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By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
At a sidebar event at the United Nations to raise awareness of sexual crimes committed by Hamas during the October 7th massacre, army reservist Shari Mendes spoke about what her unit saw at the Shura base as they prepared female bodies for burial.
The event, entitled “Hear Our Voices: Sexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 Hamas terror attack,” had as its keynote speaker, Sheryl Sandberg formerly an executive at Facebook, as well as other speakers, including those who, like Mendes, dealt directly with the dead bodies of women.
The purpose of the event was to demand that the United Nations regard the sexual violence committed by Hamas as war crimes and to address the silence in the UN and among many global women’s group.
After nearly two months, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced an investigation into the crimes.
Shari Mendes reported that many of the corpses had tense facial expressions and clenched fists that expressed the agony and torment of their final moments.
She described one female soldier’s arm was broken in so many places it was difficult to fit inside a body bag.
The entire side of one corpse was entirely shredded by a grenade and hard to identify.
Mendes reported that her team commander saw bodies of female soldiers that had been shot in the crotch, the breasts and inside the vagina.
The faces of many were shot many times in what appeared to be an intent to mutilate them beyond recognition.
Mendes said, “Heads and faces were covered in blood. They were shot in the eyes, face, and skull,”
One female soldier’s face had been shot so many times that the head had nearly fallen off.
Others’ brains were falling out of their skulls.
“Our unit has seen bodies that were beheaded or had limbs cut off, mutilated,” Mendes said. “One young woman came in with no legs: they had been cut off. We saw several severed heads, one with a large kitchen knife still embedded in the neck.”
Mendes said that, in some cases, the disfigurement of the faces was done after death, because it was clear they were made when there was no more blood left in the body and the corpses had already bled out.
