A new report from the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled, puts a number on something Israel’s Asian communities have lived with for two and a half years: October 7 was a multinational atrocity, and Thai workers were its single largest foreign-citizen casualty group.
Foreign victims, by the numbers#
On page 76, under the heading “Cross-Border Impact: Foreign Nationalities of October 7th Victims,” the Commission tallies victims who held foreign or dual Israeli-foreign citizenship:
The October 7th Hamas attack targeted civilians from 52 countries. A total of 369 persons holding foreign or dual Israeli-foreign citizenship were murdered, including those killed in captivity. An additional 106 foreign or dual citizens were taken hostage and later released or rescued alive. Of the 475 total victims, 134 held a single foreign citizenship and 18 held three citizenships.
The country-by-country bar chart that follows is striking: Thailand sits at the top of the list, well ahead of the United States, Argentina, France, or any other country.
The Asian breakdown#
Asian citizenships documented in the report:
| Country | Murdered | Returned alive | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thailand | 48 | 28 | 76 |
| Nepal | 11 | 0 | 11 |
| Philippines | 7 | 2 | 9 |
| Uzbekistan | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| China | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| Sri Lanka | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Kazakhstan | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Cambodia | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| India | 1 | 0 | 1 |
(Figures from the Cross-Border Impact chart, p. 76. They count only victims holding the listed foreign citizenship — Israeli-Asian dual citizens are aggregated separately within the 323 dual-citizen total.)
Why Thailand bore so much of it#
At the time of the attack, roughly 30,000 Thai workers were employed in Israel, almost all of them on agricultural moshavim and kibbutzim — and thousands of them were on farms within the Gaza envelope. They were the largest single source of migrant farm labour for Israeli agriculture, concentrated in exactly the communities Hamas overran on October 7.
The report’s section on Kibbutz Be’eri makes that exposure explicit. In a footnote to the kibbutz’s death toll, the Commission notes that the figure “includes residents who were killed outside the Kibbutz, as well as foreign workers residing in the Kibbutz.” (p. 91, fn. 204.) Foreign workers were not adjacent to the casualty count — they are inside it.
This site has covered the Thai dimension in earlier reporting: the December 2025 identification of Sudthisak Rinthalak, the last Thai hostage; the recovery of Nattapong Pinta’s body; and the return of Thai farmworkers to fields near the border in the months afterwards.
A documented case: Joshua Mollel#
Beyond the aggregate numbers, the report’s geographic chapter on Kibbutz Nahal Oz (p. 100, ¶81) documents an individual case involving a foreign agricultural student. The Commission describes videos published by Hamas showing the abuse of “a young male foreign student and his partially undressed body” — the man dragged, beaten, kicked, stabbed and shot, his body then transferred in a truck with men shouting “Here’s the Jew!” in Arabic, and ultimately taken into Gaza.
The footnote identifies him: Joshua Mollel, 21, an agricultural student from Tanzania. Mollel is not Asian, but he sits inside the same population this site has long covered — the Thai, Nepali, and Tanzanian foreign workers and students whose names rarely lead Western coverage of October 7. His inclusion in the Commission’s record is one of the report’s contributions: foreign-worker victims named, not summarised.
What the report is#
Silenced No More is the work of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, an Israeli non-profit founded and chaired by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a 2024 Israel Prize laureate in human-rights and international law. The Commission has compiled an archive of more than 430 testimonies and over 1,800 hours of visual material, and the report identifies thirteen recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence committed on October 7 and against hostages held in Gaza afterwards.
The subject matter is, unavoidably, harrowing. The Commission has chosen to publish with restraint where families have asked for it and to anonymise survivors and victims throughout the body of the report. The link below is to the full PDF for readers who wish to engage with the evidentiary record directly.
The report is endorsed by figures including former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Prof. David Crane (founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone), and Prof. Yuval Shany (Hebrew University), among others.
Why it matters here#
The Asian communities still working and living in Israel today — Thai farmworkers, Filipino caregivers, Nepali agricultural students, Chinese and Indian construction workers — share an inheritance with the people on that bar chart. The Civil Commission’s report is one of the documents that ensures their losses are part of the historical record under their own names and nationalities, not folded into a single Israeli total.
That counts for something.
Sources:
- Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled — the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children
- Full PDF of the report (Cross-Border Impact data: p. 76)
- Related coverage on this site: Sudthisak Rinthalak; Thai, Nepali and Tanzanian hostages
