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Israeli Propaganda: HAMAS ‘Mass Rapes’ on Oct 7

20 December 2023 | Dishonest Reporting, Featured, Israeli Propaganda

Contents

Background to October 7th (20 December 2023)

On the day of October 7, as I watched news of the HAMAS assault on the Israeli military bases that surround Gaza, on the various Israeli kibbutzim in the “Gaza Envelope”, and on ravers at the NOVA music festival, something obvious didn’t make sense.

October 7th’s “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” was a surprise attack and yet—only halfway through the day—there were already social media posts claiming systematic HAMAS atrocities beyond the killing of civilians. Knowing the chaos left in the wake of violent events, it was clear that no one could possibly have compiled any such accounts.

War just doesn’t work like that, where there is a convenient lists of what happened on the very same day. Same with the media reports making the same claims on October 10th. Too soon for that level of clarity. The first red flag.

Everything is in motion on the day

In none of the HAMAS body camera footage released by HAMAS or Israel, and in none of the CCTV footage released by Israel, are any of the armed infiltrators seen not in some state of movement. The footage is a record of constant movement during the large scale and ongoing military operation.

The “rapes happen in war” crowd (no argument there) should recognize the obvious—that rape is typically not something committed right in the middle of an ongoing military operation. HAMAS primary plan was to seize Israel hostages and get them back to Gaza so that they could exchange them for the many thousands of Palestinians jailed without trial by Israel’s military courts.

The scale of the claims

One of the reactions I had to the claims was the scale of them. Had the reports been that ‘there were some rapes’, as opposed to ‘there were mass rapes’, or that ‘some babies were killed’, as opposed to the cartoonish, biblically-numbered ‘forty beheaded babies’—then that might have been credible. But the scale of the claim was a stretch and the swiftness with which that impossible claim spread were two more of several red flags.

HAMAS isn’t ISIS

Despite the popular #HAMASisISIS hashtag shared by both official Israeli government social media accounts and its willing army of hasbara propaganda noise clowns, HAMAS is not ISIS.

While there have certainly been some brutal incidents in Gaza during the time of HAMAS’s rule there, it is absolutely not the historical norm, and the flavor of Islam that HAMAS members adhere to views such acts as hateful, sinful, and something that would make the perpetrator themselves unclean.

No coerced testimony from prisoners of Israel can change that. Israel has a long, documented history of torture and threats and, ironically, one popular Israeli interrogation threat to prisoners is the rape of their female family members. From Human Rights Watch in 1994:

Source: TORTURE AND ILL-TREATMENT: Israel’s Interrogation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, Human Rights Warch (1994), 335 pages. https://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/i/israel/israel946.pdf

Something that hasn’t got too much attention is the fact that, once the Gaza fence was breached by HAMAS, thousands of random Gazans not affiliated with the operation also entered Israel. I would be prepared to accept actual evidence that some members of this group perpetrated some rapes but that’s not what Israel is claims.

Their focus is solely on HAMAS and making the claim that HAMAS deployed systematic, sexual violence. There is little evidence that this happened but to claim it did works well enough to suit Israel’s overall demonization goal, which translates into permission for its abhorrent violence against all of Gaza’s population and Gaza itself.

A note on HAMAS resistance vs. HAMAS war crimes

It is very clear under international law that occupied peoples have a right to resist their occupiers. In December 1990 the UN General Assembly reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” (A/RES/45/130)

A significant proportion of the world views HAMAS’s armed wing as a resistance group that has the right to fight back, and it is this recognition of resistance that Israel is trying to undermine, by demonizing HAMAS with atrocity propaganda, which you’ll find a ridiculously common phenomenon if you google the phrase..

The attacks on the Israeli military bases—that surround Gaza, enforce the siege and ongoing occupation, and routinely kill residents—represent legitimate resistance to Israel’s continued occupation—a system that controls every aspect of life.

This includes Israel’s 16-year-old siege which controls who enters and who leaves the Strip, even at the Egyptian border, which has made access to food, medical supplies, and construction equipment a struggle. All must reach Gaza via its land or sea borders or via the airspace. Israel controls all three.

Israel has various levels of control over electricity, Internet, and water to Gaza, and even made illegal the collection of rainwater in a reality where 97% of Gaza’s water was unfit for human consumption even before Israel’s war on Gaza.

