JTA — Over 300 Jewish leaders, including women’s rights advocates and rabbis, urged the United Nations on Tuesday to remove Reem Alsalem, the UN rapporteur on violence against women and girls, for denying that rape occurred during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

The letter, which was addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, came two weeks after Alsalem claimed in a post on X that “No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”

In the letter, the signatories express their “horror and outrage” at Alsalem’s rhetoric, and cite two UN reports from March 2024 and July 2025 that concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that sexual violence had taken place during the attacks “in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape.”

The petition was organized by Amy Elman, a professor at Kalamazoo College who has authored books on antisemitism and state responses to sexual violence, and Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. It was shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency soon after being sent to Guterres.

“The targeted sexual abuse of Israelis by Hamas and its supporters is one weapon in the arsenal of those seeking........

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