Gaza (Reuters) – Israel’s military bombarded southern Gaza’s main city in what it said was the fiercest fighting since it began a ground invasion to eliminate Hamas five weeks ago, while the U.S. again pressed Israel to minimise Palestinian civilian casualties.

Israel reported its forces, backed by war planes, on Tuesday reached the heart of Khan Younis in southern Gaza and also surrounded the city. Hamas’ armed wing, the al Qassam Brigades, said its fighters engaged in violent clashes with Israelis.

“We are in the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation,” the commander of the Israeli military’s Southern Command, General Yaron Finkelman, said in a statement.

The combat was also the most intense since a truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed last week. Israeli forces also fought in Jabalia, a large urban refugee camp and Hamas hotbed in the north next to Gaza City, and in Shuja’iyya to the east, Finkelman said.

Hamas’ armed wing said it killed or wounded eight Israeli troops and destroyed 24 military vehicles on Tuesday. An Israeli military website listed two troop deaths for Tuesday and 83 since the ground operation began.

Gaza health officials said many civilians were killed in an Israeli strike on houses in Deir al-Balah, north of Khan Younis. Dr Eyad Al-Jabri, head of the Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital there, told Reuters at least 45 people were killed. Reuters could not reach the area nor confirm the toll.

Israel unleashed its campaign in response to an attack on Oct. 7 by Hamas fighters who rampaged through Israeli towns, killing 1,200 people and seizing 240 hostages, according to Israel’s tally.

Israeli police are investigating alleged sexual crimes and Israel’s justice ministry has said “victims were tortured, physically abused, raped, burned alive, and dismembered”.

Hamas’ media office said on Tuesday at least 16,248 people including 7,112 children and 4,885 women had been killed in Gaza by Israel’s military since Oct. 7. Thousands more are missing and feared buried under rubble.

Those figures were not immediately verified by the Gaza health ministry.

U.S. Pressure On Israel

Since the truce collapsed, Israel has been posting an online map to tell Gazans which parts of the enclave to evacuate to avoid attacks. Khan Younis’ eastern quarter was marked on Monday, and many of its hundreds of thousands of residents took flight on foot.

Gazans say there is no safe place, with remaining towns and shelters already overwhelmed, and Israel continuing to bomb the areas where it is telling people to go.

At Khan Younis’ main Nasser hospital, the wounded arrived by ambulance, car, flatbed truck and donkey cart after what survivors described as a strike on a school being used as a shelter for the displaced.

Inside a ward, almost every inch of blood-splattered floor space was taken up by the wounded including small children, with medics hurrying from patient to patient while relatives wailed.

Two girls were being treated, still covered in dust from the collapse of the house that had buried their family.

“My parents are under the rubble,” sobbed one child. “I want my mum, I want my mum, I want my family.”

Amid continued international criticism of Gaza’s plight, the United States, Israel’s close ally, reiterated on Tuesday that Israel needed to do more to allow fuel and other aid into Gaza and reduce harm to civilians. Despite the mounting death toll, it said Israel was now showing some receptiveness to the calls.

“The level of assistance that’s getting in is not sufficient,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a press briefing. “It needs to go up, and we’ve made that clear to the government of Israel.”

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that Hamas had repeatedly raped women and mutilated their bodies during its assault on southern Israel, citing survivors and witnesses.

“It is appalling,” he told a political fundraiser in Boston.

In a statement on its Telegram channel, Hamas denounced Biden’s accusations as false and said he was joining Israel’s effort to cover up war crimes committed with U.S. support.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the claims of rape and other abuse in a meeting with families of returned hostages on Tuesday that some participants described as angry because of frustration over the government’s handling of the situation.

“I heard stories that broke my heart… I heard and you also heard, about sexual assault and cases of brutal rape unlike anything,” Netanyahu said at a press conference.

Israel says a number of women and children remain in Hamas hands. During the pause in fighting, Hamas returned more than 100 hostages while 138 captives remain.

Biden blamed Iran-backed Hamas for the collapse of the truce last week, saying the militant group’s “refusal to release the remaining young women is what broke this deal”.

Israel and Hamas have accused each other of wrecking negotiations.

Asked late on Tuesday whether Hamas was the only group holding U.S. hostages in Gaza, Biden said: “Well there’s others. Look, I’m not going to talk more about it. We’re not walking away.”

