Utolsó frissítés: 2026.05.21. — Szerző: Anti-Propaganda News Blog
Leading media outlets are promoting a new report that represents an evidence-based breakthrough regarding the mass rapes of Israelis allegedly committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
This is nothing of the sort. The nearly 300-page report, „Silenced no more,” released by a supposedly independent „Civil Commission,” is largely a repackaged collection of old claims, anonymous accusations, and speculation.
This includes claims from a number of individuals whose accounts have previously been declared contradictory, unreliable, or fabricated.
But you can't tell that from the way the media reports it.
The British Daily Mail claimed that the report had „for the first time” revealed the „complete depravity” of the „unimaginable” sexual horrors committed by Hamas, „which some on the left STILL question.”.
A CNN „called the new report a ”milestone” and invited its lead author for an interview.
A BBC „It called it ”the most comprehensive„ report documenting ”rape, sexual harassment and sexual torture” against Israelis.
None of these media outlets displayed skepticism or careful scrutiny – certainly not the kind that is applied to almost any report on Israeli violence.
A The World made a rare critical remark in an otherwise sympathetic article, acknowledging that the report could be challenged for combining alleged incidents of „different natures,” including acts „whose sexual dimension is unclear.”.
A The Globe and Mail According to the report, it seeks to uncover patterns of „rape, gang rape, other forms of sexual harassment, sexual torture – including burning and mutilation,” as well as allegations of posthumous sexual abuse, humiliation and body shaming.
It’s a horrific story if true. But it’s telling that the Canadian newspaper acknowledges that the report claims „sexual violence was widespread and systemic, although it doesn’t provide a number of victims.”.
Discredited „Citizens” Committee”
Indeed, the Civil Committee – an initiative that Cochav Elkayam-Levy Israeli legal scholar launched shortly after October 7th – already more than was severely discredited by the Israeli media two years ago.
Elkayam-Levy has come under fire for his shoddy research methods – which have even embarrassed some members of the Israeli government.
„People broke up with him because his investigation is not accurate,” an Israeli government source told the Ynetof the Israeli mass-produced Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper-related online portal.
The government source mentioned how Elkayam-Levy spread a story about Palestinian fighters „cutting open the belly of a pregnant woman – a story that was proven to be untrue and that he spread in the international media”.
„"This is no joke. Little by little, professionals started to distance themselves from him because he was unreliable"” the source added, citing the damage such false reports cause to Israel's already battered credibility.
It has previously been revealed that Elkayam-Levy also tried to use an old photo of a Kurdish female fighter who died in another country as a victim of the October 7 violence.
Elkayam-Levy has also come under attack for financial opportunism.
„He accepted donations from a lot of people and started asking for money for his lectures,” the government source told Ynet.
But these warnings have not deterred a host of Israel lobbyists, including the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Jewish United Fund of Chicago, the New Israel Fund and the Wilf Family Foundation.
The report's funders include the German government, through its embassy in Tel Aviv, which is significant because German leaders have openly spread false claims about the sexual violence of October 7, including the lie that Hamas fighters filmed themselves raping Israeli women on October 7.
Such a video does not exist.
The Citizens' Commission specifically lists "our valued partners" on its website, including Microsoft and the Canadian government.
The first dozen pages of the report are dominated by endorsements from such enthusiastically pro-Israel celebrities and politicians as Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg and Rahm Emanuel.
The Canadian politician, Irwin CotlerHe is listed as a „major contributor” and wrote the foreword. Cotler has long been a staunch supporter of the Israel lobby and is widely seen as an apologist for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
Cotler also „"Doctors Against Racism and Anti-Semitism"” (Physicians Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) Honorary board member of a pro-Israel group that urged the University of Toronto to treat accusations of Israeli apartheid or genocide as anti-Semitism.
In 2024, an investigation by the Canadian publication The Maple found that key claims made by Cotler for years about his relationship with Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa were unsupported or refuted by South African sources.
