How The New York Times Weaponized Rape To Spread Israeli Propaganda
Biased, uncorroborated reporting about sexual violence on October 7th traumatized victims’ families and fueled support for (plausible) Palestinian genocide.
(Trigger warning: This story deals with sexual violence and assault, which may be triggering to survivors and victims.)
If sex sells, then rape grabs headlines. Sexual violence strikes a particular fear in us in ways that other crimes cannot. Murder is hyper-stylized and over-saturated, the stuff of casual binge-watching these days. Robbery can be cold and impersonal, delivered in statistics by your frantic local news. War crimes do not capture the imagination of those inundated with “first-world problems”.
But sexual violence captivates us because it is particularly vile in its perversion of our greatest desires. Passion and intimacy are turned into tools that dehumanize and traumatize. That women form the majority of victims of sexual violence is no coincidence in our patriarchal society. It is a crime that is rooted in the demonstration of power over another human being, and therefore the starkest and most well-known example of gender inequity and violence against women.
Our media’s constant portrayal of women as both sexual objects to desire and vulnerable beings to protect fuels a “rape culture” that removes society’s responsibility for pervasive sexual violence and places it upon an amorphous, evil male entity. The rapist is an outsider, not one of us. He is a creeper lurking in the bushes. A strange visitor from another land. A crazed madman preying upon the lily-white innocence of OUR women. (Never mind that most perpetrators of sexual violence are acquaintances, partners, or family members.)
It should therefore come as little surprise that reports of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas in its attack on Israel on October 7th have dominated news coverage. That sexual violence was perpetrated by Hamas during the attack is of little doubt. Earlier today, a report by a team of experts from the United Nations concluded that there is "reasonable grounds to believe" that multiple forms of sexual violence were committed by Hamas at several locations during the attack.
However, a different sort of narrative emerged shortly after the attacks, and continues to persist. Israeli organizations- amplified by Western media and world leaders- have consistently claimed that sexual violence on October 7th was systematic and ordered directly by Hamas as a weapon of war. Israeli officials have repeatedly evoked these allegations to not only justify their (plausible) genocide of Palestinians in Gaza but also to deflect criticism from the U.N. and other international organizations. Today, shortly after the release of the U.N. report, Israel recalled its U.N. ambassador, accusing the global body of keeping quiet about “mass rapes committed by Hamas”. The report made no attribution of sexual violence to any armed group due to the nature of the U.N. mission.
The threat of rape by Hamas has also been used by supporters of Zionism to demonize Pro-Palestinian protestors:
Hamas, for its part, has gone out of its way to strongly reject allegations of sexual violence. This is notable because they have largely taken responsibility for the other atrocities they committed, including the killing of around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages.
One of the most vivid reporting on the sexual violence occurring during the October 7th attack comes from The New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettelman, along with Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella. In a December 28th article entitled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”, the three authors present a brutal and graphic accounting of what they claim is “a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.”
Their reporting has recently come under fire for a litany of questionable practices, including bad sourcing, numerous inaccuracies, biased language, and even manipulating and discrediting a victim’s family. Furthermore, the staunchly anti-Palestinian backgrounds of Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella have also made headlines.
The revelations, put forth by the Intercept and several other outlets, detail how the Times knowingly pursued potentially unethical journalism and editorial decisions, despite voiced skepticism from other journalists at the paper, to paint a picture of a systemic pattern of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas. This coverage was then amplified and used by supporters of Israel and the Israeli government as a justification for its war in Gaza, which has now killed over 30,000 people, mostly women and children.
Separating Truth From Propaganda
Now, before delving into The Times piece, an important caveat. This is not written to cast doubt on the accounts of sexual violence, or worse on any victims themselves. In fact, it is meant to do the opposite and show how the New York Times is devaluing the suffering of those victims by misrepresenting them and, willingly or not, furthering Israeli propaganda legitimizing plausible genocide in doing so.
As previously mentioned, we can say with a great deal of confidence that Hamas did commit acts of sexual violence on October 7th, and likely numerous ones. According to Alix Vuillemin, senior advocacy advisor at Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. “Where there is conflict, there will be sexual violence, always,” In a 2022 interview, she defines sexual violence as “acts that are intentional, non-consensual, and of a sexual nature which occur during or related to a conflict, committed by or against any person regardless of age, sex or gender.”
