Just as the New York Times finally reports on Israel’s mass rape of Palestinians—after years of silence—the corporate media have joined forces with Tel Aviv to push long-debunked hoax material about sexual violence on October 7. This conveniently comes as Israel threatens to break the Gaza ceasefire.
All the way back in February 2024, United Nations officials began highlighting a growing body of evidence of sexual violence and rape against Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers. At the time, a panel of experts had highlighted at least two cases of rape, in addition to countless credible claims of sexual assault against women and girls in Gaza. UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem stated back then that “we might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are.”
As the months went on and as Israel’s genocide progressed, the reality became simply inescapable. While it may remain true that a precise number of rape victims is unlikely become clear, the evidence poured in. On June 12, 2024, a UNHRC report was issued that confirmed Palestinians had been subjected to “systematic” sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023.
In March 2024, Canadian physicians revealed horrific cases of sexual violence, including one case where a Palestinian woman was “raped for two days until she lost her ability to speak.” Then came the utterly horrifying stream of testimonies from the infamous Sde Teiman detention facility, where Gazans were held without charge. The following is a testimony collected by UNRWA, from a 41-year-old former detainee:
“They made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like re – I have burns [in the anus]. The soldiers hit me with their shoes on my chest and used something like a metal stick that had a small nail on the side…They asked us to drink from the toilet and made the dogs attack us…There were people who were detained and killed – maybe nine of them. One of them died after they put the electric stick up his [anus]. He got so sick; we saw worms coming out of his body and then he died.”
The most infamous case of gang rape was also committed at the Sde Teiman detention facility, which was caught on camera and leaked to the media. Ten Israeli soldiers were originally arrested over the incident, yet were not being charged with rape or sexual assault. Then came an unexpected twist: Israeli society mobilized and protests were launched—not against the gang rapists, but in favor of them. Some Israelis even stormed military bases and police stations.
Eventually, all ten gang rapists were acquitted, while the Israeli military’s legal chief was arrested for leaking the tape of the incident. She later attempted suicide twice and has been turned into a national disgrace, while the gang rapists are featured on television shows and have become national heroes. An Israeli lawyer later stated that the conditions in Sde Teiman are “more horrifying than anything we have heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”
Israel’s own top human rights group B’Tselem has released two different reports—one called “Welcome to Hell” and the other “Living Hell“—detailing and confirming horrific forms of rape and sexual violence. This mass systematic campaign of rape and sexual violence was not limited to one prison or detention facility, however. In mid-July 2024, it was also revealed that at the Ofer detention center in the West Bank, a 27-year-old Palestinian inmate was brutally raped in the following way:
“A pipe from a fire extinguisher was used on a handcuffed prisoner. Forcing him to lie on his stomach, stripping him of all his clothes, and inserting the pipe of the fire extinguisher into the prisoner’s rectum. Then, activating the extinguisher … in front of the eyes of the other prisoners.”
Israel also threatened Palestinian child hostages that it had seized from Gaza with the rape of their mothers and sisters, even using AI generated images in order to convince a teenager that his mother had been raped by soldiers. The following is a testimony recorded by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) of a 42-year-old Palestinian woman who was violently raped:
“At dawn I heard the soldiers shouting, saying that morning prayers were forbidden, and I think it was the fourth day after my arrest from Gaza. The soldiers moved me to a place I didn’t know because my eyes were blindfolded, and they ordered me to take off my clothes. I did so. They put me on a metal table, pressed my chest and head against it, cuffed my hands to the end of the bed, and pulled my legs apart forcefully. I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me. I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus. I kept screaming and being beaten, and I could hear a camera – so I believe they were filming me. The rape lasted about 10 minutes. After that, they left me for an hour in the same position, with my hands cuffed to the bed with metal handcuffs, my face on the bed, my feet on the floor, and I was completely naked.
“Again, after an hour, I was raped fully in the same position, with penetration into my vagina, and I was beaten while I screamed. There were several soldiers; I heard them laughing and the camera clicking as it took pictures. This rape was very quick and there was no ejaculation. During the rape, they beat me with their hands, on my head and back.
“I cannot describe what I felt; I wished for death every moment. After they raped me, I was left alone in the same room, hands still cuffed to the bed and without clothes for many hours. I could hear the soldiers outside speaking Hebrew and laughing. Later, I was raped again, vaginally. I screamed, but they beat me whenever I tried to resist. After more than an hour, I’m not sure about the time, a masked soldier entered, removed my blindfold, lifted his face covering; he had white skin and was tall. He asked if I spoke English; I said no. He said he was Russian and ordered me to masturbate his penis. I refused, and he hit me in the face after raping me.
“That day, I was raped twice. I was left naked the whole day in the room, where I spent three days. On the first day I was raped twice; on the second day I was raped twice; on the third day I remained without clothes, while they looked at me through the door slit and filmed me. One soldier said they would post my photos on social media. While I was in the room, my period started; then they told me to put on clothes and transferred me to another room.”