Missing victims of sexual assault
Does the report offer anything new?
The authors claim to have conducted more than 430 „formal and informal interviews, testimonies and meetings” and relied on media interviews, investigative reports, documentaries, podcasts, parliamentary hearings and a list of public reports on sexual violence.
The main problem with Israel’s narrative about the October 7 mass rapes has never been simply the failure to publicly name the victims. Privacy concerns may justify anonymizing survivors and withholding identifying information.
Yet, to this day, Israel has not provided even the most basic anonymized account that we would expect from a serious investigation: How many people complained that they were raped on October 7, how many deceased individuals have been positively identified as rape victims, how many families have been informed that their relatives were raped, and how many alleged cases are based solely on the inferences of witnesses, hearsay, or speculation based on the condition of the bodies observed by laypeople?
The Citizens' Commission report does not fill this gap. It does not provide a clear number of victims and a transparent list of cases, but contains only a mixture of old public statements, confidential archival references, second-hand accounts, and claims of generalized patterns.
In January 2025, an Israeli prosecutor admitted that there was still no whistleblower in the alleged October 7 rape cases.
This remains a fundamental flaw in the entire narrative, and the Citizens' Committee is doing everything it can to cover it up.
It claims that confidential information has been withheld and that findings are sometimes presented only in a „generalized manner” to avoid identifying victims, including in cases where families of murdered victims may not be aware that sexual crimes were allegedly committed against relatives.
This means that some of the report's most horrific allegations are being deliberately insulated from substantive public scrutiny.
Privacy is of course a legitimate and paramount concern, but it does not explain the conspicuous lack of first-hand accounts from rape victims.
There is no reason why authors should not include anonymized, first-person accounts of rape survivors, using pseudonyms and omitting details that could identify them – a standard practice in human rights reporting.
The same problem arises in the section on kibbutzim: The report itself states that „there are no known survivors [of sexual and gender-based violence] from any of the October 7 kibbutz attacks,” other than those who were taken prisoner.
Researchers took exactly this approach when they published explicit and detailed first-hand accounts of rape and sexual torture by Palestinian survivors of Israeli military captivity.
The Civil Commission report does indeed include numerous anonymized testimonies of alleged sexual violence other than rape. But there are no first-hand victim testimonies of rape – except for one, a man identified as „D,” a veteran of Israeli intelligence who claims to have been the victim of gang rape.
D's claims were previously reported by Israeli media in July 2024 – where he was identified with the Hebrew letter "Dalet" – after he filed a lawsuit demanding roughly $137 million from the Israeli government.
The Civil Commission claims that D's account is "supported" by medical records.
However, Amnesty International has previously interviewed D and reviewed his medical records. According to the report, there is far less real information than the Citizens' Committee would have people believe.
The Amnesty According to: „She reportedly visited a doctor twice, in March and May 2024, during both visits she reported anxiety and fears due to being at the Nova festival when it was attacked, and during the second visit she reported being sexually assaulted at the Nova festival site.”
Such records could serve as evidence that D told a doctor in May 2024 that she had been raped the previous October. However, based on Amnesty's careful description, there appears to be no medical evidence of the attack itself.
There are no first-hand accounts of rape in captivity
The Civilian Commission report states that Israeli men and women who returned from captivity in Gaza „testified that they experienced rape, sexual torture and other forms of sexual abuse during their abduction and/or captivity, as well as witnessing sexual acts committed against other hostages, including family members.”.
However, the section on captivity does not include a direct, first-person account from a returned hostage claiming to have been raped in captivity.
The only specific public source cited in the report regarding the rape of prisoners is a June 2024 Washington Post-interview Moran Stella Yanai A former prisoner who explicitly states about her captors: "They didn't rape me, they didn't touch me."„
But the Post adds, „What haunts him most are the firsthand accounts of rape from other female hostages whispered to him in captivity. He keeps their secrets and does not reveal their names to protect their privacy and avoid further endangering their lives.”
