Among Israel’s most dependable allies in its propaganda war, which has been running alongside its genocidal action in Gaza, have been Western media outlets which have systematically and faithfully amplified information and opinion emanating from Tel Aviv.
Soon after the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, Israel’s propaganda system – one of world’s most sophisticated and technologically well-equipped – swung into action. Within a matter of days, the international media were swamped with stories of Hamas operatives having decapitated Israeli babies. The figures quoted were terrifying. One NBC headline of October 12 read: ‘Unverified reports of “40 babies beheaded” in Israel-Hamas war inflame social media’. Among the sources for this report was a live broadcast put out by a Tel Aviv-based news channel, whose reporter claimed to have got the information from Israeli soldiers who had witnessed such decapitation. Shortly thereafter, you had US President Joe Biden, no less, publicly passing this off as fact. It was left to his staff to wheel back on the claim, clarifying that they had no independent way to establish its veracity. Before long, Israeli officials themselves admitted that they could not confirm that such beheadings had taken place. A CNN reporter who had earlier put out a version of this story later tweeted, “I needed to be more careful with my words and I am sorry.”
The mass beheading of Israeli babies by Hamas came to be perceived as a carefully manufactured piece of disinformation circulated to draw similarities between the Palestinian group and ISIS. More importantly, it was to justify Israel’s vicious, genocidal assault on Gaza launched almost immediately.
As the narrative of the mass decapitation of babies faded away, another – as deeply triggering as the first – took its place and continues to roil the news space to this day: mass rape as Hamas’s sanctioned strategy during the October 7 attack. Once again, Western media played their assigned role and yet again all the sources cited in their stories were exclusively Israeli. A BBC report by its Middle East correspondent was a good example. Headlined, ‘Israel Gaza: Hamas raped and mutilated women on 7 October, BBC hears’ (December 5, 2023), it contained blood-curdling details, including one testimony from a woman who was at the Nova festival that the Israeli police privately showed journalists who recalls witnessing Hamas fighters gang rape and mutilate a woman. 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.”’
What was conspicuous about this report was that its major source – the Israeli police – claimed that they had “multiple” eyewitness accounts of sexual assault but wouldn’t say how many. They also admitted they had not interviewed any surviving victims of such rapes. Such uncertain evidence however did not deter the New York Times (NYT), that prides itself on being the world’s prime repository of “all the news that is fit to print”, from repeating the mutilation story 23 days later.
The story that came to occupy pride of place in Israel’s informational onslaught post-October 7, was evocatively titled, ‘Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7’ (December 28). Written by Jeffrey Gettleman, a Pultizer Prize winner, and two Israeli colleagues, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, its main argument was evident in its headline: sexual violence as part of Hamas’s strategic offensive.
The report utilised an interesting conceit. Amidst the largely faceless reportage on mass rape that had been churned out thus far, this one interwove the story of Gal Abdush, whose body was found alongside her car and had been only identified till then as “the woman in the black dress”, whom the Israeli police claimed had been raped. By revealing her identity, NYT sought to make her symbolic of “the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks”. The story soon gained traction across the world. Heavyweights like Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Facebook, even made a documentary on the subject titled, ‘Screams Before Silence’. The NYT story had provided more spine-tingling details of the breast-hacking incident put out in the BBC report and the source was a woman with the pseudonym ‘Sapir’ who survived the Nova festival and who was now a key witness for the Israeli police.
Among the first rebuttals to the NYT story was one from the Abdush family. They denied that Gal had been raped and even implied that they had been interviewed by the NYT on false pretences (‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé’, The Intercept). Another instance cited in the same story of two young women sexually abused in Kibbutz Be’eri also came up for denial from a Be’eri spokesperson, who maintained that the girls were shot, not sexually assaulted.
Israel has invested a great deal of effort to gather the forensic evidence required to render the ‘Sapir’ story foolproof, since it was something of a centrepiece for its thesis that brutal sexual violence was integral to the Hamas attack. However, it has so far failed to identify the victim of that unspeakable atrocity.
As the NYT story began to disintegrate despite the newspaper’s stout defence of it, questions arose about its veracity from within the organisation itself. The editors of The Daily, the NYT podcast, gave up the idea of running it as it did not measure up to its evidentiary standards.
Initially it was only Palestinian outlets, like Electronic Intifada, or alternative Leftwing news portals like The Grayzone and The Intercept, and newspapers supportive of the Palestinian cause, such as Arab News, that were prepared to call out these catastrophic journalistic failures. Yet slowly, inexorably, the tableau began to change. In early March, The Nation poured scorn on the NYT story, highlighting its many obvious shortcomings (‘The Nixonian New York Times stonewalls on a Discredited Article About Hamas and Rape’, March 1). The following month, The Washington Post reported that 50 senior professors of journalism had written a collective letter to the newspaper demanding it address the questions that have arisen from its expose.
The premise on which the NYT story, and by extension Israel’s larger ‘Hamas weaponised rape’ claim, now came under more rigorous scrutiny from the Western media. Most recently the UK-based The Times, London (‘Israel says Hamas weaponised rape. Does the evidence add up?’, June 7) carried an exhaustive re-assessment, drawing on, among other sources, the report of the UN general-secretary’s special representative on sexual violence Premila Patten. It concluded, as did the Patten report, that the information on the October 7 attack was generated by sources that could not be characterised as reliable and this had created an instant but flawed narrative.
So what can we make of this flood of supposed facts that swept over the world in the wake of October 7? Let me offer four major conclusions.
First, the charge that Hamas used mass rape as deliberate strategy, which was greatly amplified by the Western media, failed the test of evidence, even if random acts of sexual violence could certainly have been committed by Hamas operatives during the incursion. In all these months, only one woman has testified to her own sexual abuse. Hugely reprehensible as the incident she narrated was, it did not take place on October 7. It was while she was in captivity in Gaza that she was forced to commit a sexual act on her male captor.
Second, in all these months, the sexual violence perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian population has been deliberately, systematically and unconscionably ignored, not only by the Western media but by those in countries like India where major media outlets had allowed themselves to get embedded in Israel’s military action.
Third, what the mainstream media across the world has always failed to do is to tell this story in all its complexity. Long before October 7 is the broken history of Palestine that is never recalled: a history of settler colonialism, dispossession, expulsion, massacre and apartheid. As the UN recently acknowledged, October 7 did not occur in a vacuum.
Finally, we need to note the cynical manner in which media information has been deployed by Israel in the wake of October 7 to frame itself as the victim, even as it continues to rain retributive fire on Gaza that has so far consumed over 37,000 lives.
To borrow a word from the NYT article, there was weaponisation in the wake of October 7 – but it was the weaponisation of information.
Pamela Philipose is The Wire‘s ombudsperson.