There is also credible evidence that can be used as a reference point, including the report released by the U.N. today. Likewise, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, a health organization working in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, published a paper that compiled available evidence and testimonies around sexual violence on October 7th. They conclude that the evidence they analyzed “raise concerns that the October 7 Hamas attacks included many incidents of sexual assault following repetitive patterns.”
Crucially, they do not conclude that the sexual violence was systemic or ordered by Hamas, as the Times’ article infers in its article. In an interview with The New Yorker, one of the authors of the organization’s paper, Hadas Ziv, detailed its painstaking process of vetting and scrutinizing sources, and why they were careful not to make unsubstantiated claims:
“In order to say that it was systematic, you need to show orders and a method, but saying that something was “widespread” was easier to feel sure about. It’s for the legal teams to investigate whether it was systematic and to define whether the scale is large enough to define it as a crime against humanity. We ask for people to investigate.”
Taking the “Investigation” out of “Investigative Journalism”
The Times, for its part, has stood by its reporting and claims of systemic sexual violence. In a statement, international editor Phil Pan said that, “We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation.” However, they also recently shelved a planned episode of its podcast “The Daily”, which was supposed to cover the article by Gettelman and co. And it seems like that was a wise decision, given all that has been uncovered around their investigation.
First off, there are serious concerns around the Times’ decision to rely on Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella as journalists, mostly because they aren’t journalists, and are certainly not unbiased. According to James North of Mondoweiss, Anat Schwartz is a filmmaker who worked in Israeli Defense Force intelligence. She has also “liked” several anti-Palestinian posts online, including one calling Palestinians “human animals”, another urging the Israeli army to make Gaza into a “slaughterhouse”, and others that spread misinformation about the Hamas attacks. (Schwartz tweeted an apology for one of these likes, saying it was inadvertent, but it is unclear which). Adam Sella is Anat Schwartz’s nephew and appears to have little journalistic experience outside of food blogging.
This information was very publicly available and, as writer/illustrator Mona Chalabi points out below, The Times seemingly had to go out of their way not to know about it:
In a podcast interview produced by an Israeli TV channel (as reported by The Intercept), Schwartz herself admits she did not have the experience to investigate sexual violence, but that the Times convinced her that she could do so anyway. Newsroom sources at the Times (again, cited by The Intercept) confirmed that Schwartz, along with Sella, did reporting on the ground, while Gettelman did the framing and writing.
In her interview, Schwartz details her process of gathering evidence and sources, which vacillates from the spectacularly inept to the dangerously problematic. After calling hospitals, sexual assault hotlines, and kibbutzim (Israeli communal collectives) and being told that none had received reports of sexual assault, she then started looking for witnesses of sexual violence. She reached out to an Israeli Air Force paramedic who told multiple news outlets that he saw evidence of two teenage sisters who were raped and killed in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
However, his testimony was roundly discredited by Palestinian journalists at Mondoweiss, who were not able to corroborate his story with that of Israeli records of dead victims. In subsequent news interviews, the soldier changed his testimony to say the girls were actually found at another kibbutz, Be’eri, which also could not be corroborated by the U.N. report. The soldier also made other outlandish and widely reported claims, such as a colleague finding a baby stabbed and thrown away in a trashcan, which has also been debunked.
The New York Times included the soldier’s changed story in their article without mention of these red flags, despite their availability weeks before the article’s publication date. Even more worrying is Schwartz’s wildly unfounded conclusion from hearing the testimony. In her own words:
“I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,”
Schwartz continued to maintain there was a pattern to the sexual violence despite finding no additional witnesses at other kibbutzim and other sites that were attacked on October 7th. Undeterred, Schwartz turned to other sources of questionable credibility, including members of Zaka, a volunteer rescue group, as well as the testimony of Shari Mendes, who served in an IDF rabbinical unit that prepared bodies for burial. The same pattern followed as with the solider: Schwart failed to verify or contextualize the source, they provided dubious testimony, and Schwartz extrapolated her own conclusions from it.
