by Owen Schacht - 7 Oct 2024
Corporate news media have consistently blundered through their coverage of the violence on October 7, with documented war crimes outshined by—and sometimes disbelieved because of—horrific claims that later proved false. There were not 40 beheaded babies, or babies hung from clotheslines or baked in ovens, and no pregnant woman was discovered with her belly cut open and her fetus stabbed.
Most of these atrocity stories disappeared after being debunked. But one especially painful and inflammatory claim continues to circulate: that Hamas militants carried out “systematic and widespread” rape on October 7 (New York Times, 2/21/24). This claim has become so embedded in the Israel/Palestine discourse that officials like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris continue to offer it as a reason to support Israel’s ongoing murderous assault on Gaza. And that has happened in no small part due to prominent and repeated coverage from corporate media—most notably the New York Times.
‘Weaponized sexual violence’
Cited and reprinted around the world (e.g., Times of Israel, 12/29/23), the New York Times‘ “Screams Without Words” report (12/28/23) established systematic sexual violence by Hamas as a core part of the October 7 narrative.
The paper’s claim—made most influentially in its December 28 above-the-fold investigation “Screams Without Words”—is that “Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7,” that militants tactically carried out “rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.”
Other newspapers cited and republished the Times’ claims, and both the US and Israeli governments have used the Times coverage to further their military and propaganda campaigns. Shortly after the publication of “Screams,” a resolution “condemning rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas in its war against Israel” was passed by the House 418–0, its sponsors citing the Times reporting and its “horrific stories” to buttress the resolution. So too did Israel heavily cite the Times when producing a “special report” on October 7 sexual crimes.
From the beginning, there were serious problems with the claims of mass rape by Hamas. Yet a new FAIR study finds that, both before and after the publication of “Screams,” the paper devoted significant coverage to promoting that narrative.
At the same time, reports of escalating Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence against Palestinians—of which there is a long, well-documented history—have found little purchase in the paper of record. When such assaults are mentioned, the study found, the paper almost always buries the news beneath sanitized headlines, using understated, clinical language—strikingly different from the definitive and evocative language they use for allegations of Palestinian violence.
The most comprehensive evidence
According to the World Health Organization:
Sexual violence is any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, or other act directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting.
The New York Times, however, often uses a more circumscribed definition of sexual violence, restricting it to a limited range of acts, as in this passage (12/4/23): “Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence—rape and sexual mutilation—particularly against women.” Indeed, rape and sexual mutilation constitute sexual violence in conflict, but so do many other acts (public degradation, verbal abuse and threats, nonconsensual touching and many others).
As it stands, the most comprehensive evidence regarding sexual violence on October 7 was presented by the United Nations (5/17/24) in its examination of crimes committed by all parties between October 7 and December 31, 2023. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory reported that the available evidence displays “indications of sexual violence” committed by Palestinians on October 7 that “were not isolated incidents,” including “bodies that had been undressed” and “the restraining of women…prior to their abduction or killing.”
It noted that it “has not been able to independently verify” allegations of rape made by journalists and the Israeli police, and that it had enough evidence to deem some of these allegations false. Notably, “the Commission did not find credible evidence…that [Hamas] militants received orders to commit sexual violence.”
Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem (8/24), documented “repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity, by soldiers or prison guards against Palestinian detainees as an additional punitive measure.”
That same report—which was limited in scope to the end of 2023—noted witness and victim testimony, as well as ante mortem video footage and photographs, that documented “many incidents in which ISF [Israel Security Forces] systematically targeted and subjected Palestinians to [sexual violence] online and in person since October 7.”
In August 2024, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a report—entitled “Welcome to Hell”—about the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israel’s detention camps. Based on interviews with 55 prisoners, as well as relatives of incarcerated individuals, the report deemed Israeli abuses of all kinds, including sexual violence, to be “so systemic that there is no room to doubt an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities.”
In other words, there is credible evidence of various forms of sexual violence committed by both Palestinians and Israelis. At the same time, there is not evidence of the lurid “systematic and widespread” Hamas rape claims made and spread by the New York Times—while there is evidence that the sexual violence Israel is committing is systematic and widespread, a contrast Times readers would almost certainly be quite surprised to learn, given the paper’s coverage.
