me, it didn't last long [as] l heard shouting outside."
Qasem described the girl as wearing a blue miniskirt, a white shirt, sandals, and pink underwear. The rape lasted around 60 to 90 seconds.
Shortly thereafter, two armed terrorists of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades entered, and they took the girl and her mother with them.
The Islamic Jihad terrorist then left for the Gaza Strip, but not before throwing a grenade at a group of Israeli civilians in the kibbutz and shooting one of them. Kasem confessed he wounded a man in his lower body but said he did not know whether the victim survived.
Israel is investigating many accounts of rapes that occurred during the Oct. 7 invasion of the northwestern Negev, when thousands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen stormed the border, killed some 1,200 people, wounded thousands more and took 253 hostages.
The full scope of the terrorists' sex crimes will never be known because many of the victims and witnesses were murdered on Oct. 7.
On Tuesday, released Israeli hostage Amit Soussana revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she was sexually assaulted during the 54 days she spent in Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip.
While several female hostages freed in the November cease-fire have alluded to being sexually abused in Gaza, Soussana's interview marked the first time that a released hostage publicly detailed Hamas sex crimes.
Soussana told the Times she was held in a children's bedroom, chained by her ankle. On multiple occasions, a guard named Muhammad would enter, sit next to her on the bed, lift up her shirt and touch her, she said.
Some two weeks into her captivity, Muhammad attacked Soussana after briefly freeing her from the shackles to use the bathroom. The guard forced her to "commit a sexual act on him" at gunpoint, she said.
The Times noted that Soussana's account was consistent with what she told a gynecologist and a social worker within hours of her release. The newspaper reviewed medical files to verify the claims.
At least one in 10 of the hostages released during the temporary truce was sexually assaulted or abused, a doctor who treated some of the 110 persons released from captivity told the Associated Press last year.
This JNS.org report was republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate.