By: Fern Sidman – Jewish Voice News

In a sweeping and unusually unified rebuke, more than 300 prominent Jewish leaders—including nationally recognized women’s rights advocates, clergy, academics, Holocaust scholars, and organizational heads—have issued an urgent petition demanding the removal of Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. The signatories contend that Alsalem is perpetuating dangerous historical revisionism by publicly denying that rape and other forms of sexual violence occurred during the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023.

According to documentation reviewed by The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the letter—addressed to UN Secretary-General António Guterres—was dispatched Tuesday morning and expressed “horror and outrage” at a deliberate distortion of documented crimes. Their alarm was prompted by Alsalem’s post on X (formerly Twitter) two weeks earlier, declaring that “no independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”

Jewish leaders say this claim is not only demonstrably false, but weaponizes the authority of a UN human rights office to sanitize or erase sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women, men, and girls during the Hamas attacks that left approximately 1,200 civilians murdered and more than 250 abducted.

As reported on Monday by the JTA, the petition cites two official UN reports—released in March 2024 and July 2025—which concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Hamas terrorists committed acts of sexual violence at multiple sites along southern Israel’s border communities. These reports, authored by an independent team of UN investigators with broad human-rights mandates, documented patterns of assault that included rape, gang rape, and sexualized mutilation.

In direct contradiction to these findings, Alsalem, a Jordanian human-rights lawyer appointed as special rapporteur in 2021, insisted that no such acts had been credibly established, characterizing international alarm over sexual violence as propaganda deployed to justify Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Her claim was met with outrage across Jewish communities and women’s rights circles. What is striking, according to the JTA report, is how quickly the backlash coalesced into a cross-communal coalition rarely seen in debates involving the UN.

The letter—shared with JTA shortly after being submitted—was organized by Professor Amy Elman, a scholar at Kalamazoo College known for her work on antisemitism and state responses to sexual violence, and Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

Elman, in a statement cited in the JTA report said: “The targeted sexual abuse of Israelis by Hamas and its supporters is one weapon in the arsenal of those seeking Israel’s obliteration. It’s outrageous that deniers such as Reem Alsalem are aiding and abetting the sexual violence by claiming it never happened.”

The petition’s signatories include an array of figures not typically aligned on political questions, calling attention to the gravitas with which the Jewish community views the denial of sexual violence:

Deborah Lipstadt, U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism (recently concluded her term)

Prof. Phyllis Chesler –  Professor Emerita at CUNY & Leader of the Second Wave Feminist Movement

Judith Rosenbaum, CEO of the Jewish Women’s Archives

Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Rabbi Deborah Waxman, president of Reconstructing Judaism

Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, president of Hebrew College

Collectively, they argue that Alsalem’s statements are incompatible with her mandate to advocate for women’s rights and protect survivors of gender-based violence.

The denial of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attacks has become a hallmark of some of the most hardline anti-Israel voices globally. As JTA has noted in multiple reports, the issue has become a disturbingly common point of fixation among activists who accuse Israel of “weaponizing” rape allegations for propaganda purposes.

This rhetoric, advocates caution, mirrors other historic patterns—such as the longstanding minimization of the Bosnian genocide, the erasure of Yazidi women’s testimonies about ISIS captivity, and even Holocaust denialism itself.

What differentiates the current case, according to the petition, is that the denial is coming from an international official whose responsibility is to document, investigate, and support victims of gender-based violence—not erase their suffering.

Medoff told JTA in a statement: “If a UN official made such a remark concerning rape victims from any other ethnic or religious group, there would be an international uproar. The same standard should apply to Israeli Jewish women who were sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists.”

Jewish leaders argue that Alsalem’s comments create a chilling effect, signaling to survivors that their experiences are politically inconvenient and therefore unworthy of recognition. This, they say, is particularly destructive in a post-genocide context, where denial serves as the final stage of atrocity.

Alsalem’s claims are directly refuted by the UN’s own material, as documented by the JTA:

UN Report – March 2024

This investigation, overseen by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated that there was “credible and consistent” evidence of sexual assault across several locations—particularly at the Nova music festival site and in kibbutzim near Israel’s border with Gaza.

UN Report – July 2025

A subsequent UN inquiry expanded on these findings, concluding that the sexual violence was “systematic,” “intentional,” and “part of a broader strategy to inflict terror and humiliation.”

Both reports emphasized the challenges of collecting testimonies, given that many victims were murdered, mutilated beyond recognition, or abducted into Gaza, where sexual abuse was also documented by freed hostages.

Despite these findings, Alsalem asserted in a podcast—shared widely by her critics—that the UN’s March 2024 report “had no basis,” and that the global community “fell into the trap that Israel set.”

She further claimed that accusations of rape were part of a broader scheme to “justify genocide,” a phrasing that the JTA report noted is common among militant anti-Israel commentators.

Her remarks, critics argue, cross the line from skepticism to conspiratorial, casting Hamas as victims of a global smear campaign rather than the perpetrators of mass atrocities.

As detailed in the JTA report, Alsalem is not the first UN-affiliated figure to question or minimize the sexual violence of Oct. 7.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, who has faced bipartisan criticism in the United States for past comments about Jews, has also publicly questioned the validity of rape allegations. The Biden and Trump administrations have each expressed concerns about Albanese’s alleged bias.

For many Jewish leaders, this pattern is intolerable.

“It is unconscionable,” one rabbi told the JTA, “that Jewish women must fight for their stories to be believed in the very institutions created to prevent the repetition of the world’s worst crimes.”

The petition also notes that independent investigations—conducted by journalists, forensic experts, and Israeli NGOs—have corroborated sexual-violence claims.

Among them, the respected Israeli nonprofit ZAKA, along with medical first responders, provided forensic testimony on bodies mutilated and assaulted. Similarly, investigative reporting by international outlets—including those typically critical of Israel—recorded witness accounts describing sexual abuse during the attacks.

Jewish leaders say that Alsalem’s refusal to acknowledge this evidence is not oversight but ideology—an intentional act of erasure in service of a political campaign to delegitimize Israel.

Many of the petition’s signatories view this controversy as a watershed moment for the UN. If the global body is unwilling to act against one of its own rapporteurs for overtly denying documented atrocities, they warn, its credibility as a guardian of women’s rights is deeply compromised.

As JTA reported, critics say that Alsalem’s continued presence at the UN sends a message that Israeli women are uniquely unworthy of protection.

Medoff framed it starkly: “A UN official who denies atrocities against Jewish women has no place in a system committed to the principle of ‘never again.’”

As of this writing, Guterres has not publicly commented on the letter, though UN officials privately acknowledged to the JTA that the controversy is “significant” and “requires serious review.”

The petition’s organizers say the matter cannot be allowed to fade quietly.

“The world must respond with the same moral clarity it would show for survivors of sexual violence anywhere else,” Elman asserted in comments to JTA.

For now, over 300 Jewish leaders—and a growing number of allies—await the UN’s next steps, determined to ensure that the victims of October 7 are neither forgotten nor defamed.