Major media outlets are promoting a new report as an evidentiary breakthrough on alleged mass rapes of Israelis by Hamas on 7 October 2023.
This includes numerous claims from figures whose accounts have already been exposed as contradictory, unreliable or fabricated. But you wouldn’t know this from how the media are covering it.
CNN called the new report a “landmark” and invited its principal author for an interview. The BBC termed it “the most comprehensive” report documenting “rapes, sexual assault and sexual torture” against Israelis.
None of these outlets offered any skepticism or cautious scrutiny – certainly not of the kind they apply when it comes to almost any account of Israeli violence against Palestinians.
Indeed, the Civil Commission – an initiative launched by Israeli legal scholar Cochav Elkayam-Levy soon after 7 October – was already severely discredited by Israeli media more than two years ago.
Elkayam-Levy came under fire for her shoddy research methods– which managed to embarrass even some in the Israeli government. “People disconnected from her because her investigation is not accurate,” an Israeli government source told Ynet, the online outlet affiliated with Israel’s mass circulation newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
The government source cited how Elkayam-Levy disseminated a story about Palestinian fighters “slicing the belly of a pregnant woman – a story proven to be untrue, and she spread it in the international media.”
The report’s funders include the German government, through its Tel Aviv embassy, which is significant since German leaders have openly promoted false claims about 7 October sexual violence, including the fabrication that Hamas fighters filmed themselves raping Israeli women on 7 October.
No such video exists.