New details refute a New York Times report about “sexual violence” at the Al-Aqsa flood

One of the houses in Kibbutz Be'eri (Getty)

Two of the three victims specifically singled out by The New York Times in a major expose published in December 2023 that claimed that the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) deliberately used sexual violence as a weapon during the Al-Aqsa flood attacks on October 7, 2023, were not in fact sexually assaulted. , according to Michal Paikin, spokesman for Kibbutz Be'eri, which the newspaper identified as the site of the attack.

The Intercept website said - in a joint article between Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grimm - that Paikin’s rejection of the New York Times report on the kibbutz significantly undermines the credibility of the controversial article published by the newspaper entitled “Screams Without Words... This is how Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon on October 7.” "First" past.

The New York Times article described three alleged victims of sexual assault, and provided specific information about their biographies. One of them was known as “The Woman in Black,” Gal Abdouche. Some members of her family objected to the allegations made by the newspaper. The other two victims were teenage sisters. Their names have not been revealed from Kibbutz Be'eri, and the New York Times reported their exact ages, making it possible to identify them.

The Intercept was able to identify the two girls, but did not publish their first names, based on data from the Israeli government’s general list of victims who died on the kibbutz during the attacks of last October 7, in addition to the memorial page created by the community itself, which shows the two victims in Kibbutz Be'eri matching the description in the New York Times, the sisters Y.

One.

Sharabi, ages 13 and 16.

Single source

When Michal Paikin was asked about the allegations made by the New York Times, he spontaneously mentioned the names of the two girls, saying, “You are talking about the two girls, Sharabi?”

"No, they were just shot. I'm just saying, but they were shot and not sexually assaulted," he added, also questioning the graphic and highly detailed claims of an Israeli special forces medic who served as a source for the claim published in The New York Times and "The Washington Post", "CNN" and other media outlets. He told the site, "This is not true," referring to the paramedic's allegations regarding the two girls that they were "sexually assaulted."

In an interview broadcast on Israeli Channel 12 last January, Israeli film director Anat Schwartz - who has little experience in reporting news - described in detail how she sought to confirm that the girls had been subjected to sexual assault, and said that she first learned about the case when she watched an interview with a man who was identified as He is a medic from an elite Israeli military unit, and the Israeli government coordinated media interviews with him, with his back to the camera to avoid identification.

Schwartz said in an interview that she was unable to find a second source to corroborate the paramedic's account, and stressed, "I do not have a second source with the paramedic regarding the Be'eri girls." The New York Times report did not cite any other corroborating witness to the paramedic's depiction of the condition in which the girls allegedly discovered them.

A recent interview in Israeli media with the Sharabi sisters' grandparents provided details that directly contradicted the New York Times report: "Their grandmother Jillian Pressley told Israel's Channel 12 they were only shot, and nothing else happened to them."

The family also gave several interviews to international media prior to the publication of Wordless Cries, providing information that undermines the assertions made in the New York Times, raising questions as to why the article did not include these publicly available details.

The Pressley family and its relatives in Israel, who lived with the Sharabi family in Kibbutz Be'eri, never confirmed that the two girls were sexually assaulted. Rather, the Pressley family confirmed in many interviews that the two girls were killed alongside their mother.

The Pressley family and its relatives in Israel, who lived with the Sharabi family on Kibbutz Be'eri, never confirmed that the two girls were sexually assaulted. Rather, the Pressley family confirmed in many interviews that the two girls were killed alongside their mother, but the paramedic - according to the "Screams Without Words" report - said that The bodies of two teenage girls were found in a room on the kibbutz. They gave a description suggesting a rape situation. He added that he did not document the scene because his job was to search for survivors.

On February 29, Israeli Channel 12 broadcast the story of the Presley grandparents who traveled from Britain to the kibbutz to see the house in which their loved ones died, and to meet neighbors, family members, and officials, but the family’s description of the death of their daughter, Lian, and their two granddaughters contradicts almost every detail in the Times article except for the ages. The two girls were killed.

The family denies

"They were found between the safe room and the dining room, which is a terrible thing to say. They were shot and nothing else happened to them," Jillian Pressley said.

Her husband Pete, the girls' grandfather, added, "A soldier said he saw our daughter, but she was covering the girls and they were shot. October 7 was the saddest day of my life."