Twelve previous large-scale Israel bombardments had taken out entire apartment buildings and neighborhoods of Gaza in the last twenty years. Israel was not innocent. It has been committing a regular pattern of genocidal crimes against Gaza for two decades.

There’s a reason for proper legal process

It is also clear from CCTV released by Israel that some Israeli civilians were indeed targeted and gunned down by identifiable HAMAS members during the operation. But when everything is intentionally conflated to serve a propaganda purpose, it becomes harder to filter through to the facts of the matter.

The international humanitarian law phrase is not “war itself is a crime” but rather “war crimes”, i.e. crimes committed during war.

For the sake of actual Israeli victims ever finding any justice, the transparent investigation of specific crimes allegedly perpetrated by HAMAS or any other Palestinians who broke out of Gaza on October 7 is their only way through to clarity.

A national ‘Israeli Commission to Investigate the Events of October 7’ is never going to happen

Israel isn’t keen on October 7 investigations, which would necessitate acknowledging the elephant in the room—how many of the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7 were killed by Israel.

The total destruction of 200 cars that the IDF helpfully assembled in a field could not have been at the hands of HAMAS. There are bullet holes in their roofs and many appear incinerated with their occupants inside.

Ynet published an article about Israeli helicopters opening fire on cars heading towards Gaza. There’s even helicopter gunsight camera video of it happening embedded in the article. Israel Channel 12 broadcast footage of a tank firing at Kibbutz homes (below).

Apart from one or two clips, none of the HAMAS bodycam retrieved by Israel from dead fighters or Israeli CCTV released by Israel shows HAMAS carrying any weapons bigger than rifles to cause that kind of damage.

There’s obviously a big story there about friendly fire but Israel is unlikely to conduct the investigation it needs to.

An estimate of the percentage of the 1,200 killed by Israel is impossible without an investigation but the Ynet footage of helicopters firing on random cars, the Channel 12 footage of tanks firing on kibbutz homes, and the visibly very heavy damage sustained by at least half of the 200 NOVA Festival cars that the IDF gathered into one field—collected from around the Festival and from the road to Gaza—suggests that the number will not be insignificant.

IDF-released drone footage broadcast on Russia Today.

We must not be content with Israel presenting uninvestigated rumors of events as universally-occurring or as intrinsic to HAMAS’s plan, especially when Israel’s first disgusting human prop for atrocity propaganda was an obviously tortured and coerced medical professional, kidnapped while obeying an IDF order to evacuate a hospital in Gaza.

One route is a transparent legal process, the other route is just atrocity propaganda to provide cover for genocide. It doesn’t do Israeli victims any favors if Israeli journalists who initially actively circulated and amplified the government’s claims, now have to navigate their own government’s October 7 atrocity propaganda before even getting to the truth of what happened on that day. That truth needs to come out for reality to be able to be assessed and Israel to make informed decisions.

Israel’s historical pattern of indiscriminate and punitive violence against Palestinians is also self-destructive. Israel’s repeated. relentless, and often clumsily transparent propaganda efforts this time around have also had the effect of causing many worldwide to recognize that Israel has weaponized information.

Now the world knows that this is not just an Israeli war against Palestinians or Gaza using conventional weapons, it is also a global battle of words of which most are lies, and that particular weapon is being used on us all.

The effect of the reports on the world

The horror of the image of ‘mass rapes’ or ‘gang rapes’ was cast across the entire HAMAS military operation, not just what happened in this or that kibbutz or at the NOVA festival. The more the claim was repeated, the more people’s imaginations took over, and soon stories of innocent festival goers being sexually violated by groups of terrorists were being widely shared, a claim that simply doesn’t jibe with the everything-in-motion reality of video captured of the day.

Those HAMAS members who could not escape with hostages from the kibbutzim and ended up cornered with Israeli hostages in their homes on October 7, were killed by Israeli tanks and helicopters firing at the kibbutzim—along with their hostages. That is a fact. There is no advantage to HAMAS if it kills hostages. Those who were armed and resisted seem few, judging from released Israeli CCTV.

Israelis were baying for blood after the initial shock wore off and when Israel began bombing Gaza later that same day, many were cheering this on, the 13th large and indiscriminate bombing of whole apartment buildings—sometimes entire neighborhoods—in Gaza in the last 20 years*, without any sense of shame.

