Updated 2024-07-16
[[MEK Note: Israel has control of the witnesses and the “crime” scene, yet they have never produced any actual victims, just third hand unsubstantiated stories hyped by corporate media. Israel and corporate media have lied constantly ignoring actual facts. Remember the “40 beheaded babies” which even President Biden lied about seeing. Only one baby is listed as killed during the Oct 7 raid and it wasn’t listed as headless. IDF and Israeli media have admitted that their own helicopters and tanks fired on Festival goers and the Kibbutz hosing causing many deaths of Israelites along with Hamas fighters, burned cars, homes and people. Israel government has even admitted they never investigated any of the October fighting sites as a crime scene. They were too busy smearing Hamas and covering up their own actions on October 7-8th. Watch the following video that debunks some of Israel’s many lies. 2023-12-04 Debunking Israel’s “mass rapes” atrocity propaganda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMqRK5LpGy4]
2024-03-27 My executed Israeli children story was untrue, admits ZAKA’s Yossi Landau The Jewish extremist behind some of Israel’s worst atrocity propaganda about 7 October admits on camera that one of his stories was untrue. This is a clip from the documentary “October 7” by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, and is posted here for news reporting purposes. Full EI story here: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZzPA2OfUKc
2024-03-26 ‘Briahna Joy Gray: NYT Hamas Rape Story DEBUNKED In NEW Video Evidence: Outlet Stands By Story Briahna Joy Gray delivers a radar on story about New York Times’ wrong reporting about mass rapes allegedly carried out by Hamas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ePNKxmZCc
2024-03-22 7 October witness Yossi Landau fails to substantiate claims in Al Jazeera investigation Yossi Landau, head of operations of the ZAKA rescue unit, was unable to substantiate claims he made as an eyewitness of the aftermath of the 7 October attacks by Palestinian fighters against Israel, during an interview with Al Jazeera as part of an investigation that aired on Wednesday.
Landau was interviewed as one of the Israeli rescue workers dispatched to Kibbutz Be’eri, where he claimed tens of children had been tied and burned to death. The death toll figures from Kibbutz Be’eri revealed only 10 children had been killed, Al Jazeera’s investigation reported.
When Landau offered to show a picture that he alleged was a pregnant Israeli woman who had been cut open with her baby removed, Al Jazeera’s interviewer said that the picture showed an unidentifiable piece of charred flesh, and that the list of the dead contained no victim that fit Landau’s description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlHay-a10j8
2024-03-20 What REALLY Happened on October 7th? | Al Jazeera Filmmaker Richard Sanders Richard Sanders is an award winning journalist and film director with over 25 years experience. He was Senior Producer on Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files, and his latest film with Al Jazeera’s Investigation Unit, October 7, has just been released.
Al Jazeera says, “the I-Unit reveals widespread human rights abuses by Hamas fighters and others who followed them through the fence from Gaza into Israel.” But the investigations also finds that “many of the worst stories that came out in the days following the attack were false. This was especially true of atrocities that were used repeatedly by politicians in Israel and the West to justify the ferocity of the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, such as the mass killing of babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIqzVIbQBoQ&t=559s
2024-03-20 October 7th: The Whole Story Finally Revealed A new al-Jazeera documentary finally offers the most definitive story of that fateful day – and I talk through the shocking claims of real atrocities and false claims with journalist Richard Sanders. Watch the documentary here: https://i-unit.io/October7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfzw-sBVP2E
2024-03-20 October 7 | Al Jazeera Investigations Documentary Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7 transformed the politics of the Middle East. Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit) has carried out a forensic analysis of the events of that day – examining seven hours of footage from CCTV, dashcams, personal phones and headcams of dead Hamas fighters, and drawing up a comprehensive list of those killed.
In October 7, the I-Unit reveals widespread human rights abuses by Hamas fighters and others who followed them through the fence from Gaza into Israel. But the investigation also found that many of the worst stories that came out in the days following the attack were false. This was especially true of atrocities that were used repeatedly by politicians in Israel and the West to justify the ferocity of the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, such as the mass killing of babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape.
In particular the I-Unit reveals that claims by the Israel Defence Force that it found 8 burned babies at a house in Kibbutz Be’eri were entirely untrue. There were no babies in the house and the 12 civilians inside were killed by Israeli forces when they stormed the house. This was one of a number of incidents where the police and army appear to have killed Israeli citizens. October 7 is a deep dive into the events that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, the significance of which will reverberate for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0atzea-mPY&t=0s
2024-03-19 Israel’s Pathological Lies & How Gaza Changed the World, w/ Ali Abunimah Rania Khalek hosts a special live episode of Dispatches w/ Ali Abunimah, executive director of the Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP7fukEV0HI
2024-03-18 Ro Khanna Has Seen EVIDENCE of Hamas Mass Rape? (Ceasefire USA Weapons 0:00, Rape 8:30, TikTok Ban-16:30, Censorship/Antisemitic 21:00) California Representative Ro Khanna returns to Bad Faith to talk the TikTok ban, whether there’s evidence to support his and others claims of mass rape on 10/7, what happened in the California race for Dianne Feinstein’s seat, and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvhEMxvgh8
2024-03-04 KIBBUTZ BE’ERI REJECTS STORY IN NEW YORK TIMES OCTOBER 7 EXPOSÉ: “THEY WERE NOT SEXUALLY ABUSED” TWO OF THE three victims specifically singled out by the New York Times in a marquee exposé published in December, which alleged that Hamas had deliberately weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, were not in fact victims of sexual assault, according to the spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri, which the Times identified as the location of the attack. The rejection of the Times reporting in the kibbutz by Be’eri spokesperson Michal Paikin further undermines the credibility of the paper’s controversial December article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
The Times article described three alleged victims of sexual assault for whom it reported specific biographical information. One, known as the “woman in the black dress,” was Gal Abdush. Some of her family members have contested the claims made by the Times. The other two alleged victims were unnamed teenage sisters from Kibbutz Be’eri whose precise ages were listed in the New York Times, making it possible to identify them.