Hamas official Osama Hamdan said on Tuesday there would be no more hostages released until Israel’s aggression stopped.

Separately, the U.S. imposed visa bans on people involved in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank after appeals for Israel to do more to prevent attacks on Palestinians by Jewish settlers.

Two Palestinian teenagers were killed by the Israeli gunfire in Tubas, West Bank, the official Palestinian WAFA news agency reported on Wednesday.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday condemned settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Jerusalem (Reuters) – On Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked, the Israeli military set up an impromptu morgue of refrigerated shipping containers at the Shura defence base in central Israel to identify and prepare the dead for burial. Of the 1,200 people killed that day, authorities said at least 300 were women.

“Often women came in in just their underwear,” said Shari Mendes, a reservist who worked for two weeks at the base helping medics with fingerprinting and cleaning female soldiers’ bodies.

“Sometimes we had people who – we just had a torso, okay – or they were very decomposed or they were mutilated,” Mendes said. “I saw very bloody genitals on women.”

Israeli police are investigating possible sexual crimes by some of the few hundred people that they arrested after the Oct. 7 attack. Their goal is to try every suspect they have in custody.

But at the morgue where Mendes worked, the women’s clothes were buried with them before police investigators could examine them. In Jewish burial law, the dead must be treated with dignity and laid to rest as soon as possible. Everything that is a part of the body is buried together, so some women were buried with their bloodstained clothes.

“We wiped everything clean of blood,” Mendes told Reuters.

It’s just one of the challenges facing the investigation into the alleged sexual crimes committed during the attack, the bloodiest in Israel’s 75-year history.

At some sites battles raged for days, making it impossible to enter. Some evidence was gathered, but police say they face a challenge after opportunities were lost to gather perishable evidence to link atrocities to specific suspects.

An Israeli military spokesperson told Reuters the first priority in the mass casualty event was to identify corpses so families could be informed as soon as possible. In the first days, many did not know if their relatives were dead, wounded or taken to Gaza.

Israel’s justice ministry has said “victims were tortured, physically abused, raped, burned alive, and dismembered.” Hamas vigorously denies the allegations of sexual assault or mutilation by members of its armed wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, on Oct. 7 or after that.

Mendes’ account is one of seven given to Reuters by first responders or others dealing with the dead that attest to alleged sexual violence. Those people said they found women semi-naked, bound, eviscerated, stripped, bruised, shot in the head or torched, at two communities including Kibbutz Beeri, and at an open-air music festival near the Gaza border fence.

Reuters reviewed images matching some of the descriptions or attesting to other possible atrocities. However, it could not independently verify all the accounts.

Taher al-Nono, the media adviser to the head of political bureau of Hamas, denied Hamas fighters were responsible for any sexual assaults in the attack and called for “a serious and impartial international investigation into the matter”.

A U.N. commission of inquiry investigating war crimes on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict will probe the allegations of sexual violence by Hamas, amid Israeli criticism the U.N. had remained silent. Israel accuses the commission of bias and has said it will not cooperate with the investigation.

Victims Dead, Traumatized

In Israeli criminal law, sexual violence includes rape, but also indecent acts, harrassment and sexually demeaning a person – including forced nudity – among other offences. A conviction can be based on testimonies and circumstantial evidence even without forensic evidence, three legal experts told Reuters.

But among the obstacles facing police investigators, they have said, is the fact many victims are dead or traumatised.

An estimated “few dozen” surviving victims and witnesses have already sought help, said Orit Soliciano, head of Israel’s Association of Rape Crisis Centres, declining to name any to protect their privacy. It can take years before a victim or witness comes forward, she said.

Many purported victims have no voice.

“All the women who were murdered and may have suffered sexual violence cannot tell us,” Hila Neubach, director of legal affairs at the Association for Rape Crisis Centres in Israel, told Reuters. “Witnesses perhaps too did not survive.”

Authorities have placed a gag order on the investigation but commander Shelly Harush told parliament on Nov. 27 they have 1,500 testimonies on atrocities including sexual violence, rape and genital mutilation from survivors, security forces, first responders and families of victims. At least a dozen graphic testimonies have been shared by government agencies and first responders.

Decomposition

Sometimes it took days after the Oct. 7 attack to reach the bodies. Chen Kugel, Head of the Israel National Center of Forensic Medicine, said ordinary protocols for forensically proving rape are nearly impossible when bodies arrive in such a stage of decomposition. “Maybe if we had checked them in the first 24 hours (that would be possible),” Kugel said.