Lopsided coverage
In our study, FAIR used the Nexis news database and NYTimes.com in an attempt to identify every New York Times news article, opinion piece and newsletter discussing conflict-related sexual violence in Israel/Palestine digitally published during the 11-month period of October 7, 2023, through September 6, 2024. (See footnote for search terms.) Transcripts, letters to the editor, corrections, podcasts and videos were excluded from the sample.
During the studied interval, we found 195 pieces (149 news articles and 46 opinion pieces) that mentioned allegations of sexual violence in the region. Of those, 158 (or 81%) reference sexual violence against Israeli women and girls by Hamas and other Palestinians. Forty-eight pieces mentioned sexual violence by Israelis against Palestinians. (Both these numbers include 11 pieces that discussed sexual violence suffered and perpetrated by both Israelis and Palestinians.)
When talking about Palestinian violence, opinion pieces—which constituted over a quarter of the references—regularly made unqualified assertions like “Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape” (2/3/24). The Times published an op-ed (11/3/23) by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that asserted that Hamas “tortured children, raped women and destroyed peace-loving communities.”
News articles turned allegations into facts in the Times’ own journalistic voice, well before any investigations had been completed. The paper (12/5/23) reported, for instance, that Biden “condemned the ‘unimaginable cruelty’ of Hamas attackers who raped and mutilated women in Israel on October 7.”
Consistent prevarication
Even when looking at the maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners, the New York Times (1/23/24) could not bring itself to refer to the mass stripping of prisoners as "sexual violence."
In contrast, the 48 Times pieces referencing Israeli-led sexual violence always prevaricated. The vast majority (88%) were news articles, as the paper published only six op-eds referencing such violence. No article, whether news or opinion, labeled it as sexual violence in their own words.
Twenty-eight of them (e.g., 1/23/24) mentioned that Palestinians are stripped regularly in public with “hands bound behind their backs [and] blindfolded.” Some of these included photographic evidence. Forcible stripping is recognized by international law as sexual violence; nevertheless, none of the 28 called it, as Ira Memaj at The Nation (5/13/24) did, “clear-cut evidence of sexual violence.” Only four of them (12/28/23, 4/17/24, 6/12/24, 6/13/24) characterized the abuse as even potential sexual violence, and even then only in the words of UN reports.
Twelve of the 48 articles described invasive sex acts—one (6/6/24) noted a Palestinian detainee who “‘died after they put the electric stick up’ his anus,” and another (5/1/24) reported that an Israeli soldier ordered a Palestinian peace activist “to perform oral sex” on him.
Four of the 12 articles that described invasive Israeli acts referenced the Frankfurt Book Fair canceling Adania Shibli’s award ceremony for her novel Minor Detail, which details the historical rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. Each of these four articles acknowledged that she “was gang-raped and murdered by an Israeli Army unit in 1949” (10/18/23). Strikingly, the only articles that were able to state, both in plain English and not as mere allegation, that acts by Israelis amount to sexual violence or rape concern a 75-year-old case written about in a novel.
We also made a count of which articles about sexual abuse specifically used the words “rape” or “sexual violence.” We chose those words in particular because they bear legal weight—in international law, “rape” and “sexual violence” are specifically outlined and prohibited as crimes against humanity. When the Times includes one or both of these terms (or doesn’t), it indicates how the paper views a given set of actions, and how it wants its readers to interpret them.
Out of 195 total stories about sexual violence in the region, 115 used the word “rape” and 76 of them use “sexual violence.” Of the articles mentioning “rape,” 105 (91%) marked Palestinians as the rapists and 11 (10%) of them named Israelis. However, four of the 11 articles about Israeli perpetrators of rape refer to Shibli’s novel. Out of the 76 articles using the word “sexual violence,” 73 (96%) of them reference Palestinians as the perpetrators and nine (12%) of them name Israelis.
'Part of a broader pattern'
The family of Gal Abdush, featured on the front page of the New York Times to illustrate its "Screams Without Words" report (12/31/23), argues persuasively that their relative could not have been raped, as the Times alleges, given the timeline of events on October 7.
