The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Even as they recorded their crimes in obsessive detail, the Nazis worked to deny and erase them. As the Shoah unfolded, they worked to conceal evidence: destroying documents, dismantling camps, burning bodies, and erasing traces of mass murder. Yet when the war ended and the scale of the Holocaust became undeniable, Nazis and their ideological fellow travelers did not retreat from denial. They escalated it. They sought to rewrite reality itself by denying, minimizing, relativizing, or distorting the crimes they had committed.

This eventually became a global phenomenon despite the Holocaust being one of the best-documented crimes in human history. Mountains of evidence existed: transport records, photographs, films, camp infrastructure, eyewitness and survivor testimony, perpetrator confessions, and the physical remnants of industrialized murder itself. None of it was enough for the deniers. Because Holocaust denial was never about evidence. It was about rehabilitating the perpetrators, delegitimizing Jewish suffering, and once again recasting Jews as manipulative liars, weaponizing victimhood for sympathy, power, or political gain.

Denial as Ideological Warfare

Today, something disturbingly similar is unfolding around October 7, particularly regarding the sexual crimes perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli women, men, and children.

A major new report by the Civil Commission, led by the inimitable Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, presented what CNN described as “the most comprehensive body of evidence yet” documenting systematic sexual violence during and after the October 7 genocide. The report draws upon survivor testimony, released hostages, eyewitness accounts, forensic evidence, therapists, medical experts, and first responders. Its conclusion is unequivocal: Hamas and affiliated terrorists used sexual violence as a deliberate weapon of war designed to maximize pain, humiliation, and terror.

After more than two years of independent investigation, the Civil Commission has released a comprehensive report documenting sexual and gender-based violence committed by Hamas on October 7 and during hostage captivity.

The report is not only a historical record — it is a call… pic.twitter.com/lqzw168Pip

— The Civil Commission (@theCC07) May 12, 2026

The details are beyond horrifying. Women were raped beside the bodies of murdered friends. Victims were found partially naked, mutilated, tied to trees and poles, shot in the genitals, or executed after assault. Witnesses described gang rapes at the Nova festival. Former hostages spoke of sexual abuse, forced nudity, threats of forced marriage, and prolonged sexual humiliation in captivity.

Hamas terrorists and many Palestinian perpetrators recorded their crimes in sickening detail. Murders, kidnappings, torture, humiliation, and sexual violence were filmed, photographed, celebrated, and distributed online by the perpetrators themselves. In some cases, atrocities were broadcast through the victims’ own phones and social media accounts. Unlike the Nazis, Hamas’ violence was not hidden; it was publicized and glorified.

And yet denial persists.

Almost immediately after October 7, before the bodies were even cold, social media filled with claims that reports of rape were “Israeli propaganda.” Activists and commentators insisted there was “no evidence.” Others claimed Israelis had fabricated the allegations to justify war. Some demanded impossible evidentiary standards that are almost never applied to sexual violence anywhere else on earth. Even now, as testimonies accumulate and further evidence emerges, denial remains deeply embedded within parts of activist, academic, and media culture.

That is because, like Holocaust denial, this is not about evidence. Holocaust denial emerged despite overwhelming proof because the denial itself served a purpose. It protected the moral image of the perpetrators while transforming Jews from victims into deceivers. The denier does not simply reject facts. They reject the legitimacy of Jewish suffering itself. The same mechanism is visible today.

When Jewish Suffering Becomes Inconvenient

For many people invested in a worldview in which Israel represents absolute evil and Palestinians represent absolute victimhood, acknowledging the sexual crimes of October 7 creates tension. Jewish women cannot be permitted to exist as victims because their reality complicates the narrative. Israeli suffering becomes ideologically intolerable. And so it must be doubted, obscured, minimized, or erased altogether. This is why so much October 7 denialism focuses specifically on the sexual crimes.

Sexual violence carries a specific moral weight in contemporary society. To acknowledge that Hamas terrorists and their collaborators committed widespread and systematic acts of rape, mutilation, and sexual torture would require many activists to confront a reality: that individuals and movements they have celebrated, romanticized, excused, or sanitized committed acts of extraordinary brutality.

We should also recognize the profoundly anti-Jewish nature of this phenomenon. Jews are uniquely subjected to suspicion toward their suffering in ways that have become normalized across political and cultural life. The distrust of Jewish testimony has become so deeply embedded that many people no longer even recognize it as prejudice.

The Crime Continued Through Erasure

The tragedy is not only the crimes themselves, but what their denial reveals about the world Jews inhabit. After the Holocaust, many believed humanity had learned something: that there existed a moral obligation to listen to victims, document atrocities honestly, and ensure genocidal violence could never again be erased through propaganda and denial. Yet within hours of October 7, that promise began collapsing in real time.

The lesson of Holocaust denial should have taught us that evidence alone is never enough against ideologically motivated hatred. There will never be enough footage, enough testimony, enough witnesses, enough forensic evidence, or enough reports for those who have already decided that Jewish suffering does not count.

That is the real connection between Holocaust denial and the denial of October 7. Both ultimately rest upon the same underlying premise: that Jews are uniquely unworthy of belief, uniquely suspect in their suffering, and uniquely undeserving of moral sympathy.

Ultimately, when these crimes are denied, minimized, relativized, or erased, the victims are violated a second time. The murdered are stripped not only of their lives, but of the truth of what was done to them. The raped are stripped not only of bodily autonomy, but of the dignity of having their suffering acknowledged. Denial is never neutral. It is the continuation of the crime through erasure.

Founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement, Ben M. Freeman is the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People (2021), Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022) and The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025). Educating, inspiring and empowering, his work focuses on Jewish identity and historical and contemporary Jew-hatred. A Holocaust scholar for over fifteen years, Ben came to prominence during the Corbyn Labour Jew-hate crisis in the UK and quickly became one of his generation’s leading Jewish thinkers and voices against Jew-hate. The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.