On Sunday evening, the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center screened Screams Before Silence, a documentary featuring eyewitness accounts of sexual violence by Hamas fighters against Israeli civilians on October 7.

Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg leads the documentary directed by Anat Stralinksy. In the film, Ms. Sandberg interviews Nova Music Festival attendees, former Hamas hostages and rescue personnel who lived through the events of October 7 and their aftermath.

The event at the film center was hosted by I Believe Israeli Women, a joint initiative between Jewish Women International and the Seed the Dream Foundation, an education foundation serving students in the U.S. and Israel. The hosts were Marcy B. Gringlas, co-founder and president of Seed the Dream Foundation, and Alexi Meyers, seasonal Vineyarder and director of anti-trafficking policy at Sanctuary for Families.

“Good people can disagree on the pathway to peace and on the many aspects of this conflict, but good people must use their voices to denounce certain unacceptable acts, and one of them is the use of mass rape as a weapon of war,” Ms. Meyers told the audience.

Panelists included Shari Mendes, a member of an all women’s reserve unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responsible for the bodies of deceased female soldiers, and Remo Salman El-Hozayel, a Muslim-Israeli police officer

who performed rescues at the Nova Peace Festival on Oct. 7. Ms. Mendes was also featured in the film.

Following the screening, Mr. El-Hozayel showed footage from October 7 that he recorded on his smartphone. Panelists also answered audience questions.

In the film, former UN official Ruth Halperin-Kaddari contextualized the October 7 sexual violence in a long history of women’s bodies being weaponized in political conflict. 

“Using sexual violence as a tool of war, of weaponizing women ... is as old as the history of humanity,” Ms. Halperin-Kaddari said in the film.

For more information and to screen the film, visit screamsbeforesilence.com.