Notably, many former prisoners' testimonies describe fear of rape, threats, humiliation, forced nudity, or other alleged sexual abuse, but none provide a direct, first-hand account from the victim of the rape.
The report contains some new allegations of sexual abuse against former detainees, including an allegation that two minors „who were family members reported being forced to ’perform sexual acts with each other’ while in Gaza.” Little further information is provided in the report.
Such reports, allegedly provided directly to the Civil Commission, cannot be evaluated independently of the public text of the report and come from an organization that is known for its dishonesty and reliance on unreliable sources.
But even if they are true, they do not support the main pillar of Israel's narrative of mass rapes and gang rapes on October 7.
Thousands of photos and videos, but not a single rape
Equally striking is the committee's evasive stance on the visual evidence it purportedly reviewed.
„At all the sites of attacks reviewed by the Commission, perpetrators were observed celebrating the massacres, chanting religious slogans, and filming violent and humiliating scenes,” the report states.
The report also claims that on October 7, Israelis were „hunted, executed, tortured, burned alive, mutilated, sexually assaulted, and taken hostage in acts of extreme brutality.”.
The report said the Palestinians who allegedly committed these acts „filmed and broadcasted them in real time, turning their violence into a spectacle and human suffering into a tool of terror.”.
And in an age when almost everyone has a camera, thousands of Israeli eyewitnesses would have had the opportunity to take both photos and videos.
The authors do boast that they analyzed over 10,000 photographs and video clips, totaling over 1,800 hours, but the report never claims that any of these depict actual rape or gang rape in progress.
The only detailed description of the body camera footage allegedly recorded by a Palestinian fighter on October 7 and seen by the Civilian Committee is of the killing of several female Israeli soldiers at a military base. The Civilian Committee does not describe this video as depicting rape or other sexual violence.
The lack of visual evidence of rape in even a single case is glaring, given the scope of the Civil Commission's allegations.
But this is consistent with the March 2024 report by UN Special Rapporteur Pramila Patten.
The UN team led by Patten also reviewed thousands of photographs and videos provided by the Israeli government and concluded that „the forensic evaluation of the available photographs and videos did not find any tangible signs of rape.”.
Despite extensive searches, „no digital evidence specifically depicting sexual violence was found in open source sources,” the UN report added.
Moreover, in April 2024, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that „intelligence materials collected by police and intelligence agencies, including footage from terrorists” body cameras, do not contain visual documentation of the acts of rape themselves.”.
Nothing in the Citizens’ Commission report challenges these findings, but to cover up the lack of visual evidence supporting the rape narrative, the report invokes the authority of thousands of photographs and videos, while carefully avoiding claiming that any image or video actually depicts such an attack taking place.
Recycled and written-off accounts
The alleged incidents in the report, which took place on October 7, are almost entirely familiar. Once again, it relies on a group of „eyewitnesses” – not first-hand victims – whose accounts are either unsubstantiated, have changed over time, or have been refuted outright.
This includes a woman named „Sapir,” who allegedly witnessed women being gang-raped and mutilated, and also claimed to have seen Palestinian fighters carrying severed heads.
This fantastic account, which has never been made public or independently verified by any related victims, bodies, or forensic evidence, was featured in the infamous and discredited December 2023 New York Times article „Screams Without Words.”.
As the Times reported, Sapir saw Hamas fighters rape several women and then witnessed „terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.”.
Sapir history was featured Sheryl Sandberg billionaire, former Facebook CEO 2024 Screams Before Silence which promotes the mass rape hoax – which was debunked in detail by The Electronic Intifada after its release – but the film does not mention the severed heads that Sapir allegedly saw.
The Civilian Commission report includes Sapir's testimony, but omits the even more sensational claim about beheaded women in the Times report.
Although it omits this shocking element from Sapir's testimony, the Civil Commission report nevertheless repeatedly cites the discredited New York Times article by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella as if it were a credible source.