Months before the New York Times story was published on December 28, according to the website, Presley’s family had conducted an interview with the BBC providing details that conflicted with the story that later appeared in the Times, and on October 24, the website published The Israeli news story "Wala" reported on the family, which also said that the two girls were killed alongside their mother.

Sharon Sharabi, whose brother Eli, the girls’ father, was transferred to Gaza, said that Palestinian fighters entered the family home, stormed their safe room and killed Layan and the two girls. He added, “To tell you concretely what happened in Be’eri, or what happened in the Sharabi family’s home, I do not have "Answer for you. There is certainly no reliable information that I can give you," he added, "I heard all the versions. What is the truth? I don't know."

Before the newspaper published its report, the paramedic’s story was met with skepticism by the American news website Mondovis. In his first interview on October 25 last with an Indian news channel, he said that he witnessed what happened in Kibbutz Nahal Oz and not in Be’eri.

When an Israeli government spokesperson promoted the story on social media that day, he posted an edited portion of the interview that removed the reference to Nahal Oz, and instead tweeted that it had happened on Kibbutz Be'eri, where official records indicate the killing of two teenage sisters who were almost identical to Description of paramedics.

By the time Schwartz met with the paramedic, the site of the incident had been identified as Be'eri, and Schwartz said in her podcast interview that she made an extensive effort to try to corroborate the paramedic's story. “I said if you want information about rapes, you should call the kibbutzim. And nothing else. No one saw,” she said. "No one heard anything."

Eventually, she reached the Unit 669 medic, and he relayed the same story she had told to other media outlets. Schwartz cited this incident as the main reason from which she concluded that organized sexual violence had occurred on October 7, and because they were two sister girls and in the same room, “there was something... "How systematic, something seems to me not to be random."

It is unclear why the New York Times did not include the widely publicized statements from family members of the Be'eri girls, many of whom gave interviews to Israeli media, international newspapers and television networks, including the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, and the newspaper article did not mention Having conflicting details, it instead broadcast unilateral assertions made by the paramedic.

The New York Times insists

Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said on Monday that her team had found information indicating that sexual violence had occurred, as the mission team found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the October 7 attacks. /Last October, and “in general, the mission team was unable to determine whether sexual violence had occurred on Kibbutz Be’eri.”

Patten found that two high-profile cases of sexual assaults alleged to have occurred on Kibbutz Be'eri were "baseless," and the New York Times, in its coverage of the UN report, claimed that the sexual assault she identified was a separate incident from the two incidents described by the UN.

The controversy surrounding the newspaper's coverage gained momentum last week after an X user named Zee Squirrel highlighted Schwartz's social media activity, which included "liking" a post expressing incitement to genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and calling for " Transforming the sector into a slaughterhouse.”

On January 5, Leila Al-Erian, an Emmy and Polk Award-winning executive producer at Al Jazeera English, sent an email to Phil Pan, international editor of The New York Times, as well as to Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and the newspaper’s standards department, containing detailed questions about... The newspaper's report was correct, but it did not receive any response, and the New York Times has since maintained its adherence to the original report.

“We stand by the story and continue to report on the sexual violence on October 7,” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhodes told The Intercept.

Meanwhile, the newspaper's newsroom faces serious internal conflict over its coverage of the war in Gaza.

Shortly after “Wordless Screams” was published on December 28, 2023, The Daily, a digital podcast platform, was commissioned to turn the article into an episode.

After review by the producers, the original script - which had been drafted to closely match the original report - was shelved and a more careful replacement script was written.

There is no doubt that publishing a watered-down version of this report would raise questions about whether the newspaper stands by its reporting amid criticism, including, most notably, from Gal Abdush’s family.

The Intercept reported on the internal conflict in the New York Times in late January.

But the newspaper did not review its reports again, as it did after the weapons of mass destruction disaster in Iraq.

Instead, it launched an extraordinary investigation into an unusual leak, but the New York Times Press Association condemned the investigation this weekend because of what it saw as racial profiling of journalists from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds.

Commenting on this issue, The Intercept quoted a source in the newspaper as saying, “They know better than anyone else that leaks are desperate measures when people want to uncover serious failures without any safe or effective internal mechanisms (..) and an attempt to crush those who revealed the matter will not erase "The basic fact is that the story is a journalistic failure par excellence."

Source: The Intercept