New York Times articles describing “the sexual violence Hamas militants committed on October 7” (1/19/24) trickled out almost immediately after that day (e.g, 10/10/23), quickly becoming a steady stream. From October 7 through December 27, the day before “Screams” was published online, the Times put out 71 articles mentioning sexual violence, 59 of them pointing to Palestinian perpetrators. (Four of the 12 referencing Israeli perpetrators were about the historical novel.) Many of these presented the claims of “mass rape” as accusations from Israeli officials or others, but some portrayed them as fact—as with a report (12/4/23) that, despite Hamas denials, “ample evidence has been collected” that “its fighters committed sex crimes.”
On December 28 (appearing in print on December 31), the Times published its bombshell, “gut-wrenching” investigation, evocatively titled “Screams Without Words.” The article asserted in its headline that “Hamas weaponized sexual violence,” and began like a screenplay for a Netflix drama:
At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.” In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
As it continued, readers were given more heinous details of more rape victims, and the assertion that “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on October 7.”
An 'established' conclusion
The New York Times (1/10/24) cited itself as a source that had "establish[ed] that the attacks [by Hamas] were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence."
After "Screams," the Times' news and opinion pieces began to refer to its own investigation to counter Hamas's denials of ordering its attackers to commit sexual violence on October 7—writing (1/10/24), for instance, that the paper had “establish[ed] that the attacks were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence.”
The Times continued to regularly publish references to sexual violence in its Gaza crisis coverage; our study found the paper's focus only began to really wane in March, settling by April around a level less than half as high as in the early months. In the final two months of the study period, when its balance finally shifted toward Israeli perpetrators, the paper published only 8 and 4 pieces, respectively, mentioning sexual violence in Israel/Palestine.
Yet at that point in the crisis, major reports had just been published—including by the Times—that Israeli security forces were systematically using sexual violence against Palestinians. The paper’s coverage of this ongoing Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence increased at this point, but pieces referencing Palestinian-perpetrated sexual violence still outnumbered them 15–11.
‘On shaky foundations'
The Intercept (2/28/24) reported that the New York Times relied "overwhelmingly on the word of Israeli officials, soldiers and ZAKA workers to substantiate their claim that more than 30 bodies of women and girls were discovered with signs of sexual abuse."
To many, “Screams Without Words” seemed a compelling exposé of brutal abuse. But after its release, detractors and scholars spoke out with concerns about its reliability. While there are certainly strong grounds to believe that instances of sexual violence occurred on October 7, that is not what is being contested. As the Intercept (2/28/24) put it:
The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on October 7.”
And, in fact, a series of investigative pieces from the Intercept (1/28/24, 2/28/24, 3/4/24) revealed that the Times’ prized cover story was built on shaky foundations, with the paper dismissing assurances from hospitals and hotlines that they had gotten no reports of sexual violence, relying instead on politicized sources with a record of debunked atrocity claims.
In January, producers of the Times’ Daily podcast pulled an episode based on “Screams,” the Intercept (1/28/24) reported, as the paper of record could not decide whether it should
run a version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version, raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original report.
Facing internal and external criticism, the Times “went into bunker mode” and pursued a ruthless investigation—not into how the paper could have published such inflammatory allegations based on shaky evidence, but into who leaked evidence of internal dissent. Management employed “Nixonian tactics of leak-hunting and stonewalling” (Nation, 3/1/24). “Frustrated” Times staffers told the Intercept (1/28/24) that the original story “deserved more factchecking and much more reporting. All basic standards applied to countless other stories.”
'Our testimonies are fully accepted'
Mondoweiss (12/30/23) noted that ZAKA, the New York Times' main source for its "Screams Without Words" piece, has played "a key role in Israel’s orchestrated propaganda campaign, spreading fake news and vague information in the service of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza."
Then, in a February article, the Intercept (2/28/24) offered insight into the authors of “Screams.” Leadership at the New York Times selected two inexperienced freelancers in Israel—Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella—to conduct on-the-ground reporting, while Jeffrey Gettleman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent, was responsible for weaving it together. Schwartz formerly worked as an Israeli intelligence officer and was caught liking genocidal posts on social media shortly before the Times employed her.
Additionally, the breadth of “evidence” was shown to be unreliable. For instance, in the case of two of the three identifiable victims reported in the Times article—sisters killed in the kibbutz Be’eri—both the kibbutz spokesperson and the UN denied the claim, based on all the available evidence (Intercept, 3/4/24). (On March 25, the Times finally added a bracketed disclaimer to its online article that describes video evidence “undercutting this account.”)