When asked about the claims made by the New York Times, Paikin independently raised their name. “You’re talking about the Sharabi girls?” she said. “No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.” Paikin also disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets. “It’s not true,” she told The Intercept, referring to the paramedic’s claims about the girls. “They were not sexually abused.” https://theintercept.com/2024/03/04/nyt-october-7-sexual-violence-kibbutz-beeri/
2024-03-01 Lack of Evidence A report from The Intercept alleges that claims of widespread sexual violence by Hamas on Oct. 7 published by The New York Times had little evidence to back them up. https://www.tiktok.com/@ajplus/video/7341542532758752543
2024-02-28 “BETWEEN THE HAMMER AND THE ANVIL” The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé ANAT SCHWARTZ had a problem. The Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official had been assigned by the New York Times to work with her partner’s nephew Adam Sella and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman on an investigation into sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 that could reshape the way the world understood Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. By November, global opposition was mounting against Israel’s military campaign, which had already killed thousands of children, women, and the elderly. On her social media feed, which the Times has since said it is reviewing, Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.” “Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read the post. “Those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules.”
Schwartz and Sella did the vast majority of the ground reporting, while Gettleman focused on the framing and writing. The resulting report, published in late December, was headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It was a bombshell and galvanized the Israeli war effort at a time when even some of Israel’s allies were expressing concern over its large-scale killing of civilians in Gaza.
The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/
2024-02-26 Examining Israeli Allegations of Atrocities by Resistance in Operation al-Aqsa Flood Israeli allegations against Palestinian resistance forces and GS residents involved in Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7/10/2023, were diverse. These claims, orchestrated by organized entities within Israel’s government, aimed to justify its assault on GS and globally vilify Palestinian resistance, despite lacking validity.
Israel disseminated false and fabricated information through sympathetic journalists, accounts and websites to garner global public opinion support for its GS war. This article will address some of these allegations and present evidence to debunk them.
On 24/10/2023, Yossi Landau, head of the Zaka organization in southern Israel, made false claims to various international media outlets, including the German daily newspaper Bild asserting that he found the body of a pregnant woman with a gunshot wound to her head and her abdomen cut open to remove the fetus. Landau specified to Haaretz the location where he purportedly witnessed this incident. However, survivors interviewed by the Israeli newspaper from the same building contradicted Landau’s account, stating that there was no pregnant woman. Despite attempts by CheckNews, a fact-checking website launched by the French newspaper Libération, to contact Landau, no response was received. Nevertheless, Israeli authorities emphasized Landau’s testimony, and the Israeli embassy in the United States shared it on X/Twitter and Instagram on 27/10/2023.
In her article published on 22/11/2023, in Newsweek magazine, Michal Herzog, the wife of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, referred to this testimony and falsely claimed that there is a video showing Palestinians in one of the settlements “torturing a pregnant woman and removing her fetus.” However, it later became apparent that “the images are in reality taken from a video shared in 2018, which allegedly shows the abuse committed by a Mexican cartel.” Asked by CheckNews, the Israeli presidency implicitly acknowledged its mistake and attempted to evade by defending the Zaka organization claiming that its witness “was not able to answer us due to the traumas experienced”! But according to a source within the forensic services involved in the identification of the October 7 casualties, no one corresponding to this description would have been taken care of, and this decisively proves the falsehood of the Israeli claim.
Several other dubious or disproven stories have as their source another non-governmental organization, United Hatzalah, whose manager Eli Beer recounted to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, USA, on 28/10/2023, stories that were later proven to be false. On 15/11/2023, Sara Netanyahu, the wife of the Israeli Prime Minister, wrote to several “first ladies”, including the wife of the President of the United States, Jill Biden, a message containing false and inflammatory content, alleging that “One of the kidnapped women was pregnant. She gave birth to her baby while a Hamas prisoner.” This letter was widely relayed by numerous Israeli and western media. On 18/11/2023, three days later, the British tabloid Daily Mail published an article claiming that a Thai woman, hostage of Hamas, had given birth in captivity. Information denied in the following days by the family of the hostage in question. None of the women released were pregnant or had just given birth.
Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker refuted many Israeli claims on 25/1/2024, and asked journalist Micky Rosenthal, who was with him on the program, about the reason behind using these false statements. Rosenthal replied, “to increase the magnitude of hatred for Hamas.” As Rosenthal put it, “The war is not only military, not only political, it’s mainly media.” https://www.globalresearch.ca/examining-israeli-allegations-atrocities-resistance-operation-al-aqsa-flood/5850689
2024-02-26 Examining Israeli Allegations of Atrocities by Resistance in Operation al-Aqsa Flood Israeli allegations against Palestinian resistance forces and GS residents involved in Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7/10/2023, were diverse. These claims, orchestrated by organized entities within Israel’s government, aimed to justify its assault on GS and globally vilify Palestinian resistance, despite lacking validity.
Israel disseminated false and fabricated information through sympathetic journalists, accounts and websites to garner global public opinion support for its GS war. This article will address some of these allegations and present evidence to debunk them.
On 18/11/2023, CNN aired a report by journalist Jake Tapper. The report claims to provide testimonies on “rape crimes” against Israeli women that allegedly took place on 7/10/2023. The CNN report begins with an interview with Cochav Elkayam-Levy. She is identified as an “expert in human rights law who organized a civil committee to document evidence.” The speaker is indeed an expert, but not of human rights law, according to a report on Mondoweiss website, on 1/12/2023, she had a post for the Israeli government’s Attorney General’s Office in the International Law Department. She has tight connections with the National Security Council for the Israeli Prime Minister. Elkayam-Levy is also the founder and director of the “Dvora Institute,” which works as a close advisory body to the Israeli prime minister’s “National Security Council.” However, in her interview, which opens the CNN report, Elkayam-Levy presents nothing but justifications for the absence of evidence and facts.
A CNN report presented a video of an Israeli soldier, showing his back only, identified by the letter “G,” claiming to be a paramedic of unit “669” – the Israeli Air Force Special Tactics rescue unit. In his testimony, which was later proven false, the soldier says that during a search in the houses of Kibbutz Be’eri, during combat, he opened a door of a bedroom to find the bodies of two girls aged between 13 and 15, both killed, one of them naked with semen remains on her lower back. But according to a report on Mondoweiss website, upon examining the names of all the girls killed in Kibbutz Be’eri on 7/10/2023, to match the facts, no pair of Israeli teenagers meeting that description were found dead together. Furthermore, according to an interview with Channel 13, the leader of the Kibbutz Be’eri battle, Brigadier General Barak Hiram, counted 13 different military units that formed the combat force that were there – Unit 669 was not among them.
The CNN report then brings two witnesses to talk about the conditions of the dead bodies they have seen. The first appears under a pseudonym for an unknown reason, despite showing her face and wearing civilian clothes. The report identified her as a “volunteer” at the morgue of the Shura military base. The witness previously appeared in a written report by Ynet, published on 31/10/2023, that included a photo of her in military uniform, where she was identified as a reservist corporal in the Israeli army, and in which she did not mention any claims of sexual violence. The second witness is Rami Shmuel, identified by the report as one of the organizers of the “Nova” festival. In fact, he is an organizer of the “UNITY” festival – another electronic music festival, held the day before the “Nova” in the same location. CNN fails to mention the fact that Rami Shmuel was not present at the festival location during the attack. According to Shmuel’s Facebook post, published on the afternoon of 7/10/2023, he was “safe” in a villa in Netivot settlement.
In her Newsweek article on 22/11/2023, Michal Herzog referred to a video showing Naama Levy, a soldier in the Israeli army and border patrol officer, being captured from the Nahal Oz military base, described as “in bloodied pants held captive at gunpoint.” However, there’s no evidence presented to support this accusation besides the blood, which isn’t enough to prove the claim of rape. It’s possible that the blood on Levy’s pants came from her wounded and tied hands behind her back, or from sitting on the ground stained with someone else’s blood. This is because the video showing Levy’s arrest depicts her standing against a wall with female soldiers in the military barracks when she was captured. She had the blood stain on her pants at that time, and then she was taken away in a military jeep as shown in the video.
Israel has not provided any criminal evidence or testimonies from women it claims were raped. According to The Times of Israel, its investigation “found physical evidence of sexual assault was broadly not collected” from bodies, and the window for gathering conclusive evidence had passed because “rape kits, which have a 48-hour window to be collected after an assault, were not prioritized.” Israeli police spokesperson Dean Elsdunne stated on 14/11/2023, that during the first 48 hours, the Gaza envelope area was still an “active combat zone.” Elsdunne added that “many bodies arriving at Shura were in such bad condition that collecting physical evidence of sexual assault, such as semen or DNA samples, was not possible.” Mirit Ben Mayor, who leads communications for the Israeli police, said much of the state’s case will rest on “circumstantial evidence.” In addition, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai said, “Many of the victims who survived the massacres are not ready to speak.” According to May Golan, Israel’s Women’s Empowerment Minister, “the very few ‘victims’ who survived are receiving psychiatric treatment and are therefore, conveniently, unable to talk.” How can Israel prove rape accusations without concrete evidence or testimony from the “victims” alleging sexual assault?
However, the world saw Israel’s detainees from the Palestinian resistance in Gaza saying goodbye warmly to women and children in front of cameras. They exchanged handshakes, jokes and smiles, showing clear evidence of the resistance’s treatment of women.
