On the morning of October 7, 2023, several thousand Hamas-led fighters and other Gaza militants breached the Israel-Gaza border fence at more than 30 points simultaneously, using explosives, bulldozers, paragliders, and boats. Over several hours they moved through more than 20 Israeli communities and a music festival attended by roughly 3,500 people, before Israeli forces regained full control of the area. It became the deadliest single day for Israelis in the country's history, and the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.
This article sets out what happened, what UN investigators subsequently confirmed, and — because this project's standard is to state the limits of the evidence rather than let the strongest version of any claim stand unchallenged — what those same investigators said they could not verify.
The scale and planning
The attack was not improvised. Israeli intelligence had obtained a document outlining Hamas's plan — internally nicknamed "Jericho Wall" by Israeli analysts — more than a year in advance, describing a coordinated, multi-front invasion designed to overwhelm the border. Analysts who reviewed it concluded Hamas lacked the capability to execute a plan of that scale, and treated it as aspirational. It was not. Female IDF soldiers stationed as border observers had also flagged unusual Hamas training activity near the fence for months beforehand.
Roughly 1,200 people were killed on October 7 itself. Independent reconstructions — Israeli, international, and some Palestinian researchers among them — broadly agree the substantial majority were civilians, including entire families killed in their homes in kibbutzim such as Be'eri and Kfar Aza, and 364 people killed at the Nova music festival specifically. Approximately 251 hostages — Israeli and foreign nationals, including children and elderly people — were taken into Gaza.
What the UN found
Two separate UN bodies investigated the sexual violence allegations that emerged in the attack's aftermath, using different methodologies.
The Office of the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, led by Pramila Patten, visited Israel and the West Bank in early 2024 and found "reasonable grounds to believe" that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang rape — occurred in multiple locations: the Nova festival site, Route 232, and Kibbutz Re'im. Investigators also found clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including against hostages, may have continued in captivity.
The UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry, working separately and later in 2024, reached materially consistent conclusions: it confirmed acts of sexual violence at the Nova festival, Route 232, Nahal Oz military base, and the kibbutzim of Re'im, Nir Oz, and Kfar Aza.
What investigators said they could not confirm
This is the part of the record that gets flattened in most public discussion of October 7, in both directions. The Commission of Inquiry was explicit that it could not verify every individual claim that had circulated in the attack's immediate aftermath — including some specific reports of genital mutilation — because it lacked direct access to crime scenes, physical evidence, and living witnesses for those particular claims. It also found no evidence that sexual violence had been an explicitly ordered tactic, as opposed to violence committed by individual fighters amid the broader assault.
That evidentiary limit does not cancel out the confirmed findings at the sites listed above. Both bodies stand by those. It means precisely what it says: some specific claims that spread in October and November 2023 were never independently substantiated, while the broader pattern of sexual violence at multiple locations was.
The hostages
Hostages released in staged exchanges beginning in November 2023 described being held in civilian homes and in Hamas's tunnel network, moved repeatedly, held with minimal food, and in several documented cases subjected to physical and sexual abuse — accounts that corroborated each other independently rather than resting on a single testimony. Dozens of hostages died in captivity, some from conditions of captivity itself and some, by Israel's own account, in Israeli strikes on the locations where they were held — an outcome that reflects the risk of keeping hostages inside an active war zone, not a finding attributable to Hamas alone. Under the October 2025 ceasefire, the remaining living hostages were released and the bodies of those who died were returned in a phased process that hostage families and mediators say Hamas used, at points, as continued leverage.
Why this matters for everything that follows
October 7 is the hinge on which the rest of this conflict's most recent chapter turns — the war that followed killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza, produced an ICJ genocide case and ICC arrest warrants against Israel's own leadership, and is still being litigated in international courts. None of that erases what happened on October 7, and nothing that happened on October 7 excuses what came after it. Both of those sentences are true at once, and this project's separate, full accounts of Hamas's record and Israel's record — including the intelligence failure that let this happen — are written to hold both without collapsing into either side's preferred simplification.
Sources
- UN — Sexual Violence Occurred on 7 October and Against Hostages, Finds UN Special Representative
- CBS News — UN Says "Reasonable Grounds" Hamas Carried Out Sexual Attacks Oct. 7, and Likely Still Is
- Atlantic Council — Unpacking the UN Findings of War Crimes by Hamas and Israel Since October 7
- AP — Israeli Military Concedes Failures Around Oct. 7 Attack