Claim: Sapir’s Testimony Cannot Possibly Be True. (It can.)
A woman named Sapir told the police, and later journalists, of witnessing sadistic gang rape, murder, and mutilation including the severing of breasts.
A Grayzone author insists the testimony is a “transparent fraud” — including because she spoke of the victims breast being severed. There is, though, corroboration of this very type of bodily mutilation. In video testimony, someone who appears to have worked at one of the makeshift morgues for murdered Israelis independently describes encountering corpses with missing breasts.
Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah charges that Sapir is not credible because she had described seeing Hamas fighters at the scene raising decapitated heads. In his words: “So has anyone else said that they saw Palestinian fighters carrying decapitated heads? Even the Israeli government hasn’t said that. But that shows you the credibility of this alleged eyewitness,” Abunimah says.
The New York Times later reported that
The police also said they found Sapir’s bag where she said she had been hiding, and women’s clothing near where she said the rapes occurred. And three severed heads were found farther away, near the bodies of assailants in military fatigues, Israeli officials said, without providing more detail.
The United Nations mission report confirms decapitations, including some attested to in photo or video. Video from October shows Palestinian attackers ecstatically trying to decapitate a Thai worker in with a garden hoe. David Tahar, the father of an Israeli soldier killed in the Oct. 7 massacre, shared that his son’s head was taken to Gaza as a trophy. A video of unknown provenance shared on popular Arabic-language Telegram accounts just after the October 7 attack, which has been viewed by CAMERA, shows terrorists standing in front of an Islamic Jihad al-Quds Brigades flag proudly displaying a severed head.
Mondoweiss’ attempt to itemize why Sapir is a “non-credible witness” likewise falls flat.
Claim: ZAKA Unit Commander Says the Group Only Treats Jews. (The link says otherwise.)
Volunteers from the disaster recovery organization ZAKA were among the first in the field, and some of its volunteers have described seeing evidence of sexual violence. Mondoweiss seeks to discredit the organization as a whole, claiming:
ZAKA’s “operation unit commander” stated that “he puts aside medical consideration and decisions are made on who deserves treatment based on whether they are Jewish.” (Link in original)
But the quote is nowhere to be found in the linked article — neither in the text nor the embedded audio segment that it summarizes.
The audio is of an interview about how to prioritize treating terrorists who are injured while attacking Jewish targets. The interviewer asks the ZAKA official: “When you arrive in the field, and there are two people strewed on the ground — the terrorist, who is terribly [injured], and next to him a Jew who was run over [in a car-ramming attack], with broken legs — do you have some sort of code, who to treat first?” The official ultimately responds to this, and to various other hypotheticals, by stating that in the case of terrorists and also any type of murderer, he would first attend to the victim. Though the interviewer does at times use “Jew” as shorthand for the targets of terror attacks, the medic himself never once says “Jew” or “Arab.” Mondoweiss similarly misrepresents a second, nearly identical discussion about terrorists and victims.
Claim: Raz Cohen Didn’t Mention Rape on Oct. 9. (He did.)
Raz Cohen, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, describes hiding in a streambed and witnessing several Palestinian infiltrators raping an Israeli woman before stabbing her to death. The following is his account to The New York Times:
He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.
“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”
“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”
Seeking to discredit the testimony, Max Blumenthal charged that, “Since his first interview on October 9, Cohen has altered his testimony several times.” Ali Abunimah names Cohen among witnesses who “lack credibility” because, he alleges, they “changed their stories over time.” The Intercept claims Cohen’s comments in one interview contradict a claim The New York Times attributed to him.
According to Blumenthal: “When Cohen was interviewed on October 9 about the attack on the music festival, … he did not mention any act of sexual assault committed by Hamas militants.” Abunimah likewise cites the charge that on Oct. 9 Cohen “never mentioned anything about sexual assault,” as do Gupta in Yes! Magazine and other anonymous online deniers. The New York Times relayed the charge as follows: “Critics have questioned his credibility because he did not say he witnessed such an attack in his very first interviews with reporters, on Oct. 9.”
But these claims are false. Cohen did on Oct. 9 discuss witnessing rape.
In an interview that day, Cohen, who appears to still be anxious from surviving the attack (the video shows him stopping mid-sentence and looking around with a concerned expression because he hears a helicopter) tells his story to an i24 interviewer. “Critics” point to the fact that the interview doesn’t include a reference to rape. The broadcast, though, ends abruptly, before Cohen has a chance to detail his experience in the streambed.
We asked the interviewer, Ariel Oseron, about the jarring ending. He explained that the discussion was cut short because Cohen said it was too difficult for him. But Oseron added: “After he told me in person I reported on his testimony later in the broadcast.”