Despite the majority of detainees not giving public interviews, the media shared the experience of detainee Mia Limberg, who left captivity with her dog Bella. Also, there was a thank-you message from detainee Daniel Aloni to Hamas members for their treatment of her and her daughter Emilia. Additionally, a TV interview of a mother Chen Goldstein-Almog and her released daughter Agam Goldstein-Almog recounted how Hamas members treated them with respect, where one Hamas member, for example, used a towel during arm-wrestling to avoid physical contact. The daughter said, “For them, women are sacred. Women are like queens.” Chen mentioned that “they gave her [daughter] a beautiful name there… Salsabeel, it means water and it is mentioned in the Quran.” Is this the same Palestinian resistance group that Israel alleges, using unfounded fabricated accounts, committed the rape crime on 7/10/2023, in an attempt to convince the world? https://www.globalresearch.ca/examining-israeli-allegations-atrocities-resistance-operation-al-aqsa-flood/5850689
2024-02-22 Hamas Rape Narrative COLLAPSES, Israeli Forces Accused of SEXUAL VIOLENCE in Gaza: Briahna Joy Gray Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray discuss reports the U.K. could halt weapons shipments to Israel should the IDF continue its siege of Rafah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_RcgBjOQs0
2024-02-22 New Israeli report alleging ‘systematic and intentional rape’ by Hamas relies on debunked Western media reports The contents of the Israeli Association of Rape Crisis Center’s paper alleging “systematic” Hamas rape derive largely from discredited second-hand testimonies and debunked media reports. Among its most heavily cited sources is a dubious NY Times article that triggered a staff revolt at the paper.
Despite the AP’s acknowledgment that the report “did not specify the number of cases it had documented or identify any victims, even anonymously” and that its authors “declined to say whether they had spoken to victims,” dozens of mainstream outlets have presented its findings as incontrovertible fact.
Yet a close examination of the ARCC report reveals that the paper is short on new research, absent of hard evidence, and reliant instead on clips from factually-challenged articles by the same Western outlets promoting its publication. Among the paper’s most frequently cited sources is an infamously shoddy New York Times report by Jeffrey Gettleman purporting to detail “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7.”
Following an internal staff uproar prompted by a series of Grayzone exposés which highlighted major inconsistencies and demonstrable falsehoods by the paper’s sources, the Times canceled an episode of its “Daily” podcast about the article.
Despite the controversy surrounding the Times’ report, the ARCC cites it twelve times in its own paper, while sourcing testimony second-hand from many of the same discredited Israelis as the Times. The ARCC also relies substantially on testimony from ZAKA, the ultra-Orthodox “rescue” group which introduced false allegations that Hamas beheaded babies, cut fetuses from pregnant women, and had lunch in an Israeli family’s home after killing and mutilating them. ZAKA has been lambasted in Israeli media for serially mishandling evidence from the October 7 attacks and even staging atrocity scenes for fundraising purposes. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/02/22/israeli-hamas-debunked-western-media/
2024-02-21 Israel Vs Palestine | Systematic Sexual Abuse By Hamas In Gaza | Israel Vs Hamas | News18 | N18V Written by umbrella organization of rape crisis centers, grim document reviews Palestinian terror group’s strategic use of sexual violence, as deniers abound. [MEK Note: Not one piece of evidence or witness is shown in this video, only Orit Sulitzeany, Executive Director of ARCCI ranting how evil Hamas is with video of burned homes, the festival grounds, blurred image of covered bodies in a Morgue Van, a woman’s rally demanding a deal (hostages). The burnt homes and cars are from IDF tank and Apache Helicopter fire! Just more Israel rants and lies to smear Hamas without any evidence.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx8Uq99gr1I
2024-02-04 ZAKA’s World – How an Israeli Organization Used October 7 to Tell Lies and Make Money Composed mainly of volunteers, ZAKA is a non-governmental ultra-Orthodox organization “with sole responsibility in Israel for dealing with incidents of unnatural death,” according to its website. Its task is to collect bodies and body parts, including blood, so that it can be buried in accordance with Jewish religious law.
An investigation by the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, however, has raised several questions about procedures during the retrieval of the bodies. It raised concerns that “in the first and critical days after October 7”, the Israeli military decided to forgo the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. “Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use ZAKA, a private organization, alongside soldiers in the Military Rabbinate’s search unit” for the south, the paper said.
However, “as part of the effort to get media exposure, ZAKA spread accounts of atrocities that never happened, released sensitive and graphic photos, and acted unprofessionally on the ground,” the report states. On November 23, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly met with the organization’s teams. He is reported as having said “You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders. We are in a war; it will continue. The war is not only to take care of the 1,400 people…but also to give us the maneuvering room.”
In what the Haaretz article subtitles ‘Tales of Imagination’, it reports that a ZAKA volunteer “tearfully” recounted on social media that “We saw a woman, around 30 years old, (and) she was lying on the floor in a large puddle of blood, facing the ground.” The volunteer continued, “We turned her over in order to place her into the bag.” “She was pregnant …Her stomach was swollen, and the baby was still attached by the umbilical cord when it was stabbed, and she was shot in the back of the head. I don’t know if she suffered and saw her baby murdered or not.” The incident, which the volunteer alleged occurred in Be’eri, “simply didn’t happen, and was one of several stories that have been circulated without any basis.” “There is no evidence for this incident, and no one in the kibbutz has heard of this woman. A ZAKA senior official admitted in a conversation with Haaretz that the organization knows the incident didn’t occur,” the Haaretz report states.