Israel’s war against Gazans had many fans around the world, especially once the atrocity propaganda was deployed. For once, Israel found itself in a position where it didn’t have to worry about international perceptions of its actions.

This dynamic is the key to understanding the purpose served by Israel’s atrocity propaganda, it is deployed to shock people into political support, active amplification of the claims, and garner friendly political cover, so that Israel can unleash unimaginable levels of state violence against its usual victims.

The Western media reflexively trust Israeli officials and media

Again: The ‘mass rapes’ accusations started circling social media far too early on for anyone to have been able to assess what had just happened but nonetheless the accusations quickly gained ground, and swiftly turned into news reports and articles in Israel—and then globally—in the first week after October 7.

In the US, CNN’s Jake Tapper was an early and enthusiastic American amplifier of Israel’s atrocity propaganda. On November 16th (according to the URL on CNN’s video report), Tapper began his report asserting that October 7th ‘mass rapes’ were an immutable fact—”it was not a lie but an ugly truth”.

Tapper’s report focused on “testimonies”—which is exactly what all of us had been waiting to hear—but the “testimonies” were thin, had suspiciously cartoonish elements, and were delivered by objectively compromised sources. The Mondoweiss article that follows this introduction discusses that at length.

No matter that the testimonies were weak. Pretty soon the ‘mass rapes’ claim was repeated as fact by almost all of the US and West European media. This would prove to make it very easy for Israel to do whatever it wanted to in Gaza.

Nigel Parry, FACTIFADA

The first Mondoweiss article challenging the narrative, “CNN report claiming sexual violence on October 7 relied on non-credible witnesses, some with undisclosed ties to Israeli govt” (1 December 2023)

Israel-Palestine news site Mondoweiss published two early articles challenging this narrative. The first article from Mondoweiss about Tapper’s coverage—by anonymous contributor/s who would seem to be an Israeli judging both by the media they comment on and their knowledge of the characters in the story—is very much pertinent to the issue of how the falsehood spread.

CNN report claiming sexual violence on October 7 relied on non-credible witnesses, some with undisclosed ties to Israeli govt

The author/s write:

On November 18, 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 October 7, 2023. Within a few hours of the publication of the CNN report, an international media campaign by Israel and pro-Israeli groups was launched. Other media outlets, including The Washington Post, based their reporting on CNN’s report. Feminist activists and groups who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza were also targeted as part of this campaign. 

The author/s of the Mondoweiss article summed up the problems with Tapper’s report as follows:

The most concerning aspect of the report is the fact that every single witness and “expert” in the CNN report proves to either be lacking in credibility or have ties to Israeli government officials and institutions. A deeper examination of the CNN report shows a series of manipulations and professional failures, including the fact that all witnesses that CNN claims to have “found” were featured in previous reports pitched and coordinated by the Israeli government, calling into question how much original reporting or fact-finding went into the CNN report.

Source: https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/cnn-report-claiming-sexual-violence-on-october-7-relied-on-non-credible-witnesses-some-with-undisclosed-ties-to-israeli-govt/

A second article on Mondoweiss that challenged the narrative, “Despite lack of evidence, allegations of Hamas ‘mass rape’ are fueling Israeli genocide in Gaza” (8 December 2023)

A week later, a second article was published on Mondoweiss on December 8th, by Kareena Pannu.

The title of the article alone explains why I have taken on this ‘dirty job’ of having to explain why ‘mass rapes’ did not happen in a world where the #MeToo movement has made believing women paramount, something that Israel has so obviously weaponized in this case: “Despite lack of evidence, allegations of Hamas ‘mass rape’ are fueling Israeli genocide in Gaza.”

Pannu’s article follows at the embedded link below:

Despite lack of evidence, allegations of Hamas ‘mass rape’ are fueling Israeli genocide in Gaza

In her article, Kareena Pannu writes:

Indeed, narratives of sexual violence have not only resurged, but they have done so with vim. Lurid stories of gang rape, mutilation, and even necrophilia, have been disseminated by the media. This has occurred despite there being no substantive developments in evidence of sexual assaults from the Israeli occupation forces. Israel has repeatedly failed to provide forensic evidence, concrete photographic evidence, or victim testimonies to news organizations beyond inferences made by Israel’s forensic teams. Indeed, the Times of Israel alleges that the IOF will never provide forensic evidence because “physical evidence of sexual assault was not collected from corpses by Israel’s overtaxed morgue facilities,” and it is now, reportedly, too late to collect conclusive evidence. 