Notably, much testimony came from ZAKA (Intercept, 2/27/24), described by the Times (12/28/23) as a nonprofit “emergency response team” but described by others, like the esteemed Israeli journalist Yigal Sarna, as a “militia” (YNET, 2/15/05). ZAKA's volunteers are not trained in medical procedures or forensic science; in fact, the organization has actively taken legal action against the use of forensic procedures like autopsies (Behadrei Haredim, 1/1/13).
Many of the charges ZAKA made in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack turned out to be fabrications; they were responsible for the false claims of babies beheaded and burned in ovens, and pregnant women with their wombs slashed open (Mondoweiss, 12/30/23). Yet such tales, which circulated widely in the immediate aftermath of the incursion, played an important role in legitimizing the massive violence that Israel subsequently unleashed on Gaza.
“The testimonies of ZAKA volunteers, as first responders on the ground, had a decisive impact in exposing the atrocities in the South to the foreign journalists covering the war,” Eitan Schwartz, a consultant to Israel's National Information Directorate, told the Israeli outlet YNET (11/12/23; cited in Intercept, 2/27/24). “These testimonies of ZAKA people caused a horror and revealed to the reporters what kind of human-monsters we are talking about.”
But media outlets rarely explain who it is they are quoting when they relay ZAKA’s lurid atrocity tales. As one ZAKA spokesperson (YNET, 11/12/23) put it:
Being a voluntary organization without a political agenda leads to openness and more receptiveness.... Our testimonies are fully accepted as if they are dealing with an international humanitarian volunteer or a doctor.
Moreover, some family members of the only other identified victim discussed in “Screams”—Gal Abdush, the victim whose family is depicted on the cover, and whose story comprises a third of the report—spoke out to refute the Times’ narrative about their relative. They said that it would have been impossible for her to have been raped, given the timing of her death, and that the Times lied and manipulated them (Mondoweiss, 1/3/24).
Abdush’s sister, Miral Altar—who is a fervent Zionist—wrote, “They are animals, they raped and beheaded people, but in my sister’s case, this is not true.” In an interview on Israeli Channel 13 (1/1/24), Nissim Abdush repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped, and proclaimed that “the media invented it.”
Unfazed by grave journalistic errors—if not malpractice—Times columnist Bret Stephens (3/5/24) chose to chastise the skeptics, writing, “How quickly the far left pivots from ‘believe women’ to ‘believe Hamas’ when the identity of the victim changes.” The problem, however, is not that people “believe Hamas”—they just don’t believe the New York Times.
Opting for selective outrage
Among the acts of sexual violence recounted in Ilan Pappe's Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006) was an incident, recorded in David Ben-Gurion's diary, in which Israeli soldiers based at Kibbutz Nirim "captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl...gang-raped her and in the end murdered her."
“Screams” stands out as the most impactful and tone-setting story produced by the New York Times during the studied period. A similarly in-depth, damning and adjective-fueled Times piece detailing Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence does not exist. That absence has nothing to do with the veracity of claims made by Palestinian victims; they are not less verifiable, or less widespread. There’s actually a long history of Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence, and it is extremely well-documented.
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006), Israeli historian Ilan Pappé provided many detailed accounts of rape throughout the Nakba. He explained how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, “seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary.”
Furthermore, a recent technical glitch in the Israel State Archives revealed that Aharon Zisling, Israel’s first agriculture minister and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, “said in 1948 that he ‘can forgive instances of rape’ committed by Jews against Arab women” (Haaretz, 1/5/22).
Despite this history, the paper of record opts for selective outrage. The closest the Times came to publishing anything about Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence that was as damning as “Screams” was a front-page (but below the fold) article (6/7/24) by Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair about Israel’s Sde Teiman detention center—described by a lawyer who visited the site as “more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo” (+972, 6/27/24).
'Where Israel takes Gazans'
This obliquely headlined article (6/7/24) was the closest the New York Times came to putting systemic Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence on its front page—yet readers wouldn’t find it mentioned until well after the jump.
After CNN (5/11/24) published “Strapped Down, Blindfolded, Held in Diapers: Israeli Whistleblowers Detail Abuse of Palestinians in Shadowy Detention Center,” the Times (6/6/24) offered its own reporting of Sde Teiman in the obliquely headlined “Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans.” (The headline in the print edition was even more obscure: “Behind Lines Where Israel Takes Gazans.”)