Indeed, in a segment recorded later that night, Oseron told viewers that his conversation was cut short because Cohen went to the hospital for psychological support. He reported that Cohen later shared with him “horrifying atrocities,” including an account of the terrorists “raping Israeli women.” A few hours later, shortly after midnight, a local news publication posted a story in which Cohen is quoted similarly saying, “The terrorists captured women and harmed them in every possible way, and when they finished their indecent acts they began slaughtering them….”
So much for not having mentioned sexual assault that day. (In an example of that capillary action that moves falsehoods from the conspiratorial fringe to the mainstream, The New York Times repeated the critics’ false charge that Cohen “did not say he witnessed such an attack in his very first interviews with reporters, on Oct. 9.” CAMERA has informed the newspaper of the error. It has yet to correct.)
Claim: Cohen Changed Account to Describe Civilian Attackers. (He did not.)
The Intercept’s reference to a separate contradiction, which they cast as another “serious mistake,” likewise doesn’t pan out. The publication refers to “comments from a key witness seeming to contradict a claim attributed to him” in a New York Times piece on sexual violence. The Intercept doesn’t elaborate further, but the passage links to a Twitter post by one of the authors, Ryan Grim, in which he comments on Cohen’s appearance on CNN. “[Cohen] just told [CNN interviewer Jake] Tapper the men he saw were not actually from Hamas, but rather Gazan civilians who came through the fence after the IDF collapsed,” Grim writes.
Cohen, though, has been consistent on this point. The Dec. 28 Times story in question reports that he said he “saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer.” The i24 reporter who spoke with Cohen on Oct. 9, meanwhile, reported that he “described to me how the people, the Gaza — the Palestinians who were there, most of them if not all of them were not armed or wearing military uniforms.” The reporter continued: “He said these were regular Gazans, they were not members of any special unit, military unit by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, these were Gazans who came to have fun.”
Then there’s the anonymous Twitter thread, shared by Abunimah, that suggests Cohen is lying because, at some unknown point during his many hours in hiding, he photographed himself smiling. That this could have happened prior to the incident is, in the minds of deniers, beyond the realm of possibility. That’s how denial works.
That the deniers rely repeatedly on falsehoods and distortions does not necessarily mean every Israeli testimony (or even every Hamas confession) is truthful. Above we mention a fabricated account by a fraudster and unfounded claims by emergency personnel. And such stories can reverberate — in an interview with the Daily Mail, for example, Shari Mendes had relayed an account of an atrocity that had previously been circulated by Zaka volunteer Yossi Landau, but which turned out to be unfounded.
To play the devil’s advocate, it’s certainly not impossible that other inaccurate accounts might have emerged from the whirlwind of Oct. 7. To play the devil himself, it’s not technically impossible that every eyewitness is lying, that every photo is manipulated, and that we are in the middle of a conspiracy worthy of the imagination of Holocaust deniers. But the sexual assault deniers, like those other deniers, haven’t made that case. They fail to make their case even with the claims above, and others.
Along with their ugly reactions to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, the deniers’ bad faith is underscored, too, by the hypocrisy. After Al Jazeera broadcast accusations by Jamila al-Hissi that Israel raped women in Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital, the broadcaster pulled the video. Its former managing editor and reportedly Hamas deemed it was a fabrication, and the accuser’s brother said the testimony was erroneous. In multiple articles, Mondoweiss continues to uncritically share the retracted charges.
In March, a victim of Palestinian sexual violence spoke out publicly. Amit Soussana, who was held hostage by Hamas before being released as part of an exchange, told The New York Times how her Hamas-assigned guard assaulted her:
“He came towards me and shoved the gun at my forehead,” Ms. Soussana recalled during eight hours of interviews with The New York Times in mid-March. After hitting Ms. Soussana and forcing her to remove her towel, Muhammad groped her, sat her on the edge of the bathtub and hit her again, she said.
He dragged her at gunpoint back to the child’s bedroom, a room covered in images of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, she recalled.
“Then he, with the gun pointed at me, forced me to commit a sexual act on him,” Ms. Soussana said.
Her testimony matched what she told doctors and a social worker just after being released.
An anti-Israel social media account called Propaganda and co, which has been cited by many deniers, immediately cast aspersions on the victim. Ali Abunimah, who had repeatedly pointed to lack of victim testimony in order to denying sexual assault, immediately immediately insisted Amit’s account “needs to be treated as a lie” until someone — perhaps the Hamas kidnappers? — convinced him with further evidence. The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, who had likewise cited a lack of victim testimony, immediately posted online, questioning her credibility.
Gilead Ini is a Senior Research Analyst at CAMERA, the foremost media watchdog organization focused on coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where a version of this article first appeared.