Presently, Israel’s case consists of one eyewitness testimony shown privately to journalists by the Israeli police, witness testimonies of “body collectors,” forensic teams, and army staff, photographs taken at sites that suggest women may have been sexually assaulted, and witness testimonies of Hamas fighters acquired from Shin Bet, whose use of torture is notorious. Testimonies of victims will not be shared; the police have not interviewed any surviving victims, and 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. 

The rest of Kareena Pannu’s article looks at the real life fallout from the accusations, both in terms of Israel’s free pass for its “retaliation”—in reality just another carpet bombing of Gaza’s neighborhoods, Israel’s thirteenth such orgy of destruction in the last two decades*—and the remaining stain, which Pannu correctly notes, is not going away any time soon and is counter productive to anyone actually working to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict for once and all:

The reliance on lazy Orientalist caricatures of Arab men as savage sexual predators is both cunning and destructive. The implication that brutality and sexual depravity are intrinsic characteristics of Arab men and Arab people suggests that Palestinians are, inherently and irredeemably, an evil race, and their total annihilation, therefore, is justifiable. Manufacturing consent for a genocide works only when the genocide of a people is not regarded as a loss, and the eradication of their culture, their history, and their humanity is an act that renders the world a better place. The stigmatization and dehumanization of indigenous men and men of color is not new. It is an agenda that is all too familiar, and we must resist it.

Source: https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/despite-lack-of-evidence-allegations-of-hamas-mass-rape-are-fueling-israeli-genocide-in-gaza/

Israeli Foreign Ministry posts tweet claiming they found HAMAS rape instructions in Israel (12 November 2023)

Source: https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1723759157960953981/photo/1

Arabic is a gendered language like Spanish and French. The verb form is used masculine (“إخلع بنطالك”) and is not something used when addressing a woman. The list appears to be commands as you’d see in a military or law enforcement context—nothing to do with sexual violence—and all of the instructions were as follows:

1. Stop. 2. Stay still. 3. Come here. 4. Hands up and legs apart. 5. Move away. 6. Place your weapon on the ground. 7. Remove your pants. 8. Lie down on the ground. 9. Stay silent. 10. Where are your unit/comrades? 11. Kneel. 12. Walk ahead of me. 13. Don’t look back. 14. Do you have weapons on you? 15. How do I use this weapon? 16. Be quiet. 17. Show me the way. 18. Where is the GPS chip? 19. Walk faster. 20. Stand up/Get on. 21. I will harm you / I will Kill you. 22. Are you hurt/Injured?

This is desperate as the hand drawn calendar the IDF found in Al-Shifa Hospital, which it tried to spin as a “HAMAS hostage guarding schedule”. This stuff would be funny if it wasn’t being successfully used to dissuade people from protesting an ongoing genocide.

The New York Times article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” (28 December 2023)

This extensive article, from a major US newspaper, was one of the biggest recent pushes of the ‘mass rapes’ trope.

The article can be accessed here.

Two early deconstructions of the New York Times article on Twitter (28-29 December 2023)

The reviews of this article are starting to come in. Below, are two X/Twitter threads going through the article point-by-point:

Direct link: https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1740547528377114634

Direct link: https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1740641517847335009

Another Mondoweiss article: ZAKA is not a trustworthy source for allegations of sexual violence on October 7 (30 December 2023)

Another article in Mondoweiss by journalist collective called “The Short String”, who describe themselves as “an anonymous group of Palestinian journalists in Israel who analyze the role of international media and organizations in promoting Israeli propaganda,” deals with the highly problematic Israeli organization ZAKA, which the NYT also relied on. The introduction to the article appears below, a link to the full article follows: 

Many of the reports in Israeli and international media networks — including CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, and many others — that accuse Palestinians of committing systematic wide-scale gender-based violence against Israeli women on October 7, 2023, rely on testimonies by Israeli ZAKA volunteers.

