The truth about the New York Times’ Hamas sexual violence exposé

On December 28, the New York Times published a blockbuster front-page exposé claiming Hamas deliberately and systematically used mass rape as a weapon of war during the October 7 attack.

The article galvanized the Israeli war effort at a time when even some of Israel’s allies were expressing concern over its large-scale killing of civilians in Gaza.

However, The Intercept uncovered facts that cast doubt on the article and the reporting process behind it.

The Times shelved an episode of its flagship podcast “The Daily” amid an internal firestorm about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject. In addition, one of the story’s reporters had liked social media posts calling Palestinians “human animals” and urging Israel to “turn the [Gaza] strip into a slaughterhouse.”

The Times says it’s standing by the story, but it’s simultaneously walking back its explosive framing of a systemic Hamas mass rape campaign — and The Intercept is exposing how senior editors presided over a reporting process that bolstered a campaign by Israel to win support for its ongoing assault on Gaza.

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The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Nor is there a question about whether the October 7 Hamas raid was a war crime worthy of condemnation.

The central issue is whether The New York Times presented solid evidence to support the claim, stated in its headline, that Hamas deliberately and systematically deployed sexual violence as a weapon.

To this day, neither the Times nor any other institution has presented proof to back that explosive assertion.

In fact, in a podcast interview translated from Hebrew by The Intercept, the novice reporter commissioned by the Times to investigate the story admitted that extensive efforts to get confirmation of widespread sexual violence on October 7 from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel initially turned up nothing.

“She was told there had been no complaints made of sexual assaults,” a Times spokesperson acknowledged to The Intercept.

The reporters on the Times story then turned to anonymous Israeli officials or witnesses who’d already been interviewed repeatedly in the press — some of whom had already been shown to be unreliable witnesses.

In the same interview, the reporter admitted that she had been reluctant to work on the story because — in her words — “I have no qualifications” to report on victims of sexual violence.

The International Court of Justice in The Hague says that there is plausible evidence that Israel’s assault on Gaza is an ongoing genocide. The most influential newspaper in America must be held to fundamental journalistic standards in its reporting of these horrors.

The Intercept is continuing to investigate media bias as part of our ongoing coverage of the war in Gaza — and we rely on the support of readers like you to power our work. Will you make a donation right now?

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