In the case of Zaka, Schwartz thought nothing of the fact that they were a conservative, ultra-Orthodox organization, or the fact that they had no forensic or crime scene expertise. In fact, in an October interview describing the group’s work after the October 7th attack, Yossi Landau, a senior Zaka official, said “When we go into a house, we are using our imagination.” The newspaper Haaretz later found that the group had mishandled evidence. Zaka has also been accused of spreading false stories about October 7th.
Zaka, for their part, never actually made specific allegations of rape, even by Schwartz’s own admission. However, in her interview, Schwartz listed Zaka’s along with the soldier’s accounts as evidence that she did find. The Times not only heavily featured Yossi Landau and Zaka in their piece but provided no context of their background other than that they are “religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.”
Shari Mendes’ account and interviews have been widely circulated by major news agencies, and she even testified before a UN session about sexual violence on October 7th. As with others, Mendes had no experience in forensics, as she is an architect by training. Her testimony has been called into question, particularly regarding her claim of finding a beheaded pregnant woman whose baby had been cut out and also beheaded, despite no existence of a record of such a woman or baby.
The Times includes Mendes in their story and mentions her background, but not the red flags raised in her testimony. In their article, she says she saw the bodies of four female soldiers, who she deemed to have had signs of sexual violence, “including some with “a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.”
Physicians for Human Rights Israel do not include Shari Mendes’ testimony in their paper. While they include accounts from Yossi Landau and Zaka, they were careful to only document what Zaka workers witnessed, without making any inferences. In his interview, Hadas Ziv explains the importance of this:
“The rescue teams were traumatized. Because it was the first time that we saw sexual violence in conflict—this is something we haven’t seen before—they did not come prepared to collect the testimony and collect the evidence that is needed…For example, as in one of the testimonies, if an ambulance driver or a paramedic sees a woman, a youth, legs spread, lower body exposed, semen on her back, he says she was raped, but he’s not an expert. All we know is there was sexual abuse here because of how we found the body, but he’s not an expert to say that she was raped.”
The UN report specifically noted “erroneous interpretations of the state of bodies by some volunteer first responders without relevant qualifications and expertise”.
In all, October 7th Fact Check, an independent verification site, flagged a dozen testimonies that the Times used in their article as having varying levels of inconsistencies, lack of evidence, or outright falsehoods. Some of the testimonies made by the Times’ sources were also discredited by the U.N. report.
Doing No Harm?
Mendes’ interviews made Anat Schwartz jump to further illogical conclusions:
“It feels to me like it’s starting to approach a plurality, even if you don’t know which numbers to put on it yet.”
However, issues arose by this point in her “investigation”. Some of the previously mentioned falsehoods and inconsistencies in the testimonies had started to become public, and there was still little to no primary evidence.
The Israeli police have maintained that they have compiled an enormous amount of testimonies and have forensic evidence, which they will share at a later date. As of this publication, this evidence has not been released. However, while the Times does not address this issue directly, they provide contradictory accounts for the lack of forensic evidence.
At one point, they say (correctly) that forensic evidence is difficult to come by in a conflict zone, but that Israeli police did dispatch forensic teams and that it is possible. But earlier in the article, they claim, without corroboration, that “Jewish religious duties” of quickly burying bodies was a factor in the lack of forensic evidence. Both the UN report and Physicians for Human Rights Israel allude to capacity issues, including a shortage of forensic pathologists.
Schwartz also reported wanting to publish as quickly as possible to maintain the momentum of the story of sexual violence and even reported being pressured by Israeli police themselves.
The lack of primary evidence led Schwartz to more drastic measures. In her interview, she describes going to a trauma center various times to get testimonies, but when she was unsuccessful, she accused the therapists at the center of “a conspiracy of silence.”
Schwartz’s callous actions violate the principles of “Do No Harm”, the widely held standard for working with victims of sexual violence. The principle maintains that any work related to sexual violence should always seek to prevent any form of additional trauma or harm to victims, including in the way their stories are used and amplified.
When asked why victims might not want to want to speak out, Schwartz provided random musings about “conservative Israeli society” and at another time, suggested that victims may just not want to remember due to their trauma. Hadas Ziv provides a professional explanation:
“Our decision was not to approach the actual victims or the eyewitnesses because we thought that this was too short a time afterward, and that we were not equipped to talk to them and treat them. Every time you ask them to tell the story, it’s opening up the trauma, and we are not professionals in this.”
