Abu Dawud 2671 preserves a particularly chilling detail of the Banu Qurayza massacre (treated under entry b08): the criterion used to determine which males would be executed and which would be spared. The criterion was puberty, determined by physical examination — specifically, examination for pubic hair growth. Boys who had not yet grown pubic hair were spared (and presumably enslaved with the women); boys who had grown pubic hair, no matter how young chronologically, were executed.

The narrator, Atiyyah al-Qurazi, was a survivor — a boy who had not yet reached puberty and was therefore spared. His personal testimony makes this hadith historically valuable and biographically poignant. He saw his community's adult and post-pubescent males killed, was himself spared on a physical-examination criterion, and lived to recount it. Ibn Ishaq preserves the broader massacre narrative in detail — Alfred Guillaume's translation of the Sīra (Oxford University Press, 1955, pp. 461–464) describes the men and post-pubescent boys being led out in groups and beheaded in the market-place trenches — and Atiyyah's hadith supplies precisely the procedural criterion that Ibn Ishaq's account implies but does not specify.

The hadith is sahih in Abu Dawud and Tirmidhi 1584. Al-Tirmidhi explicitly grades it Hasan Sahih and notes that Ahmad and Ishaq took pubic hair growth as a legally operative indicator of the age of responsibility — directly building jurisprudential precedent from the Banu Qurayza procedure. It is one of the most direct first-person testimonies of the massacre.

The additional ethical analysis (in addition to what is treated under entry b08):

1. Pubic hair as the execution criterion. The criterion treats biological puberty as the threshold of legal-male adulthood. This is itself a problematic legal standard — pubic hair growth varies by individual (some boys mature at 11, others at 16), and using physical examination is intrusive. But the deeper issue is that any criterion of this kind reduces the killing decision to a body-check rather than to individual responsibility for the alleged offences.

2. The pubescent victims. Boys at the cusp of puberty (roughly 11-15 years old in modern populations) who happened to have begun pubic hair growth were executed alongside adult men. These were children by any modern standard. The Banu Qurayza death toll (600-900) thus included some boys who, on the criterion used, qualified as 'adult' males but who in any contemporary moral framework were still children.

3. The dehumanising procedure. Lining up captive boys, examining them physically, and dividing them into 'kill' and 'spare' piles based on body inspection is procedurally dehumanising. The procedure converts the victims into specimens to be inspected, not into persons whose individual circumstances matter.

4. The 'spared' boys. The boys spared on this criterion were enslaved alongside the women. Their fathers, brothers, and male relatives over puberty had been killed in front of them or in nearby trenches. They were then assigned as slaves to Muslim masters. The 'sparing' is partial — they kept their lives but lost their families, freedom, and community.

5. The testimony's preservation. The fact that Atiyyah's testimony is preserved in the canonical record indicates that the early Muslim community did not see anything to hide in the procedure. The pubic-hair examination is reported matter-of-factly, as legal-procedural detail rather than as ethical concern. This itself reveals the moral framework of the original community: the procedure was unproblematic enough to be preserved as a hadith.

6. Modern legal implications. By any modern standard of war crimes, executing post-pubescent males of a defeated enemy after surrender is a violation of non-combatant protections. Using physical examination to draw a kill/spare line in this context is the framework of mass atrocity. The hadith documents what international criminal law would now classify as a war crime.

7. Pubic-hair criterion in Islamic law. The criterion was not isolated to the Banu Qurayza event. Classical fiqh later used pubic-hair growth (or other physical signs) as a marker of legal majority for various purposes — including for being subject to capital punishment. As Rudolph Peters documents in Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005), classical Islamic jurisprudence treated physical puberty markers — including pubic hair growth — as operative legal indicators of majority, directly in the tradition that the Banu Qurayza procedure established. The Banu Qurayza event is therefore a precedent in classical Islamic juvenile-jurisprudence: physical signs of maturity can mark a child as an executable adult.

8. The academic debate on historicity. The massacre's historicity is firmly established in the scholarly record. W.N. Arafat's article "New Light on the Story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society vol. 108 (1976), pp. 100–107, attempted to minimise the death toll and cast doubt on the classical accounts — but M.J. Kister of the Hebrew University delivered a thorough rebuttal in "The Massacre of the Banū Qurayẓa: A Re-Examination of a Tradition," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986): 61–96, systematically restoring the mainstream sources and demonstrating that the classical Islamic accounts are consistent and independently corroborated. Kister's article remains the standard scholarly treatment: the massacre happened at the scale the sources report, the pubic-hair examination was part of the procedure, and the apologetic attempts to minimise the event do not survive scrutiny of the source material. W. Montgomery Watt's Muhammad at Medina (Oxford University Press, 1956) likewise accepts the massacre as historical and treats it as a decisive episode in the formation of Muslim Medina, noting that the tribe's fate was determined by the standards of Arab tribal practice in the period rather than by any unique religious warrant.