Hebrew University Reinstates Professor Who Questioned Hamas Sexual Assaults

Jerusalem, 28 March, 2024 (TPS) -- Despite calls for her dismissal, Hebrew University reinstated an Israeli-Arab professor who walked back comments questioning whether Hamas committed sexual assaults and made other inflammatory statements, the university announced.

Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who lectures on social work and law, was suspended for incendiary comments made during a March 9 podcast. Shalhoub-Kevorkian questioned whether Hamas’s sexual assaults on October 7 happened. She also referred to Israel as the “Zionist entity,” calling it “criminal” and a “killing machine.”

The university suspended Shalhoub-Kevorkian on March 12, saying “Since the beginning of the war, Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has been speaking out in a disgraceful, anti-Zionist and inflammatory manner. At the beginning of the war, the lecturer signed a petition calling Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide, and [the state] an occupying entity since 1948.

Many students and faculty members called for her dismissal.

But Shalhoub-Kevorkian was reinstated following a meeting with rector, Professor Tamir Sheafer. According to a university statement, Shalhoub-Kevorkian claimed that “as a critical feminist researcher she believes all victims and does not doubt their words, and that she does not deny the fact that on October 7 there were cases of rape.”

A report released in February by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel said that Hamas committed “brutal sexual assaults, carried out systematically and deliberately” on October 7, the first such report to detail the day’s sexual violence.

The ARCCI is an umbrella organization of Israel’s regional rape crisis centers.

The report specified that sexual violence took place at the Nova Music Festival, in the communities near the Gaza border, on the army bases that were attacked, and addressed the continuing abuse of hostages still held in Gaza.