Despite Shwartz’s admission, per the Intercept’s article, that she got little more than “innuendo and general statements” from therapists at the center, the Times article reported that: “Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.”
Perhaps the most egregious example of Schwartz and the Times’ unethical practices is their treatment of the family of Gal Abdush, who the Times and other outlets dubbed “the woman in the black dress”. The Times used Abdush’s family as their article’s cover photo, and opened the article by describing the viral video of her burned body being found. They go on to report that Israeli police deemed Abdush was raped based solely on the video itself, and label her “a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks”.
However, after the article was published, the family denied the Times’ assertion that Gal was raped and said the paper misrepresented its intent when they agreed to speak with them. As Mondoweiss first reported in January, Gal’s brother-in-law told Israeli news the media invented the story of Gal’s rape, while one of Gal’s sisters wrote in an Instagram post (since deleted) “If we knew that the title would be about rape and butchery, we’d never accept that.” In its follow-up story to its “Screams Without Words” article, the Times sought to discredit Gal’s sister, saying she was “confused”.
Meanwhile, Israeli site Ynet (via The Intercept) reported that the woman who took the video of Gal was pressured by Adel Schwartz and Adam Sella to give the New York Times access to her photos and videos for Israeli propaganda purposes:
“They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara,” she recalled, using the term for public diplomacy, which in practice refers to Israeli propaganda efforts directed at international audiences.”
Weaponizing Rape in the War of Information
As previously mentioned, there were writers within the New York Times staffroom who expressed skepticism and criticism for this reporting. The Intercept even cites anonymous sources at the paper who likened the article to Rukmini Callimachi’s podcast and news series on the Islamic State “Caliphate”, which was roundly discredited and eventually retracted by the Times in 2019.
Schwartz herself recalled being questioned extensively by others at the Times, particularly around the issue of a lack of primary evidence. However, she claimed that the Times editors never voiced any skepticism to her.
While Schwartz’s practices were indeed questionable, and her participation in this investigation unacceptable, the larger issue is a lack of journalistic professionalism on the part of the editors and Jeffrey Gettelman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. After all, it was Gettelman himself who provided the writing and framing of the “Screams Without Words” story, while the editors should have ensured proper corroboration and verification before the article was published.
However, Gettelman’s own public comments show a troubling lack of concern for veracity in his reporting. Speaking to a panel on sexual violence in conflict at Columbia University following the article’s publication, Gettleman casually waived off concerns around evidence:
“What we found — I don’t want to even use the word ‘evidence,’ because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court. That’s not my role. We all have our roles. And my role is to document, is to present information, is to give people a voice. And we found information along the entire chain of violence, so of sexual violence.”
Accuracy and balance, it seems are secondary concerns for Gettleman:
“It’s really difficult to get this information and then to shape it,” he said. “That’s our job as journalists: to get the information and to share the story in a way that makes people care. Not just to inform, but to move people. And that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time.”
Placing a priority on shaping narratives rather than informing people is a dangerous precedent for a prominent journalist to take. In the ongoing war of information, where a litany of malicious actors are looking to amplify and disseminate disinformation at blinding speeds to shape false narratives, we need journalists more than ever to uphold truth rather than “shape information”. In the context of sexual violence, Gettleman’s job should have been to seek truth for the victims of October 7th. He, and the entire staff of The New York Times, failed in this endeavor.
Only Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella can speak to their true motives. However, it is hard to look at the entirety of their unethical practices- from the hiring of Schwartz and Sella, to publishing biased information, to traumatizing and gaslighting a victim’s family members- as unintentionally anti-Palestinian. Schwartz’s Zionist bias is, of course, public knowledge at this point. But Gettleman, the self-proclaimed “information shaper”, had to have known that his story would “move people” in an anti-Palestinian direction.
As to the New York Times? While they spent a great deal of effort trying to address criticisms of their original reporting (which they still stand by), they have published nothing regarding last month’s UN report detailing sexual violence committed by Israeli forces on Palestinian women.