Even in normal times, roughly 80% of sexual offence cases in Israel are closed every year because prosecutors see insufficient evidence, justice ministry data show. Prosecuting the Oct. 7 cases will require a different approach.

“In a criminal case, a specific defendant is convicted of harming a specific victim,” said Dana Pugach, law professor at Ono Academic College. “They will have to look at an entirely different legal construct in this case.”

Prosecutors could rely on a legal doctrine of shared responsibility, she said – one used in Israel earlier this year to convict 11 people of sexual violence for gang rape.

For that, proof of intent and co-conspiracy will be needed.

Testimony

The testimonies are mounting. At the Shura base, Rabbi Israel Weiss told reporters some bodies were naked and “torn apart.”

Nachman Dyksztejn, a volunteer for Zaka Search and Rescue who was at the festival, wrote in testimony shared by Zaka with Reuters that he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”

Concert producer Rami Shmuel, who helped in the festival searches for casualties, said he saw the bodies of three women, one naked and the other two stripped from the waist down. One was clearly shot in the back of the head, he said, and torched.

Police say they have over 60,000 “visual documents” including videos from Go-Pro cameras worn by attackers, CCTV footage and images from drones.

Online video clips amplify the allegations. Some of those purporting to show sexual violence could not be authenticated – one seen by Reuters appeared to date to 2021.

The news agency verified the locations of two other videos that suggest sexual violence, shared on social media within a day of the attack. Reuters could not confirm who first posted them.

Of these, one showed the half-naked body of a woman from the festival, later publicly identified by her mother as tattoo artist Shani Louk, slung across the back of a pickup truck and paraded through Gaza.

The other showed a young barefoot woman, also identified to Reuters by her mother, being pulled by the hair from the trunk of a van in Gaza and shoved into its back seat by an armed man amid shouts of “God is great.” Her hands are tied. The seat of her trousers appears bloodied as do her ankles and arm. The image does not show what happened to her.

Israeli authorities have confirmed Louk is dead. They believe the other woman is alive in captivity in Gaza.

On Nov. 14, police showed reporters footage of an unnamed witness of the festival attack. In it, she said she saw gunmen gang rape one woman and cut off the breast of another and throw it on the street. Later, she said, a gunman shot the woman in the head while raping her. Police declined to name the witness or make her available to Reuters.

Witness accounts alone cannot always secure an indictment or conviction, said legal expert Neubach. But overall, she said, the information already accumulated is reliable enough to determine that sexual and gender-based violence has likely been perpetrated.

Court

If prosecutions in Israel prove challenging, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague was set up to prosecute those responsible for war crimes. It has already said it has jurisdiction over atrocity crimes committed by Palestinians on Israeli territory that day.

The tribunal can step in if states are unwilling or unable to prosecute war crimes committed by nationals of its members, or on the territory of its members. The ICC says its prosecutor has collected a significant volume of information and evidence.

Israeli lawyers say its evidentiary requirements on sexual violence are less challenging than Israel’s. For example, it does not need victim testimony. The non-consent of victims mostly does not need to be separately established if the acts take place during mass atrocities.

Two lawyers told Reuters they are preparing evidence to present there. Tel Aviv-based Yael Vias Gvirsman is gathering evidence for families of 54 victims which will include victims of sexual and gender-based violence, she said. She declined to provide details but said there are a few key witnesses.

But for the Israeli state, the ICC is problematic: Israel does not recognise its jurisdiction – although Israeli individuals and the state itself are free to submit evidence.

“That brings us to sort of, I’ll call it the Israeli dilemma,” Vias Gvirsman said, referring to where such cases could be judged. Israel may hold some perpetrators but does not have reach of the instigators, commanders or aiders and abetters that the ICC could bring to trial, she said.

She and another attorney expect the Israeli government eventually to turn to the ICC. Israel’s Justice Ministry declined to comment on whether it would turn to the tribunal but said it would pursue legal proceedings against those responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks, wherever they are.

“Normally the Israeli Defence Force, the Israel government, would say ‘we have no dealings with the ICC,'” Geert-Jan Knoops, lead defence counsel at the tribunal, told Reuters.

“But this is going beyond any imagination. I think Israel has the interest to provide the evidence to the ICC prosecutor and for the Oct. 7 events.”