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Rape Deniers: Evidence of Hamas Sexual Assault Ignored Despite Proof (Part Three)

Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival running to safety during the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, as seen in the documentary “Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre.” Photo: Screenshot

Where there are anti-Jewish atrocities, there are deniers. And on Oct 7, there were atrocities, including countless acts of murder and mutilation, as well as brutal acts of sexual violence by the Palestinian attackers.

In this three part series, CAMERA will expose some of these deniers, and offer irrefutable proof of the sexual abuse of Israeli women by the Palestinian attackers both during and after the October 7 atrocities.

Part One of this story laid out the facts about Hamas’ sexual violence, proof it happened, and some information about the critics who are disputing these facts. Part Two laid out more evidence of sexual violence against Israelis, and debunked claims that the assaults didn’t happen.

Part Three follows below.

Claim: Gal Abdush’s Family Disproves Rape. (It does not.)

A horrifying video of Gal Abdush’s corpse, recorded not long after she was murdered, shows the condition of her remains: dress hiked up to her waist, no underwear, legs splayed, and face seriously burned. The video led Israeli police and some members of her family to conclude she was raped, the New York Times reported.

But The Intercept charges that this report contained “serious mistakes,” noting that “subsequent public comments from the family” show they reject this conclusion and linking to a piece on Mondoweiss that raises the same point. Others, too, latched on to this argument.

It is true that some family members — though contrary to how Mondoweiss and The Intercept frame it, not all — have pushed back on the conclusion she was raped. Is this the damning evidence the outlets make it out to be?

Not according to those same outlets. Just days before Mondoweiss insisted the account of Gal’s rape is “undermined” by the beliefs of the family members, it called on readers to dismiss conclusions from Israel first responders because they “lack the professional qualifications to make such assessments (they are not medical experts).”

The Intercept, too, brushed off a recovery worker’s account of sexual violence since she “has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape.” They don’t explain why credentials are suddenly irrelevant when it comes to the Abdush family members.

In pushing back against the rape conclusion, Gal’s brother-in-law Nissim Abdush, and her sisters Miral Alter and Talia Bracha, separately pleaded that we remember the victim has two young children. The psychological impact an account of sexual violence would have on the kids was clearly on their mind. Mostly, though, they cited the timing of communications from Gal and her husband Naji, who was also murdered.

At 6:51 a.m., Gal sent a WhatsApp message noting that she was near the border with Gaza. Nissim, the brother in law, said he spoke to Naji at 7:00, who shared that he was injured in the hand and that Gal was dead. Miral, in a comment on Instagram, recalled hearing slightly different account of Nissim’s conversation with Naji: That at this point Gal was shot and wheezing a death rattle. At 7:44, Naji sent his brother Nissim a final WhatsApp message: Take care of the kids.

Nissim was emphatic in saying he did not believe she was raped. Talia, in an Instagram post, said that we can’t know what Gal endured and rejected accounts of what happened.

Miral, in her Instagram comment, argued Gal wasn’t raped and couldn’t have been assaulted in the time between her last message and Naji’s call to Nissim. But she subsequently deleted her comment, and later told the Times she was confused and trying to protect her sister: “Did she suffer? Did she die right away? I want to hope she didn’t suffer, but we will never know.”

What we do know is that the couple’s ordeal didn’t end at 7:44. At some point after sending his last message, Naji was killed and his body was burned. In Naji’s communications, he apparently never mentioned Gal’s burnt face, though that doesn’t mean it was not burnt. Atrocities subsequent to Gal’s death cannot be ruled out. The United Nations mission report acknowledges “the mutilation of corpses, including decapitation” and notes that “photos and videos revealed widespread mutilation of bodies, involving both attempted and actual decapitation.” It also references “accounts of individuals who witnessed at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women.”

Separately, Mondoweiss and The Intercept insist that the New York Times story on sexual violence hinges or centers on the Abdush case. That is false.

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.

The post Rape Deniers: Evidence of Hamas Sexual Assault Ignored Despite Proof (Part Three) first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd

Magdeburg Christmas market, December 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Christian Mang

i24 NewsA suspected terrorist plowed a vehicle into a crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, west of the capital Berlin, killing at least five and injuring dozens more.

Local police confirmed that the suspect was a Saudi national born in 1974 and acting alone.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his concern about the incident, saying that “reports from Magdeburg suggest something bad. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”

Police declined to give casualty numbers, confirming only a large-scale operation at the market, where people had gathered to celebrate in the days leading up to the Christmas holidays.

The post Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister

A person waves a flag adopted by the new Syrian rulers, as people gather during a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) near the Umayyad Mosque, after the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, Photo: December 20, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo

Syria’s new rulers have appointed Murhaf Abu Qasra, a leading figure in the insurgency which toppled Bashar al-Assad, as defense minister in the interim government, an official source said on Saturday.

Abu Qasra, who is also known by the nom de guerre Abu Hassan 600, is a senior figure in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group which led the campaign that ousted Assad this month. He led numerous military operations during Syria’s revolution, the source said.

Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa discussed “the form of the military institution in the new Syria” during a meeting with armed factions on Saturday, state news agency SANA reported.

Abu Qasra during the meeting sat next to Sharaa, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, photos published by SANA showed.

Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said this week that the defense ministry would be restructured using former rebel factions and officers who defected from Assad’s army.

Bashir, who formerly led an HTS-affiliated administration in the northwestern province of Idlib, has said he will lead a three-month transitional government. The new administration has not declared plans for what will happen after that.

Earlier on Saturday, the ruling General Command named Asaad Hassan al-Shibani as foreign minister, SANA said. A source in the new administration told Reuters that this step “comes in response to the aspirations of the Syrian people to establish international relations that bring peace and stability.”

Shibani, a 37-year-old graduate of Damascus University, previously led the political department of the rebels’ Idlib government, the General Command said.

Sharaa’s group was part of al Qaeda until he broke ties in 2016. It had been confined to Idlib for years until going on the offensive in late November, sweeping through the cities of western Syria and into Damascus as the army melted away.

Sharaa has met with a number of international envoys this week. He has said his primary focus is on reconstruction and achieving economic development and that he is not interested in engaging in any new conflicts.

Syrian rebels seized control of Damascus on Dec. 8, forcing Assad to flee after more than 13 years of civil war and ending his family’s decades-long rule.

Washington designated Sharaa a terrorist in 2013, saying al Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing Assad’s rule and establishing Islamic sharia law in Syria. US officials said on Friday that Washington would remove a $10 million bounty on his head.

The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions.

The post Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels

View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.

i24 NewsSweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and will instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Scandinavian country said on Friday.

The decision comes on the heels of multiple revelations regarding the agency’s employees’ involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.

Sweden’s decision was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channeling aid via the agency more difficult, the country’s aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, said.

“Large parts of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are either going to be severely weakened or completely impossible,” Dousa said. “For the government, the most important thing is that support gets through.”

The Palestinian embassy in Stockholm said in a statement: “We reject the idea of finding alternatives to UNRWA, which has a special mandate to provide services to Palestinian refugees.”

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel thanked Dousa for a meeting they had this week and for Sweden’s decision to drop its support for UNRWA.

“There are worthy and viable alternatives for humanitarian aid, and I appreciate the willingness to listen and adopt a different approach,” she said.

The post Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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