The article goes on to say that in another video, the same volunteer weepingly describes “how he found the burnt and mutilated bodies of 20 children in one of the kibbutzim.” He told Haaretz that this was behind the dining hall in Kfar Azza, while in another instance, he said it was in Be’eri. However, reports Haaretz, two adolescents, aged 14 and 16, were killed in Kfar Azza. Ten children were killed in Be’eri, but at least some were known to have been with a parent and were killed in their homes, the report adds. Haaretz reports that the organization “has been accused of spreading false information before.”
In December 2022, Haaretz reported that ZAKA had inflated its stated number of volunteers for years in order to receive more funding. Haaretz reports that before October 7, the organization faced insolvency. “In the time since, says a source at ZAKA, they have raised over 50 million shekels ($13.7 million),” the report adds.
“Not only do these men lack the professional qualifications to make such assessments (they are not medical experts), but their testimonies also lack details: no age, no location, and no time,” Mondoweiss stressed. The report continues that “Details and/or evidence have not even been given to journalists who have asked to see them while reporting on these testimonies. This means that it is impossible to either confirm or debunk them.” https://fgww.palestinechronicle.com/zakas-world-how-an-israeli-organization-used-october-7-to-tell-lies-and-make-money/
2024-01-10 Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report The Grayzone has identified serious issues with the credibility of key sources quoted in the New York Times’ December 28 story, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7.” Authored by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, the article purports to prove “a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” than even Israeli authorities have been willing to allege . However, the Times report is marred by sensationalism, wild leaps of logic, and an absence of concrete evidence to support its sweeping conclusion.
The Times has come under fire from family members of Gal Abdush, the so-called “girl in the black dress” who features as Exhibit A in Gettleman and company’s attempt to demonstrate a pattern of rape by Hamas on October 7. Not only have Abdush’s sister and brother-in-law each denied that she was raped, the former has accused the Times of manipulating her family into participating by misleading them about their editorial angle. Though the family’s comments have sparked a major uproar on social media, the Times has yet to address the serious breach of journalistic integrity that its staff is accused of committing.
The Israeli police have also issued a statement since the publication of the Times’ article asserting that they themselves are unable to locate eyewitnesses of rape on October 7, or to connect the testimonies published by outlets like the Times with anything remotely resembling evidence. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/
2024-01-05 The New York Times “weaponized” Hamas rape story is a fraud. Ali Abunimah debunks it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VvGF9vYnlw
2024-01-04 MASS RAPE By Hamas on Oct 7th? NYT Coverage QUESTIONED By Max Blumenthal: Rising DEBATES Editor at The Grayzone Max Blumenthal weighs in on recent updates surrounding October 7th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN9Rh3XOeo8
2023-12-24 There Was No Cover-Up of Hamas’s Sexual Violence on October 7 The right manufactured it, the media and feminists bought in — and Israel is exploiting the outcry. There has been no cover-up. If anything, the public’s fixation on sexual violence heightens attention to the Hamas-led crimes. The scandal that unfolded in early December was largely manufactured by right-wing pundits who until this moment didn’t give a fig about rape.
Mainstream media, which had grown correctly cautious after repeating unconfirmed reports about who bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in mid-October, could not resist feeding their audiences’ prurience. Then some feminists took the bait, creating false moral distinctions — and strategic divisions — between those who care about rape and those who also recognize the urgency of ending Israel’s occupation and indiscriminate killing. Ultimately, the outcry distracts from the annihilation of Gaza and its people and lends Israel justification in perpetuating it. Needless to say, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is exploiting the opportunity. https://theintercept.com/2023/12/24/feminism-sexual-violence-hamas-israel/
2023-12-18 Hamas ‘mass rape’ claim lacks evidence. But it’s being used to justify genocide This article is intended as a follow-up to my last article, on the western media’s refusal to investigate what happened on October 7. As I argued there, journalists are suppressing evidence from credible sources, including the Israeli military, suggesting that Israel was responsible for many of the deaths of its citizens that day, including those whose charred remains are regularly cited as proof of barbarism by Hamas – and by implication, all Palestinians.
My previous article makes the point that these allegations against Hamas are being used to justify a genocidal bombing campaign that it is known to have killed so far more than 19,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children, as well as an ethnic cleansing campaign that has driven some 2 million Palestinians from their homes and left them exposed to disease and starvation in a tiny area, pressed up against the short border with Egypt. The goal is obvious: to push Palestinians out of Gaza and into Sinai.
But the absence of evidence cannot be treated as evidence, as it is by Haaretz and the western media. Only those reading these two articles through an entirely ideological lens – one seeking to play on a racist trope of the primitive, savage, predatory Arab male so as to rationalize the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza – can fail to notice that lack of meaningful evidence.
