UN Official Reem Alsaem Claims ‘No Rapes’ on October 7

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Dec 5, 2025

Competing in the antisemitism sweepstakes along with Francesca Albanese, Roger Waters, Ye, Guy Pearce, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, is a UN official of whom you may not have heard until now. She is Reem Alsalem, who is the UN Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls. So you would think, given her job, that she would. take a keen interest in identifying and publicizing examples of such violence, especially of rape. But that turns out not to be the case.

Instead, Reem Alsalem has denied that any rapes occurred when Hamas smashed into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, despite the evidence of eyewitnesses, photographs, corpses of raped girls and women, and the proud boasts, which some of the rapists themselves recorded on their phones when they telephoned their families and friends in Gaza about what they had done. More on this grisly tale that Reem Alsalem refuses to accept can be found here: “Over 300 rabbis, Jewish leaders call for removal of UN official who denied October 7 rapes,” by Grace Gilson, JTA, December 3, 2025:

Over 300 Jewish leaders, including women’s rights advocates and rabbis, urged the United Nations on Tuesday to remove Reem Alsalem, the UN rapporteur on violence against women and girls, for denying that rape occurred during Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

The letter, which was addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, came two weeks after Alsalem claimed in a post on X that “No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”…

Many people, including non-Israelis and non-Jews, have been shown the carnage at the kibbutzim. They saw the remains of families whose members had been tied together with wire, and then burned alive. They saw the bodies of women whose breasts had been sliced off before they were killed, and the bodies of men, their genitalia sliced off and their eyes gouged out. They saw the corpses of women and girls who had been raped, and then were stabbed to death as they were being raped. They saw other corpses of girl soldiers, who had been raped and then been stabbed or shot in their vaginas.

This evidence of rape and mass rape has been accepted and reported on all over the world. In two UN reports, not by Reem Alsalem, the evidence of “rape and gang rape” at the kibbutzim, and in the fields where the Nova Music Festival had been held, was considered to be convincing.

Dispute over whether sexual violence took place as Hamas murdered about 1,200 people in Israel on October 7 has solidified as a point of sustained interest for some of Israel’s staunchest critics who allege that Israel and its supporters are using claims of rape as propaganda….

No doubt the atrocities, including sexual ones, that Hamas carried out on October 7 do buttress Israel’s claims about the terror group’s barbarism. But that is different from saying that Israel has made up claims about rape to use as propaganda.

In the X exchange that spurred the new letter, Alsalem was arguing with another user about the Israeli government’s prosecution of soldiers accused of abusing a Palestinian detainee.

A day later, Alsalem posted a link to a Substack podcast from October where she criticized the credibility of the March 2024 UN report and said she had sought contact with the Israeli government to confirm its findings but had not received a response.

There was no response from the Israeli government, because it is well aware of Reem Alsalem’s anti-Israel animus, and knows that whatever it were to say to her, she would twist and use to defame the Jewish state. They were not going to provide her with that fodder.

“The media, certain organizations, and the world basically fell into the trap that Israel set up, which is to project that there was barbaric sexual violence being committed by these barbarian Palestinian men, and it was spun around and disseminated and very much used in order to then justify the genocide,” said Alsalem on the podcast.

So all that evidence — those mutilated corpses, that eyewitness testimony, the boasts of the Hamas rapists themselves — was all a clever fabrication of those diabolical Zionists. They wanted the world to think that “ barbarian Palestinian men” were capable of such things as the mass rapes and tortures and mutilations of girls and women when, in truth, Reem Alsalem wants us all to understand — why would she lie? — none of that happened.

Will Antonio Guterres at long last do something halfway decent when it comes to Israel and the Jews? Will he discharge Reem Alsalem, who is supposedly a sanctified expert — the UN’s “special rapporteur” — on violence toward women and girls, but instead turns out to be a defender of lies and a denier of the truth, when it comes to those Palestinian Arabs who have committed every conceivable kind of sexual violence on helpless Jewish women and girls? How much more of a laughingstock does Guterres want the UN to become?