Amnesty International on Thursday accused Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups of crimes against humanity, including extermination, during and after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war.
“Palestinian armed groups committed violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity during their attacks in southern Israel that started on 7 October 2023,” the human rights watchdog said in a 173-page report.
The group has previously accused Hamas and others of committing war crimes.
War crimes are serious violations of international law against civilians and combatants during armed conflict. Crimes against humanity can occur in peacetime and include torture, rape and discrimination, be it racial, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender-based. They involve “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.”
Amnesty has also accused Israel of genocide, an accusation that Jerusalem vehemently denies. However, Amnesty said any Israeli wrongdoing, or Palestinian groups’ crimes against other Palestinians, were outside the scope of this report.
Amnesty said that the mass killing of civilians in Israel on October 7 amounted “to the crime against humanity of extermination.” Among the other crimes listed were murder, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance, and sexual violence.
Hamas rejected the report, saying it contained “inaccuracies and contradictions.”
Israel also critiqued the report, noting that it came out more than two years after the attack, with the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Oren Marmorstein, saying it “falls far short of reflecting the full scope of Hamas’s horrific atrocities.”
“The horrors perpetrated by Hamas and Palestinian civilians on October 7 and thereafter are so grave that even a biased organization like Amnesty International could not overlook them,” he continued. “Fortunately, the world does not need Amnesty International to recognize the truth of the sheer monstrosity of Hamas.”
A reservist, with his gun slung across his back, looks at a house destroyed during Hamas’s invasion of Israel, during a memorial event two years later on October 7, 2025. (Tsafrir Abayov/FLASH90)Amnesty said Hamas, including its armed wing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, were “chiefly responsible” for the crimes committed on October 7. Hamas ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and “unaffiliated Palestinian civilians,” were responsible to a lesser extent.
Amnesty called on Hamas as the de facto authority of Gaza, as well as Israel and the Palestinian Authority, to investigate and prosecute the offenses.
It noted that PA President Mahmoud Abbas “has called for the release of hostages and condemned the killing of civilians, [but] Amnesty International is not aware of any recognition or condemnation by him or any other leaders of the State of Palestine of the scope and scale of violations.”
The organization said that after the attack, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Gaza “continued to commit violations and crimes under international law in their holding and mistreatment of hostages and the withholding of bodies seized.”
“The holding of hostages was done as part of an explicitly stated plan explained by the leadership of Hamas and of other Palestinian armed groups,” the report determined.
Hamas accused Amnesty of echoing Israeli “lies.”
“The report’s repetition of the lies and allegations promoted by the occupation [Israeli] government concerning rape, sexual violence, and the mistreatment of captives clearly demonstrates that the purpose of this report is incitement and distorting the image of the resistance,” the terror group said in a statement. It called on Amnesty to retract the “flawed and unprofessional report.”
During the October 7 onslaught, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from Gaza, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, including the bodies of some 36 people they had killed.
“Contrary to claims by Hamas leaders that their fighters only targeted military objectives, the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians and most of the locations targeted were residential communities or other places in which civilians were gathered, namely two music festivals and a beach,” Amnesty said.
The human rights group determined that Palestinian assailants committed sexual assault during the attack, but said it could not determine the “scope or scale” of the violence or the affiliations of most of the perpetrators.
Additionally, the group said it “found no evidence that Hamas or other Palestinian armed groups gave orders to their fighters to commit acts of sexual violence during the attacks.”
It noted that the accounts of five freed hostages indicate criminal sexual violence to which they were subjected in captivity, including “sexual assault, forced nudity, and/or forcible shaving of body hair,” and that hostages heard accounts from other captives of sexual violence as well.
Amnesty said it collected evidence indicating that rape likely took place during the assault — citing one person’s direct testimony as well as media reports and the testimony of therapists — but said it could not “definitively conclude that rape, as opposed to sexual assault more broadly, was committed.”
In May 2024, the International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants for Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s armed wing Mohammed Deif, and head of Hamas and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar. The ICC withdrew the applications after the trio were all killed later that year by Israel.
The court also issued a still-active arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the war in Gaza.
In December 2024, Amnesty also accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza during the war with Hamas that followed the October 7 attack. It then claimed late last month that Israel was “still committing genocide,” despite a ceasefire that came into effect on October 10.
When Amnesty made the accusation, Israel’s Foreign Ministry vehemently rejected it as “entirely false” and called the report “fabricated” and “based on lies.” As evidence, Israel has cited efforts made to avoid civilian casualties in the war, including evacuation orders ahead of assaults on terror strongholds in Gaza.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 70,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7, 2023, onslaught.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 476.