Regarding the claim that the Hamas leadership ordered its fighters to carry out rape, the main overview article cites David Katz, an Israeli police commander investigating the October 7 attack. According to Haaretz, he says “it’s premature to determine whether Hamas terrorists received specific instructions to commit rape”. In other words, there is no evidence for such an order.
The idea that the testimonies of Hamas fighters – or of anyone else in Israeli detention – can be treated as credible evidence is patently absurd. As has been well documented, torture is standard practice in interrogations of Palestinians, and is even used against children. No one can seriously argue that Hamas fighters interrogated by Israel following the October 7 atrocities were not subjected to the most extreme “pressure” techniques. Is it likely that none were willing to falsely “confess” to witnessing rapes to ease that pressure? Such “testimonies” would be worthless in any court of law outside Israel.
As for the allegations from male Zaka volunteers, a hardline religious organization best known for collecting Jewish remains for burial, they are best treated with the utmost skepticism. These are the same male volunteers already caught inventing or relaying the most lurid, fabricated claims against Hamas, such as that it beheaded 40 babies, put a baby in an oven, hung other babies from a clothes line, and ripped a fetus from its mother’s womb. According to Israel’s own figures, two infants were killed that day. The Zaka volunteers appear to have an ideological agenda: to fuel as much hatred against Palestinians as possible to justify the kind of genocidal response we have been witnessing over the past two months.
That leaves an anonymous witness testimony, that may or may not be credible, and a handful of photos whose contents are ripe for interpretation and dispute. Assuming that all of this evidence can be taken definitively at face value, that would still not show that Hamas ordered rape or that Hamas fighters carried out systematic rapes, or even conclusively that Hamas fighters carried out any rapes.
Opportunistic rape would be entirely unremarkable in any violent, militarized situation – and indeed unremarkable in behaviors towards women in western societies in general. It would mean that any sexual violence against Israeli women that occurred on October 7 was as representative of a general Palestinian savagery as sexual violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian women – examples can be found here and here – is of a general Israeli savagery. Which is not at all. The same Israelis and westerners who express concern that Israeli women are fearful of coming forward to tell of their experiences on October 7, as Elkayam-Levy stresses, have in the past shown precisely zero concern that Palestinian women, who live under a belligerent military occupation, have been fearful for decades of telling of their experiences at the hands of unaccountable Israeli soldiers.
However, unlike the lack of evidence that Hamas ordered rape as a weapon of war, we do have evidence – from the Israeli media – that an Israeli military leader encouraged Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian women to “boost morale”. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/hamas-mass-rape-claim-lacks-evidence
2023-12-13 Hamas survivor refutes progressives downplaying terrorists’ sexual violence A recently released Hamas hostage’s revelation of sexual violence against her fellow captives appears to refute anti-Israel progressives who tend to downplay or dismiss terrorists’ atrocities. Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, was held hostage by Hamas with three of her children for 51 days following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israelis. Her husband and eldest daughter were murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the attack.
The former hostage also said she “was threatened once when they thought I was wandering around and looking free” in the first apartment they were taken to and that “there was a threat that” she would “be handcuffed, but it didn’t happen.” “I said I have kids and nothing happened to me,” Goldstein-Almog said. “It was the only time I felt under threat [of sexual violence].”
Many American progressives have been largely silent on Hamas’ sexual violence against Israelis, while some have downplayed or dismissed the reports of sexual assault. Briahna Joy Gray, a former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, tweeted earlier this month, “‘Believe all women’ was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required.”
“The same is true of the allegations out of Israel,” Gray wrote in a Dec. 4 tweet. “But also, this isn’t a ‘believe women’ scenario bc no female victims have offered testimony.” “Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms,” Gray continued in a subsequent tweet. “Shame on Israel for not seriously investigating claims of rape and collecting rape kits,” she added.
Goldstein-Almog and her children were released by the terror group, and the wife and mother gave an interview with the Israeli press on Dec. 11 about her time as a hostage. During her interview, Goldstein-Almog revealed she heard firsthand accounts of sexual violence from other female hostages by their Hamas captors. Goldstein-Almog said they “heard three stories firsthand of women saying they were sexually abused and we heard an additional story.” She added that “presumably, there are more instances” of sexual violence by Hamas. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hamas-survivor-refutes-progressives-downplaying-terrorists-sexual-violence/ar-AA1lsduZ
2023-12-13 Hamas survivor refutes progressives downplaying terrorists’ sexual violence Progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was torched after she clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash over the lack of widespread condemnation of Hamas’ use of sexual violence against Israeli women during the Oct. 7 attacks. The Washington state Democrat suggested that wasn’t true, and claimed she had already condemned Hamas’ treatment of women, before quickly turning the conversation back to Israel.