While comparable in length to “Screams,” and damning in the facts it lays out, the article did not focus exclusively—or even primarily—on the sexual violence committed at Sde Teiman; this occupied just five of the 90 paragraphs. It also had a remarkably different tone from “Screams.” It lacked the emotional weight, but also the forthright naming of “sexual violence” or “rape,” even as it included an image of a truckload of bound, blindfolded and stripped Palestinians.
The two most detailed paragraphs about sexual violence read:
Mr. al-Hamlawi, the senior nurse, said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with “unbearable pain.”
A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus.
This is how the Times reports on Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence: Impaling people’s rectums with hot or electrified metal rods is just not news enough for its own headlines—nor damning enough to be labeled “rape.”
Even now, following the release of video footage depicting Israeli soldiers gang-raping a detainee, and Knesset members debating their right to do so, the Times’ equivocation prevails with headlines like “Unrest at Army Bases Highlights a Long Battle for Israel’s Soul” (7/31/24).
‘No credible evidence’
The New York Times' subhead (6/13/24) references "sexual violence...by Hamas," and not by Israel—though the story said the UN was commission was "unable to independently verify the accusations of rape, sexualized torture or genital mutilation that had been reported in the news media."
In June, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory issued its “first in-depth investigation of the events that took place on and since 7 October 2023”—offering the most comprehensive assessment of sexual violence at the time. In the Times’ summary (6/13/24), published one week after its piece on Sde Teiman, Erika Solomon devoted an entire section to the report’s findings on sexual violence, but left much wanting.
In “The UN Report on Israeli and Palestinian War Crimes: What We Know,” Solomon first used the term “sexual violence” prominently in the subhead, which read:
The findings cite acts such as sexual violence and the deliberate killing or abducting of civilians by Hamas. They also accuse Israel of collective punishment and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
For the many readers who don't bother to read further, the subhead reinforces the notion that sexual violence is what Hamas, not Israel, commits. But the section dedicated to sexual violence acknowledged that the report accuses both sides of sexual violence. Furthermore, Solomon admitted, for the first and only time in the Times’ coverage, buried in the bottom third of the story, that the Commission “found no credible evidence that militants were ordered to commit sexual violence”—discrediting months of reporting in the paper about “Hamas’s campaign of sexual violence”—and that it “was unable to independently verify the accusations of rape, sexualized torture or genital mutilation that had been reported in the news media”—referring to the purported crimes on October 7 so highlighted by the Times.
The Commission also found that sexual violence is “part of ISF operating procedures,” which Solomon did not report. Overall, the UN report is a damning indictment of the Israeli state’s record of sexual violence, and of the New York Times’ reporting on the issue—neither of which are made at all apparent in Solomon’s report.
Legitimizing an unlawful occupation
In Israel/Palestine on Record (Verso, 2007), Howard Friel and Richard Falk explain how
the enduring pattern of the Times’ maximalist coverage of Palestinian violence and minimalist coverage of Israeli violence obscures the magnitude of Israel’s transgressions.
In this case, the Times amplified dubious and discreditable stories, serving to legitimize an unlawful occupation. It forced voices calling for justice into a defensive and optically abysmal position.
Furthermore, as the Egyptian feminist coalition SpeakUp! articulated:
Exploiting women’s bodies and rape allegations as war propaganda carries profound and extensive implications, affecting not only the immediate conflict but also influencing global attitudes and perceptions about women. This approach undermines the credibility of legitimate cases of sexual violence. It may lead to skepticism and disbelief when survivors share their experiences, perpetuating a culture of silence and impunity.
As the New York Times’ army of reporters emphasize one thing and de-emphasize another, frame one thing as fact and cast doubt on the other, lie by omission and bury the lead, they remind us that all victims are equal, but some victims are more equal than others (FAIR.org, 3/18/22, 11/17/23).
*Search terms: FAIR searched for articles containing variations of the terms Israel, Palestine or the West Bank in conjunction with one or more of the following terms: sexual violence, sexual assault (or other variations), sexual abuse (or other variations), rape (or other variations), stripped (or other variations), forced nudity, rectum, oral sex or anus. False positives were excluded from results.
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