In addition to this, there are countless field testimonies that have been captured, such as the eyewitness and victim accounts reported by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor detailing sexual abuse during a raid on Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2024, for example.
Regurgitating October 7 Hoaxes
As soon as the New York Times released its article finally reporting on the issue of “The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians,” an enormous attack campaign was launched against its author and the outlet itself. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even pledged to launch legal action over the article.
And of course, no Israeli propaganda campaign would be complete without its lapdog media outlets launching an unhinged stream of clearly non-credible reports about atrocities that never took place. The New York Post ran the headline “Hamas forced sex between family members as part of Oct. 7 torture campaign, probe finds: ‘You hear the screams’“; the Daily Mail went with “October 7 barbarism beyond all imagination: New report details how terrorists performed almost unimaginable horrors—which some on the Left STILL cast doubt on“; even Canadian state media played along and reported “Sexual violence was ‘deliberate tactic’ and integral to Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, report finds.”
If you were to read the headlines, you would be led to believe that some new revelations had suddenly emerged as a result of some kind of independent inquiry—the very opposite is the case. Instead, these claims hinge upon the long-discredited Israeli lawyer Cochav Elkayam-Levy and proven fabricators. No proof exists to support any of these claims.
The chair of Israel’s investigative committee into rape on 10/7 by Hamas, @CochavElkayam, presents an old image of dead female Kurdish fighters as women sexually assaulted at the Nova music fest
During a 11/12 talk for Harvard’s Maimonides Society, Elkayam referred to “an image… pic.twitter.com/DjGT1L45LI
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 4, 2023
Israel used an image of a women from at least 2022, claiming it was proof of rape at the music festival on October 7th, 2023. After it was revealed to be an old image that had previously been used by the IDF, Israel deleted the image with no comment. https://t.co/v1EvBqd27s pic.twitter.com/hd7iJJDjxj
— The Last American Vagabond (@TLAVagabond) November 18, 2023
The “report” in question, entitled SILENCED NO MORE Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity, is presented across the corporate media as if it is credible, with no one daring to question it. If you read the articles written about it, the impression given of the “Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes Against Women and Children” is that it is a large organization, and it is frequently claimed that it is “independent”—neither of which are accurate.
The Civil Commission is led by Elkayam-Levy, who made herself its chair and was paraded across the international media for months, claiming to be the one woman who would expose the “Hamas mass rape campaign.” However, from the beginning she had admitted that all her claims had come without taking a single direct testimony.
Later, Israeli media outlet Yediot Aharanot (Ynet) would report in Hebrew that Israeli government officials had even distanced themselves from Elkayam-Levy “because her research is inaccurate.” An official in Tel Aviv even went as far as stating the following about her:
“For example, the story about the pregnant woman who had her stomach ripped open—a story that was proven to be untrue, and she spread it in the international press. It’s no joke. Slowly, professionals began to distance themselves from her because she was not credible. There are researchers who sit for hours in archives and analyze videos. This is the work of historians, lawyers and gender experts. Everyone who deals with this aims first and foremost for professionalism and credibility. After all, if there are inaccuracies, within a minute they claim it’s fake news, and therefore we have to be as accurate and as faithful to reality as possible. She also wanted to prevent the visit of Pramila Patten to Israel (the UN Secretary-General’s envoy on sexual violence in conflict—N.P., AA).”
For context, the Israelis had pushed for Pramila Patten to visit and quickly draw conclusions about alleged sexual violence on October 7, which ended up majorly backfiring. The Ynet exposé argues, through its sources, that Elkayam-Levy had essentially used the issue to grift millions of dollars through her one-woman-show “Deborah Institute” and produced material that was far from up to any professional standard. The UN fact-finding mission ended up debunking two crime scenes that were manipulated to make it appear as if sexual violence had taken place at separate locations; it did not have an investigative mandate.
UN representative Pramila Patten, who prepared the report on alleged sexual violence on October 7, admits that the report is not an investigation and that it contains unfounded and outright false testimonies. I just discussed this last night. Link below. pic.twitter.com/v6QRQDfkUY
— The Last American Vagabond (@TLAVagabond) March 7, 2024
None of this information is difficult to find, meaning that every media outlet continuing to run Elkayam-Levy’s long-debunked fairy tales is willfully misleading the public. At the bare minimum, it is your obligation as a journalist to note if a report you are quoting is written by someone who has been discredited and even accused of using an issue to grift money. No proof has been presented for these claims, which just so happen to reach every Western news outlet’s front pages immediately after the NYT finally decides to report on an issue that has been going on for years.
If anything, this entire ordeal is another reason why the public should no longer trust the corporate media, which continues to lie so outrageously on an issue that the majority of the population already knows they are lying about.