“But I think we have to remember Israel is a democracy. That is why they’re a strong ally of ours. And if they do not comply with international humanitarian law, they are bringing themselves to a place that makes it much more difficult strategically for them to be able to build allies, to keep public opinion with them, and frankly, morally, we cannot say that one war crime deserves another. That is not what international humanitarian law says,” Jayapal said. “We have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians. Fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, three-quarters of whom are women and children.” “And it’s horrible,” Bash said. “But you don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.” “I don’t want this to be the hierarchies of oppressions,” Jayapal said. [MEK Note: Apparently Diana Bash has never talked to Palestinian women held as prisoners by Israel.] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hamas-survivor-refutes-progressives-downplaying-terrorists-sexual-violence/ar-AA1lsduZ
2023-12-08 Hamas terrorists raped and mutilated Israeli women and girls. Where are #MeToo warriors? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/hamas-terrorists-raped-and-mutilated-israeli-women-and-girls-where-are-metoo-warriors/ar-AA1lbRbz
2023-12-07 What we know about rape and sexual violence inflicted by Hamas during its terror attack on Israel https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/06/middleeast/rape-sexual-violence-hamas-israel-what-we-know-intl/index.html
2023-12-06 Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications During an October 31 Senate hearing on Israel’s war in Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered his rationale for rejecting a ceasefire. Summoning as much emotion as a dour Democratic Party operative could muster, Blinken conjured up a gruesome scene intended to illustrate the savagery of Hamas, and the impossibility of negotiations with such an organization: “A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table,” Blinken intoned. “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.” The Secretary of State concluded, “That is what this [Israeli] society is dealing with.”
Though Blinken did not state the source of his disturbing claim – and was not prompted to do so by any senator – it matched testimony delivered by Yossi Landau, the head of operations for the southern Israel region of a religious “disaster victim identification” organization called ZAKA. Indeed, Landau has rehashed various forms of the story Blinken referenced since October 12, detailing how Hamas militants viciously mutilated and killed a 6 and 8 year-old child and their parents in Kibbutz Beeri before dining in their home.
Despite the presence of multiple potential witnesses inside Beeri before ZAKA arrived to collect dead bodies, independent testimony corroborating Landau’s claim has yet to surface. Further, there are no recorded deaths of siblings around the age of 6 to 8 in Beeri on October 7. Any record of a young child killed in the manner Landau described is similarly nonexistent, as are photos of the murdered family he described. In fact, the only siblings anywhere close to this age range who died in the community on that day—12-year-old twins Liel and Yanai Hetrzroni—were killed by Israeli tank shelling.
Landau’s story – and by extension, Blinken’s testimony before the Senate – therefore appears to have been spun out of whole cloth; a cynical fabrication intended to dramatize the supposed barbarism of Hamas in order to widen the political space for Israel’s rampage in the Gaza Strip. As this investigation will demonstrate, Landau’s tale was merely one of many tall tales concocted by a small circle of dubious characters who have managed to shape the official narrative of October 7 in Western media.
Though Israeli officials played a central role in Tel Aviv’s misinformation campaign surrounding the events of October 7— falsely claiming, for instance, that the bodies of dead Jewish babies were found dangling from a laundry line in one kibbutz—the most inflammatory allegations have emerged from a collection of ultra-Orthodox volunteer organizations such as ZAKA. Though ZAKA specializes “in body collection and disposal,” the group has no coronary credentials and is staffed by droves of poorly trained volunteers.
From “confirming” the fraudulent story of beheaded babies found in a kibbutz to blatantly inventing others about Hamas fighters cutting fetuses out of pregnant women’s bodies, severing a little girl’s arm, and baking a baby in an oven, ZAKA and rival groups have demonstrated a remarkable gift for seeding the media with depraved tales of alleged Hamas brutality. In doing so, they have armed Western leaders like Blinken and President Joe Biden with the narrative they would weaponize in order to block ceasefire proposals and rearm a military that has killed over 15,000 civilians in Gaza in less than two months. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/06/scandal-israeli-october-7-fabrications/
2023-12-05 Israel Gaza: Hamas raped and mutilated women on 7 October, BBC hears Hamas has rejected Israel’s accusation that its men sexually assaulted women during the attacks. Much of the evidence has come from the volunteer body-collectors deployed after the attacks, and those who handled the bodies once they arrived at the Shura army base for identification. The BBC has not been able to independently verify this account, and Israeli media reports have questioned some testimony from volunteers working in the traumatic aftermath of the Hamas attacks. Investigators admit that in those first chaotic days after the attacks, with some areas still active combat zones, opportunities to carefully document the crime scenes, or take forensic evidence, were limited or missed. “The first thing was to work on identifying the victims, not necessarily on crime scene investigation. People were waiting to hear what happened to their loved ones.”
Several people involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of those killed in the attack told us they had seen multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners. Video testimony of an eyewitness at the Nova music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim. Videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack, and photographs of bodies taken at the sites afterwards, suggest that women were sexually targeted by their attackers. Few victims are thought to have survived to tell their own stories. Their last moments are being pieced together from survivors, body-collectors, morgue staff and footage from the attack sites.
Police have privately shown journalists a single horrific testimony that they filmed of a woman who was at the Nova festival site during the attack. She describes seeing Hamas fighters gang rape a woman and mutilate her, before the last of her attackers shot her in the head as he continued to rape her. In the video, the woman known as Witness S mimes the attackers picking up and passing the victim from one to another. “She was alive,” the witness says. “She was bleeding from her back.” She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim’s body during the assault. “They sliced her breast and threw it on the street,” she says. “They were playing with it.” The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues. “He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn’t even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.”
