NYT pushes Israeli propaganda on 'rape' by Hamas, ends up with egg on face

As the blinkered Western media continue to push Israel's outlandish claims of rape by Hamas fighters during the October 7 cross-border assault, the New York Times has ended with egg on its face after the family of an Israeli woman refuted claims that she was raped and mutilated.

The news report comes amid Israel's continuous and indiscriminate bombing of Gaza for nearly three months, which has killed close to 22,000 Palestinians – most of them women and children.

As global condemnation of Israeli atrocities on Palestinian civilians continues to grow, the Netanyahu government has stepped up its propaganda war with the help of US media outlets, trying to portray Hamas as a monster.

Like similar reports in the Western media, the New York Times article dated December 28 came under scrutiny for its coverage of unverified rape allegations involving an Israeli woman named Gal Abdush.

The piece claims to have verified video evidence but raises questions about the nature of the verification.

While previous articles on the subject included disclaimers about the inability to independently confirm the allegations, the recent New York Times article took a different approach.

It asserted that the video evidence had been verified, but this verification only confirmed the identity of Gal Abdush, not the rape allegations.

The article suggests that "Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped", emphasising that these are still Israeli officials' claims.

However, a family member of Gal Abdush, Miral Alter, contradicted the NYT narrative.

In a comment on an Instagram post by Yoseph Haddad, an Arab-Israeli advocacy activist, Alter stated that they had agreed to the story about Gal Abdush and her husband but would not have consented if they had known the headline would involve rape and slaughter.

She explicitly denied the rape allegations, stating, "There is no proof that there was rape".

Screenshots of Alter's comments were shared on social media after they were removed from Instagram.

The article also relies on testimonies from volunteers of the Zaka Foundation, an organisation in Israel with 3,000 members and funded by the Israeli government.

Notably, Zaka has a history of propagating false information, including a fabricated story about babies being beheaded by Hamas.

Yossi Landau, the head of operations at Zaka, claimed to have seen bodies of beheaded babies, a statement refuted even by Israeli newspapers.

Furthermore, Zaka's leaders face charges of sexual assault, rape, and child exploitation.

Israel continues to employ rape accusations as a systematic weapon of war, with major news outlets, such as the New York Times, falling prey to this narrative without demanding proper evidence.