An Israeli expert who heads a civilian commission on sexual violence by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling on global bodies to recognize a “new crime against humanity,” which includes violence targeting families.

Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world should take a stand against the destruction of the family as a specific, recognizable weapon of conflict, aimed at terrorizing one’s relatives. She suggests calling the crime “kinocide”.

She also said in the interview that Canadians can demand that Hamas be brought to justice while also demanding accountability when Israeli troops commit sexual violence against Palestinians, without drawing a false equivalency.

“We need to see Canadian leadership in addressing the lack of moral clarity of international institutions,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview during a visit to Ottawa last month.

Elkayam-Levy is a professor of international law at the Hebrew University who has chaired Israel’s civilian commission on crimes against women and children since October 7.

The NGO initially set out to document patterns of sexual violence by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 attacks and against hostages it took in the Gaza Strip.

The aim was not to come up with the number of attacks, but instead to document the systemic factors in how women are raped, tortured and mutilated. The idea was to achieve an understanding that could help victims and their descendants deal with intergenerational trauma, and to create an archive that researchers and prosecutors could use for possible investigations.

Elkayam-Levy’s team reviewed hours of footage showing “very extreme forms of violence” from CCTV and what the militants themselves had recorded.

They began to notice six patterns of violence among the circumstances of more than 140 families.

This includes victims using social media to broadcast a person’s torture to their friends and family, including hostages and those killed. The second was the killing of parents in front of the children or vice versa, and the second was the destruction of family homes.

“We started to understand that there is something here, a unique form of violence,” she said. “The abuse of family relationships to increase harm, to increase suffering.”

Receive daily national news

Get the day’s top news, political, economic and current affairs headlines delivered to your inbox once a day.

Elkayam-Levy said she developed the term with the help of experts, including Canadians like former Attorney General Irwin Cotler. The rules on which the International Criminal Court is based mention families only in a procedural context, but not as a factor in war crimes, she pointed out.

“It’s a crime without a name,” she said, arguing that it prevents victims from healing.

She said experts on past conflicts agreed with her, saying the kinocide should have been a factor in how the world understood and sought justice for atrocities on various continents, such as how Islamic State militants have targeted Yazidi families since 2014. until 2017.

“Justice begins with this recognition; healing begins with recognition,” she said.

Elkayam-Levy noted that “gender-based violence” existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.

She also targeted “the silence of many international organizations and the lack of moral clarity”, calling out sexual violence on a global scale.

In particular, UN Women did not condemn Hamas’ sexual violence until nearly two months after the attack, a move Elkayam-Levy said set a poor precedent for upholding global norms.

“They have fueled the denial of sexual crimes,” she said, adding that the constant demand for physical evidence permeates social media “in a very anti-Semitic way.”

Israeli police said forensic evidence was not preserved in the chaos of the attacks, and people believed to be victims of sexual assault were often killed and immediately buried.

Acts of sexual violence were not part of the 43-minute video that Israel’s foreign ministry showed to reporters, including The Canadian Press, which was taken from security footage and videos taken by militants during the October 2023 attack.

In March, a UN envoy said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas had committed rape and “sexualized torture” during the attack, “including rape and gang rape”, despite the group’s denials.

That same month, freed hostage Amit Soussana went public about how her captors groped her and forced her into a “sexual act” that she asked not to be named.

As part of its recognized feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. Still, conservatives criticized liberals for not condemning Hamas’ sexual violence until five months after the attack.

In March, Ottawa came under fire for pledging $1 million to groups supporting Israeli victims of Hamas sexual violence and $1 million to Palestinian women facing “sexual and gender-based violence” from unspecified actors.

Global Affairs did not say whether it referred to domestic abuse or sexual violence by Israeli officials, prompting a rebuke from a senior Israeli envoy.

Human rights groups have long accused Israeli officials of sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank. In July, those concerns escalated when Israeli soldiers were accused of perpetuating the videotaped gang-rape of a Palestinian prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Far-right Israeli ministers have expressed support for mobs trying to free soldiers under investigation.

Elkayam-Levy said Canadians can call out Hamas’ patterns of sexual violence against Israelis, and also demand that the Israeli state investigate and prosecute its soldiers who commit acts of sexual violence against Palestinians.

“The fact that (Western leaders) are trying to make the right political decision, instead of the right moral decision, creates confusion, creates a moral fog – instead of giving space for all the victims to be heard about what they suffered,” she said.

For her, a “false parallel” is drawn between individual cases of sexual assault by soldiers who should be held accountable and a group that uses patterns of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.

Elkayam-Levy said that people should respect the principles of international law.

She is aware that many have argued instead that Israel’s military campaign violated international law and undermined systems designed to uphold human rights.

Elkayam-Levy has been critical of the Israeli government, claiming before the conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was seeking anti-democratic reforms in the country’s judiciary.

She was critical of his war cabinet for its lack of women and highlighted extensive media reports that female military personnel had discovered that Hamas was planning a major attack only to be overruled by male leaders.

She said that the world should condemn violence against families and try to prosecute those responsible. Otherwise, she fears fighters in other countries will adopt his brutal tactics.

Otherwise, “we will see an international system that will not last long,” she said.