An Israeli woman pays her respects at the memorial to the victims of the 2023 Hamas attacks at the Nova festival site in Reim, southern Israel, on Oct. 6.ILIA YEFIMOVICH/AFP/Getty Images
It started at dawn. Three years ago, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas led an attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostage. Many of the victims were young people attending a music festival who ran for their lives as these men descended on them, mercilessly attacking them. Some arrived via paraglider to carry out the deadly operation, called Al-Aqsa Flood.
The attack sparked a catastrophic war that has killed more than 74,000 Gazans, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Over here in Canada, a new special issue of the online journal The Ex-Puritan looks at these events through a literary lens, with a special “Resistance & Hope” issue, guest-edited by writer Bahar Orang. It features Ms. Orang’s own poem, Flood.
“Praise the paragliders, their gentle ascension, their unbroken morning, and of course their triumphant descension, their feet touching down,” it begins. “Praise October.”
There’s a lot of praise in the poem – for “the fighters, whose courage nourishes the world.” For “their cunning, their patience, the tanks on fire, the enemy fleeing.” Also for missiles, “the recognitions written in blood on each one, the names carved already into your own flesh.”
I found this hard to read. But not nearly as difficult as other reading I’ve done about that day.
There is nothing poetic about “Silenced No More,” a report by the independent Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children. The report was published in May. Canada’s Irwin Cotler is named as a principal contributor.
Warning: What you are about to read is disturbing.
“Victims endured brutal acts, including burning, mutilation, rape, restraining, forced insertion of objects into the genitalia, shootings to the faces and genital area, killings and abuses in front of family members, and executions,” states the report, which draws on extensive documentation, including original filmed survivor and witness testimonies, interviews, photographs, videos, official records and other primary materials from the attack sites.
While women and girls were the primary targets, the commission also found “a discernible pattern of boys and men who were subjected to extreme forms of sexual violence, sexual torture and sexual humiliation, including rape, forced nudity, mutilation, targeted burning in genitals and repeated sexual assaults.”
The report reveals that acts of kinocide – the systemic weaponization and targeting of families to maximize suffering – were deliberately perpetrated , including a case in which family members were coerced into performing sexual acts on one another.
A first responder said that he found the body of a man with “severed male genitalia in his mouth.” A volunteer discovered a woman’s body with “metal cans inserted into her vaginal area.” A witness saw a woman being raped by several assailants; then one of her attackers cut off her breast. “He throws it on the road, and they are playing with it,” he said.
Another witness testified: “I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams – screams you have never heard anywhere. … And after one finished, he told another to go up ‘Ta’al’ [in Arabic], like to the next one. … And after they finished, they shot her. … The moment they were killed, I said, ‘Oh my God, finally, it’s over.’ ”
“Praise beauty,” the poem instructs.
I wrote to The Ex-Puritan with a request to speak with its editor-in-chief, Ryanne Kap, as well as Ms. Orang, whose next book Grief Theory is scheduled to be published next year by Book*hug Press. I did not receive a reply by the deadline I gave them.
I also wrote to the Canada Council for the Arts, an arm’s-length funding agency of the federal government, to inquire about its funding for the journal, as its logo appears on The Ex-Puritan’s website. The Canada Council awarded the journal a four-year operating grant in 2024, with annual funding of $22,000.
In the e-mail, the Canada Council shared that it has started an internal review of funding provided to the magazine given concerns raised by this edition, and has retained legal counsel as part of the review.
“As an arm’s-length public arts funder, our mandate is to foster and promote the arts,” wrote Lise Ann Johnson, the director-general of arts and granting partnerships. “While funded magazines have editorial independence, freedom of expression in Canada exists within a broader legal framework and is subject to limits under Canadian law. This is why we aim to carefully balance the importance of freedom of expression with applicable legal limits.”
People are justifiably outraged about the sexual assault allegedly committed by seven men at Cornell University, known as the Cornell 7. Which makes the silence about the genital-burning, body-severing, gang-rapes of Oct. 7 even more outrageous. Not just the silence, but the denial. Erasure. Praise, even.