ZAKA is a non-governmental religious Haredi organization specializing in collecting dead bodies and body parts from sites of “unnatural” deaths and transporting them to morgues according to strict Jewish religious laws. 

The organization was founded in the late 1990s by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. Meshi-Zahav was previously the leader of “Keshet,” an ultra-Orthodox Jewish terrorist group that targeted forensic pathologists and used explosives against shops selling “secular newspapers.” Meshi-Zahav led ZAKA until 2021, when he attempted suicide after shocking revelations of dozens of rape and sexual assault cases committed by him. Since its inception, the organization — described as a “militia” by the highly esteemed Israeli journalist Yigal Sarna — has been subject to incessant criticism, investigations, and demands to dismantle it.

Source: https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/zaka-is-not-a-trustworthy-source-for-allegations-of-sexual-violence-on-october-7/
ZAKA is not a trustworthy source for allegations of sexual violence on October 7

Sister of the “Woman in the Black Dress”, turned into the mass rapes poster child by the New York Times, denies her sister was raped in an Instagram comment (2 January 2024)

Replying to an Instagram post about the New York Times rapes story by Yosef Haddad, an Israeli Arab Zionist influencer, Miral Alter (מירל אלטר), the sister of “The Woman in the Black Dress” Gal Abdush ( גל עבדוש ), responded in Hebrew:

אז “האישה בשימלה השחורה ” זאת אחותי אני באמת לא מצליחה להבין את כל הכתבות התקשורתיות סביב הסיפור הזה ולמה אני אומרת כי היו כל כך הרבה מקרים קשים אפילו יותר אז למה דווקא הסיפור שלה ?? הכל בגלל סרטון 1 שהופץ ללא ידיעת המשפחה ללא אישור מציינת שיש ילדים בסיפור וזה לא מעניין אף אחד. בסרטון נכון המראה לא קל אבל זה ברור שהשימלה תהיה למעלה ולא בצורה רגילה ראש חצי שרוף כי זרקו רימון על הרכב שלא יראה כאילו אני מצדיקה את מה שעשו שם החלאות הם עשו מעשים הרבה יותר גרועים כן אנסו כן שחטו ערפו ראשים וחלקים של גופות אבל במקרה של אחותי לא! ולמה לא בשעה 6:51 גל שולחת לנו הודעה לקבוצת ווסאפ אנחנו על הגבול” אתן לא מבינות מה הולך איזה פיצוצים יש יצאנו מכאן. בשעה 7:00 גיסי מתקשר לאחיו ואומר ירו בגל היא “מחרחרת” איך ב4 דקות גם אנסו גם שחטו וגם שרפו נכון גיסי היה שרוף כולו אבל היא לא נאנסה אך ורק כי אין ממצעים רפואים ובדיקות אשר מוכיחות שעברה אונס מציינת שהניורק טיימס שהגיעו אלינו הם ציינו כי רוצים לעשות כתבה לזכרם של גל ונאגי וזהוו לכן אישרנו אם ידענו שמדובר בכותרת כמו אונס שחיטה לעולם לא היינו מסכימים לעולםםם מציינת שכל יום מתקשרים אלינו כתבים עיתונאים מערוץ תקשורת גם בעולם ורוצים לראיין ולשמוע מה היה באמת בבקשה לא לשכח שיש 2 ילדים שנשארו ללא הורים אומנם משפחה ענקית שעוטפת ולא חסר להם כלום אז בבקשה נכון שצריך לזעזע את העולם ונכון שכולם צריכים לדעת מה היה שם אבל לא על חשבון הגב של אחותי וגיסי יוסף אתה עושה עבודה מדהימה הלוואיי והיו עוד המון כמוך בבקשה אין שום הוכחה שהיה אונס זה רק על פי סרטון ואם יש הוכחה אחרת כמובן שנרצה לדעת!

Text above exactly as it was posted in Hebrew. Here is a translation of the first part of Miral Alter’s Instagram post provided on Mondoweiss:

I can’t understand all these reports. There were many difficult stories, why this story in particular? It’s based on only one video published without the family’s knowledge… It is true that the scenes in the video are not easy, but it’s clear that the dress is lifted upwards and not in its natural state, and half her head is burned because they threw a grenade at the car. I don’t want to be understood as if I’m justifying what they did; they are animals, they raped and beheaded people, but in my sister’s case, this is not true. At 6:51, Gal sent us a message on WhatsApp saying ’we are at the border, and you can’t imagine sounds of explosions around us’. At 7 o’clock, my brother-in-law called his brother and said they shot Gal and she’s dying. It doesn’t make any sense that in four minutes, they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?

