Israel-Hamas war: ‘Hamas attackers laughed as they raped, killed woman’ recalls Israeli witness

Amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, stories of barbarity and violence that the terror group carried out during the October 7 attack have started to emerge.

In an interview with CNN, one of the hostages, identified as Raz Cohen, narrated the unfolding of Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023.

Five men came out of a van and captured a woman, ripping off her clothes as they formed a circle around her. One raped her and then killed her with a knife. Then he raped her again, said Cohen in his interview with CNN. The other men around the victim did not seem angry, he said.

“They always laugh. I think it was for fun. They murdered a lot of people for fun,” he added.

She tried to flee with another friend and was killed, he said. Cohen saw another young woman shot in the head as he ran to hide in a bush– the spot where he witnessed the rape, he told CNN.

He had gone to the Nova music festival in southern Israel to be with his girlfriend Maya when the Hamas attackers carried out one of the bloodiest attack on Israel, which killed over 1,200 people.

WATCH THE CNN REPORT HERE

Later, Israel retaliated with intense bombardment and a ground invasion of Gaza which resulted in the death of more than 22,000 people.

Cohen further added that after raping and killing the woman, the group went after another man and a woman and killed them by stabbing them with knives and an axe.

He also said that in an attempt to protect his life, he ran across the open desert and felt like being stuck on a firing range and with nowhere to hide and bullets coming from left, right and behind.

“I ran in the open field, and I was very close to some girl,” he said. “When I passed her, I heard that she fell on the ground. I looked back and I saw that she got shot in the head. I looked at the girl, but I couldn’t help her so I kept running away until I got to the bush,” he said.

Rami Shmuel, an organiser ofâ€ïthe music festival that was attended by Cohen, also shared similar scenes of the October 7 attack.

In an interview to CNN, he said he saw female victims with no clothesâ€ïas he made his escape, and had no doubts about what happened.

“Their legs were spread out and some of them were butchered,” heâ€ïtold CNN.

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