One man we spoke to from the festival site said he heard the “noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated”. To our question about how he could be sure – without seeing it – that the screams he heard indicated sexual assault rather than other kinds of violence, he said he believed while listening at the time that it could only have been rape. A statement he made through a support organisation describes it as “inhuman”. “Some women were raped before they were dead, some raped while injured, and some were already dead when the terrorists raped their lifeless bodies,” his statement says. “I desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do.”
Police say they have “multiple” eye-witness accounts of sexual assault, but wouldn’t give any more clarification on how many. When we spoke to them, they hadn’t yet interviewed any surviving victims. Israel’s Women’s Empowerment Minister, May Golan, told the BBC that a few victims of rape or sexual assault had survived the attacks, and that they were all currently receiving psychiatric treatment. “But very, very few. The majority were brutally murdered,” she said. “They aren’t able to talk – not with me, and not to anyone from the government [or] from the media.”
“For the first five days, we still had terrorists on the ground in Israel,” May Golan said. “And there were hundreds, hundreds of bodies everywhere. They were burned, they were without organs, they were butchered completely.” “This was a mass casualty event,” police spokesman Dean Elsdunne told journalists at a briefing. “The first thing was to work on identifying the victims, not necessarily on crime scene investigation. People were waiting to hear what happened to their loved ones.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67629181
2023-12-06 Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/06/scandal-israeli-october-7-fabrications/
2023-12-04 Debunking Israel’s “mass rapes” atrocity propaganda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMqRK5LpGy4
2023-12-04 Watch: Debunking Israel’s “mass rape” propaganda Israel and its proxies have launched a new media blitz, reviving unverified claims that Hamas fighters perpetrated mass rapes of Israeli women during its 7 October military operation. Despite blanket coverage, Israel does not claim to have identified any specific victim of such crimes, nor produced any videos or forensic evidence corroborating that they took place. On The Electronic Intifada livestream we dissected this propaganda campaign and showed how it is being fronted by operatives close to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-debunking-israels-mass-rape-propaganda
2023-12-04 Sheryl Sandberg on Hamas attack: Rape should never be used as an act of war Sheryl Sandberg, a longtime advocate for women and girls’ rights, spoke out against Hamas’ use of sexual violence as a war tactic, saying at the United Nations Monday: “Rape should never be used as an act of war.” Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook (now Meta) and founder of the nonprofit group Lean In, spoke at an assembly hosted by Israel at the United Nation’s headquarters in New York on Monday. “This goes beyond politics. If we can’t agree that rape is wrong, then we have accepted the unacceptable. Then the question will be not what is happening in the Middle East but what is happening to our humanity?” This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.”
Senator Gillibrand called on the UN to denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization. Gillibrand slammed the “horrific acts” committed by Hamas on October 7 as “truly indescribable.” Several speakers reiterated that some human rights groups such as UN Women were too slow to condemn the rape and sexual violence. “We unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October,” the group said in a statement on Dec. 1. “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.”
Hamas on Monday doubled down on its denial that its militants committed rape during the Oct. 7 attacks in a statement on Telegram. “We strongly reject and denounce the coordination of some Western media outlets with the Zionist misleading campaigns that promote unfounded lies and allegations aimed at demonizing the Palestinian resistance, the latest of which is the allegation that resistance members committed ‘sexual violence’ during the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th,” Hamas’ political office said in a statement on Telegram. https://www.wral.com/sheryl-sandberg-rape-should-never-be-used-as-an-act-of-war/21180054/
2023-12-04 Jayapal BLASTED For ‘Both Sides’ing Alleged Hamas’ Sexual Violence On Oct 7: Rising Briahna Joy and Robby Soave discuss Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Wash.) recent comments on Israel and Palestine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1efVY322kA
2023-11-30 UN commission to investigate Hamas sexual violence, appeal for evidence
[MEK Note: Israel makes lots of wild claims to paint Hamas as barbaric, yet it didn’t treat the areas of attack as crime scenes by gathering evidence and it refuses to cooperate with an UN investigation.]
A U.N. commission of inquiry investigating war crimes on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict will focus on sexual violence by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and is about to launch an appeal for evidence, its chair told Reuters on Wednesday.
Chair Navi Pillay on Wednesday said she would pass the evidence onto the International Criminal Court and called for it to consider prosecutions amid earlier criticism from Israel and families of Israeli hostages that the U.N. had kept quiet. “I’m now sitting as chair of a commission with the power to investigate this. So there’s no way we will not do so,” said Pillay, chair of the three-member commission of inquiry into abuses committed in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Already, she said some people are keen to provide testimonies and that these would be handed over to prosecutors.
However, a major challenge for Pillay is that Israel has not cooperated with the commission, which it says has an anti-Israel bias. The commission could struggle to gather sufficient evidence to support future charges if access is not granted. “Since the establishment of the COI (Commission of Inquiry) in 2021, Israel has made it clear: it will not cooperate with this discriminatory body and its Commissioners,” Israel’s permanent mission to the U.N. in Geneva said in a statement to Reuters on Thursday.
Hamas has denied the abuses and was not available for comment. Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said on Thursday the commission had “pre-existing biased prejudices against Israel”. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-commission-investigate-hamas-sexual-violence-appeal-evidence-2023-11-29/.
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