Source:

Miral Alter’s original post continued on with a critical detail about how the New York Times presented the interview to the family but was not quoted in the Mondoweiss article, so here is the rest of it. I used mostly Google Translate (with reference to Bing, iTranslate & Reverso translators):

The New York Times came to us and said they wanted to do an article In memory of Gal and Nagai and we confirm that if we knew that this was going to be a headline like “rape slaughter,” we would never have agreed to it. Every day reporters from the media are calling us from around the world and want to interview and hear what really happened.

Please do not forget that there are two children left without parents, although a huge family surrounds them, so they are not missing anything, so please: it’s true that the world needs to be shaken and everyone needs to know what took place, but not at the expense of my sister and my brother-in-law Yosef.…. They have no proof there was rape—just by video—and if there was any other proof of course we would want to know!

Mondoweiss: “Family of key case in New York Times October 7 sexual violence report renounces story, says reporters manipulated them” (3 January 2024)

Mondoweiss published an article on 3 January 2024 which compiled the denials from various members of Gal Abdush’s family that Gal had been raped. You can find the article here. The New York Times has some explaining to do and some genocide propagandists to fire.

NYT piece debunked by 16 MENA human rights organizations and feminist groups

These groups are dedicated to supporting victims of gender-based violence and striving to eradicate sexual violence in all its forms; original petition signed by 766 individuals (as of 3 January 2024).

Introduction to the report: Following the allegations of rape cases on October 7, and 80 days of subsequent developments, The New York Times released an “investigative report” on December 28, 2023. This report, allegedly detailing the events and claiming to “verify” incidents of rape, spans over 3500 words. However, it fails to present any concrete evidence or include accounts from the alleged victims.

As MENA Human Rights organizations and feminist groups dedicated to supporting victims of gender-based violence and striving to eradicate sexual violence in all its forms, we recognize the possibility of sexual violence occurring in times of war and conflict. Women often bear the brunt of such conflicts, facing multilayered levels of violence, including sexual assault. Despite this, we find the report profoundly disturbing for its lack of credible arguments, evidence and failure to engage with any of the alleged victims. We vehemently oppose the exploitation of women’s bodies and experiences in perpetuating misleading propaganda.

Read the whole report here: https://speakupeg.com/2023/12/30/nyts-disgraceful-investigation-weaponizing-sexual-violence-against-women-for-occupation-propaganda/ (archived link)

The UK Guardian rehashes the same propaganda over three months later (18 January 2024)

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/evidence-points-to-systematic-use-of-rape-by-hamas-in-7-october-attacks

In a 19 January 2024 article by independent journalist Jonathan Cook, “Why the Guardian’s ‘Hamas mass rape’ story doesn’t pass the sniff test”, Cook asks, “How is it that journalists are not pausing to question the outrageous improbability of so many of the evidence-poor Hamas rape stories being advanced?” He writes:

The Guardian has just published the latest in the western media’s endless cycle of stories claiming Hamas committed “systematic, mass rape” on October 7. Its article is headlined: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.

The biggest problem with these stories isn’t just the continuing absence of any meaningful evidence for “systematic” rape; or Israel’s long track record of lying to justify state terrorism; or Israel’s refusal to cooperate with independent investigators; or the racist, anti-Arab tropes that pass for sophisticated analysis in western circles.

It is simply the outrageous improbability of so many of the evidence-poor rape stories being advanced.

Read Jonathan Cook’s article at https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-01-19/guardian-hamas-rape-sniff-test/

The Hill reports on the New York Times doubling down on its “Screams without Words” propaganda (26 March 2024)

*FOOTNOTE ON HAMAS RESISTANCE TO ONGOING ISRAELI OCCUPATION

Anyone who talks about “HAMAS starting this” has missed the last 75 years of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which began with the ethnic cleansing of 418 Palestinian villages, including two that were razed to see Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, built on their ruins.

But let’s just very briefly consider one aspect, just involving the Gaza Strip, just in the last two decades—Israel’s military assaults:

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