feature image photo by NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images
A cursory search of The New York Times reveals an unwavering spree of reportage about the prevalence of sexual violence towards Israelis on October 7. In the months since then, the newspaper has published almost weekly opinion pieces on the topic, including “Denying the Gender-Based Violence on October 7 Helps No One,” and a large-scale investigation known as the “Screams Without Words” report in the waning days of 2023, which the newspaper was recognized for, amongst its other related foreign policy coverage, with two George Polk journalism awards.
The “Screams Without Words” report notes that “No survivors have spoken publicly” about experiencing rape. The piece drew internal criticism from staffers and led the Times to pull an episode of The Daily podcast about the extent and nature of the sexual violence, according to The Intercept. Instead of credible first-person sources that can corroborate the alleged prevalence of sexual violence on October 7, which would usually be required to uphold even basic journalistic integrity standards, the veracity of the claims were frequently obscured by bias, hearsay, unidentified sources, and police accounts of the crime scene. The Times devoted a third of its “Screams Without Words” report to the story of Gal Abdush, who was killed along with her husband on October 7. However, the Abdush family, who were interviewed for the newspaper cover story, insist that Gal was not raped and that their words were misrepresented. The chief superintendent of the Israeli national police, Yael Richert, who was quoted in an opinion essay published in December about the alleged sexual violence, was himself quoting what he had heard from another person who was at the Nova rave. Upon inspection, most perspectives on the sexual violence of October 7 are attributed in this second- or even third-hand testimonial fashion, as if to construct a narrative of marauding Palestinian rapists with or without the evidence to prove it.
On February 25, The Daily Beast reported that one of the “Screams Without Words” cowriters, Anat Schwartz, who had previously served in the Israeli military intelligence services, was under investigation by The Times for liking a tweet calling for the Gaza Strip to be turned into a slaughterhouse. Schwartz’s nephew by marriage, Adam Sella, was her cowriter on the article. How could a writer so biased in her judgment of the facts — and so clearly reluctant to bestow any humanity upon Palestinians — be allowed to cowrite serious journalism on this topic?
The prevailing wisdom from within Israel suggests that forensic teams were too busy identifying the bodies of the victims to collect any DNA evidence of rape or sexual assault on October 7, and Hila Neubach, director of legal affairs at the Association for Rape Crisis Centers, argued that the lack of evidence may be because those who experienced rape were murdered alongside all of the witnesses. The outcome showing no credible evidence is the same, especially since no autopsies were performed on any of the victims. One Israeli eyewitness, Raz Cohen, on whose testimony many articles and reports of sexual violence can be traced, changed his story multiple times, as documented in a thread of videos and articles on Twitter. On October 9 in an interview with i24 News, Cohen didn’t mention sexual assault at all and, over the next few weeks, his report switched from Hamas gunfire to stabbings, and from gang rapes of multiple women he said he personally observed to a single instance of a man raping a woman.
On Feb 27, The Intercept broke a story revealing even more inconsistencies in the allegations of sexual violence against Hamas, including several instances of outright fabrication that can be attributed to Zaka, an Israeli search-and-rescue organization tasked with gathering human remains after October 7. Reports of pregnant women laying face down in a pool of blood, of stabbed babies, of mass rape, and sexually mutilated corpses, which were quickly spread by representatives of Zaka and then picked up by international news agencies, have since turned out to be completely unsubstantiated by photographic or forensic evidence. It is an indictment of mainstream media in America that Israel-based publication Haaretz has been more discerning in debunking the misinformation regarding the sexual violence of October 7 than The New York Times.
A United Nations commission of inquiry will probe these allegations of sexual violence against Hamas, who deny committing any rape or sexual assault. However, Israel has flatly refused to cooperate with the inquiry or even grant the UN access to complete the investigation. After Israeli commander Avi Rosenfeld admitted to requesting an aerial strike on his own base on October 7 that invariably contributed to the death toll, Israel’s refusal to participate in the UN investigation to discover the truth behind sexual violence allegations suggests further foul play.
As a counterpoint, on February 19, the United Nations Office of Human Rights released a damning report that showed credible evidence of egregious violations against women and girls in Israeli detention. According to the report, many Palestinians have been subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment, denied menstruation pads, food and medicine, were severely beaten, and have had demeaning photographs taken of them and uploaded online. On at least one occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were kept in a cage in the rain and cold without food. UN experts, including two Special Rapporteurs, compiled reports from Palestinian women and girls who were subject to multiple forms of sexual assault in detention, such as being stripped naked and searched by Israeli army men, including “at least two female Palestinian detainees [who] were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence.”
These UN experts expressed concern that an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have gone missing after contact with the Israeli army in Gaza, and some reports suggest at least one female infant was forcibly transferred by the Israeli army into Israel, in addition to other Palestinian children who’ve been separated from their parents. The New York Times reported on none of this. The newspaper has been silent about sexual violence towards Palestinians since October 7 and long before that even. In 2015, Daniel J.N. Weishut, a clinical psychologist and teaching associate at Bar Ilan University in Israel, published an academic article called “Sexual Torture of Palestinian men by Israeli Authorities,” wherein he draws on a large database of first-person testimonies of Palestinian survivors of Israeli sexual violence gathered by the human rights NGO The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI). Alongside 36 reports of verbal sexual harassment and 35 reports of forced nudity, there were six testimonies of Israeli officials involved in sexual assault of Palestinian detainees, including the kicking of genitals, simulations of rape, and actual rape by means of a blunt object.
Sexual violence towards Palestinians is rampant, systemic, and underreported, and what makes it particularly appalling is how little attention it receives and the skepticism with which it is treated abroad. To understand why this happens, especially in the context of occupied Palestine, it’s important to turn to the scholarship of the Martinican writer Frantz Fanon and the distinction he draws between the “settler” and the “native” in his seminal text, The Wretched of the Earth. In Fanon’s account, the native, who here represents the Palestinian, is presumed guilty insofar as they are painted as “the quintessence of evil.” The native, to Fanon, “is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values.” In this characterization, it is no wonder that uncorroborated hearsay regarding the uniquity of sexual violence on October 7 gained the traction it did, snowballing with racist assumptions about the presumed sexual perversity of Muslims and their bloodlust towards the settler population. Inversely, the detained Palestinian native is treated with automatic disdain, such that their mistreatment and sexual torture can be justified under the guise of collective punishment.
Colonialism, Fanon tells us, is characterized by pervasive violence — both by the state and by the settlers set up as the country’s elite against the marginalized natives — and by governing institutions that construct and preserve inequality. The New York Times is responsible for an astounding neglect of journalistic integrity with respect to its biased reportage of the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which has now killed upwards of 30,000 innocent Palestinians.
From Native Americans in the United States to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, sexual violence is almost always historically employed as a tool in settler-colonial contexts to further subjugate the already oppressed populations of indigenous people, and there is no doubt that it is commonly leveraged in apartheid Israel by prison guards and IDF officers who command the carceral power and impunity to get away with it. Despite so many first hand testimonies from Palestinian men, women, and children, mainstream media has ignored these survivors and instead chooses to focus largely on uncorroborated accusations. To misattribute the blame for rape and sexual assault is a grave perversion of the truth.
