The Israeli government rapidly deployed a multipronged propaganda strategy to win unprecedented support from the U.S. and other Western governments for a sweeping war against the entire population of Gaza. To oppose Israel’s war is antisemitic; to question its assertions about the events of October 7 is akin to Holocaust denial; to protest the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is to do the bidding of Hamas.

From the earliest moments following the October 7 attacks, Israel charged that women had been raped by Hamas fighters, though it was often an allegation made in sequence alongside other alleged atrocities. But in mid-November, those assertions began evolving into a sustained public blitz, accusing Hamas of instituting a plan to “systematically rape women.” Israel government spokesperson Eylon Levy spoke “Hamas rapist machine.”

To date, there has been no credible evidence presented publicly that such a campaign took place, and Hamas has vehemently denied that its fighters committed any acts of rape or sexual assault. The fact that Israel has not produced forensic evidence for individual rapes does not prove that no such deeds took place. Rape investigations are often complex, particularly when the crime occurs amid a chaotic scene of mass violence. Sexual violence is common in warfare, and it often takes years for the full story of such crimes to emerge.

There was no Holocaust survivor killed at Kibbutz Be’eri that day. There were no mass beheadings of babies, no group executions in a nursery, no children hung from clotheslines, and no infants placed in ovens. No pregnant woman had her stomach cut open and the fetus knifed in front of her and her other children. These stories are entirely fictional, a set of audacious lies weaponized to generate the type of collective rage used to justify the unjustifiable.

  • IndustryStandard@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Another long excerpt from the article:

    Three weeks after the October 7 attacks, Eli Beer, the head of a volunteer EMS squad in Israel, traveled to the U.S. and addressed a gathering at the convention of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas.

    “I saw in my own eyes a woman who was pregnant, four months pregnant,” he said “They came into her house, in front of her kids, they opened up her stomach took out the baby, and stabbed the little, tiny baby in front of her and then shot her in front of her family and then they killed the rest of the kids.”

    Beer offered graphic descriptions of other horrors he claimed to have witnessed. “These bastards put these babies in an oven and put on the oven. We found the kid a few hours later,” he toldOpens in a new tab the U.S. audience on October 28. “I saw little kids who were beheaded. We didn’t know which head belonged to which kid.” Beer, whose stories were widely reported in the international media, also met with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Israel soon after the attack.

    "But there is a problem with the gut-wrenching narratives that have bolstered the underlying justification for the slaughter of Gaza: They are either complete fabrications or have not been substantiated with a shred of evidence. Many have been thoroughly disproven by major Israeli media outlets.

    Whew. You can tell The Intercept is fed up with the bullshit

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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    9 months ago

    This post was erroneously removed by the AutoMod as a rule 1 violation. I don’t see anything here that would constitute a rule 1.

    TBH, I’m tempted to leave it banned because of the soft paywall, but we don’t have an official policy on those, I just PERSONALLY hate them. ;)

    lemmy.world has had to beef up auto removal tools due to some jack-wagon posting child pornography. That’s the kind of garbage YOU don’t want to see and the mod team shouldn’t HAVE to see.

    I think this post was caught in the crossfire.

  • Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldOP
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    9 months ago

    From the earliest moments following the October 7 attacks, Israel charged that women had been raped by Hamas fighters,

    To date, there has been no credible evidence presented publicly that such a campaign took place

    :)

      • Jaderick@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It’s “support the victim” but verify. Blindly supporting anyone is… problematic to say the least.

        The Central Park 5

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case

        https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/case-settled-1989-central-park-jogger-believes-person/story?id=63077131

        When the first trial began in August 1990 against Salaam, Santana and McCray, Meili agreed to testify. On the witness stand, she talked about what her normal running practices had been and what she had been wearing that night.

        “I remember I was very nervous," she said. “I thought, ‘I know I have no memory but I wanted people to know the condition that I had been in.’”

        The police were shit at their jobs, and they used Meili to convict those boys.

        • ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It takes a pretty huge pussy to deploy genocide to escape criminal prosecution. That’s beyond Trump tier.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Read the article, some of the accusations were made up by some Israeli extremist group and then were pumped into us media by pretty sophisticated operations.

          • TimeNaan@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            She has blood on her pants after a bloody mass shooting. It doesn’t prove anything.

            Either Israel provides actual evidence or they will be treated as liars, as they should be, because of all the lies they told in order to justify their genocide in Gaza.

            • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Notice that they cut her Achilles tendon so she couldn’t run away?

              Reprehensible is the right word for denialism.

              No amount of proof will reverse your denial.

              • TimeNaan@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Wtf are you on about, she has scrapes on her legs, nobody cut her tendons or she wouldnt be able to stand at all. Also way more blood.

                I’m still waiting for any proof of SYSTEMATIC rape that’s more than a photo of some bloody pants. Won’t happen tho, because that was not a thing.

                Yes, they killed a lot of innocent civilians. No, they did not mass rape them or behead babies. You are falling for propaganda meant to create bloodlust and support for the IDF’s heinous and illegal actions.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    During that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalizing of relations with Saudi Arabia, an initiative spearheaded under the Trump administration and embraced by the Biden White House, as the linchpin of his vision for this “new” reality, one which would open the door to a “visionary corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel.

    Under fire from his own ministers and supporters for impugning Israeli military and intelligence agencies, Netanyahu apologized for his comments, deleted the tweet, and then shifted to the stance he now repeats: There will be a time for such inquiries — but only after Israel achieves total victory in Gaza and eliminates Hamas.

    Blinken told the U.S. Senate another harrowing story about how Hamas terrorists had tortured a family in their living room while intermittently taking breaks to eat a meal their victims had placed on the dining table before the horrors began that morning.

    According to major Israeli media outlets that have worked diligently to identify all the victims of the October 7 attacks, there was one infant killed that day: a 9-month-old named Mila Cohen who was shot dead at Kibbutz Be’eri as her mother held her in her arms.

    Israeli authorities have said evidence that would typically be taken in cases of suspected sexual assault was not recovered in the aftermath of the attacks, attributing this failure to a combination of the magnitude of the deaths, the charred nature of some bodies, and to Jewish burial practices.

    The mounting pile of Palestinian civilian corpses and their surviving family members, meanwhile, are relegated to the workshopped afterthoughts uttered by Western politicians who have been told they should occasionally squeeze a line or two into their speeches about death and suffering in Gaza.


    The original article contains 7,434 words, the summary contains 286 words. Saved 96%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!