About a hundred pages later, independently of Sapir’s firsthand testimony, the report states that witnesses claimed that „the perpetrators were carrying the severed heads of women.” A footnote attributes this claim to Sapir. If the Civilian Commission finds it credible—despite the lack of corroboration—why does it omit it from Sapir’s own testimony?
The report also includes other dubious „eyewitnesses,” such as Raz Cohen and Tali Biner.
Cohen — whose story has changed several times — is featured in Gettleman's article, and both appear in the Sandberg film.
Fabulists, liars and cheats
These aren't even the most egregious examples.
The Civilian Commission report also mentions several other individuals whose credibility has collapsed, including Rami Davidian, who is featured prominently in Sandberg's film and claims to have single-handedly saved hundreds of Israelis from the clutches of Palestinian fighters on October 7.
He also claimed that he saw dozens of dead victims of his alleged rape that day, some with objects inserted into their genitals, but told Sandberg that he had changed the positions of the bodies so that – conveniently – no one else would see what he saw.
In May 2024, the Electronic Intifada pointed out the glaring contradictions and impossibilities of Davidian's claims.
A year later, the Israeli Channel 13 investigation found that Davidian had indeed fabricated his stories of superhero-like heroism and used his fame to enrich himself with huge speaking fees and donations.
„These are not slight exaggerations, slight inflating of the number of those rescued, not at all,” said Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker. „These are stories that are made up from beginning to end. These are hair-raising stories that never, ever happened.”
And yet Davidian widely cited as a source in the Civil Commission report.
Similarly, the report relies heavily on claims made by members of ZAKA, the Israeli „rescue” organization responsible for the infamous October 7 lies, such as the false claims of dozens of decapitated babies and burned children.
The group played a prominent role in lending credibility to such atrocity propaganda, referring to it as a „first responder” and helping to build public consensus on Israel’s genocide in Gaza after October 7th.
A ZAKA by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav who committed suicide after being exposed in Israel as a serial sexual predator accused of decades of violent sexual crimes against Jewish men, women and children.
After Mesi-Zahav's victims spoke out, ZAKA staffer Chaim Otmazgin publicly defended him, claiming that the extensive evidence against him was obtained through blackmail.
ZAKA and Otmazgin are repeatedly cited as credible sources in the Civil Committee report.
Otmazgin and ZAKA associate Simcha Greinman also appeared in Sandberg's film, where they made racy and controversial claims about seeing nails and other objects around the genitals.
The intersection is no coincidence. The Civil Committee's report specifically thanks Kastina Communications, the producer of Screams into Silence, for allowing the use of "materials and testimonies" collected for the film.
Painting a dark picture
The report acknowledges in a footnote that Israeli authorities „largely failed to collect relevant forensic evidence from the attack sites or the bodies found.”.
The lack of forensic evidence is therefore another significant narrative problem that the Civil Commission must grapple with, in addition to the lack of rape victims.
The report attempts to explain this lack with the cliché claim that „Hamas agents and collaborators systematically destroyed important evidence by burning bodies, properties, and houses.”.
Basic forensics makes it clear that destroying forensic and DNA evidence, even by fire, is not necessarily simple at a single crime scene.
The claim becomes much less plausible when applied to a pattern of alleged mass rapes that were allegedly committed over a vast geographical area amidst the chaos of October 7th.
The report does not address evidence that significant numbers of Israelis were killed and many bodies burned by Israeli fire during the widespread application of the Hannibal Directive, a protocol that allows the Israeli military to use overwhelming force to prevent the capture of Israelis, even if it means killing them along with their captors.
However, the Citizens' Commission – like the Sandberg film – relies on multiple eyewitness accounts of bodies, such as those with legs spread or groin injuries, to assume that these individuals were victims of rape and other sexual assault.
This phenomenon was already addressed by the UN's Patten Report of March 2024, which pointed to "misinterpretation of the condition of bodies by some volunteer first responders who lack the appropriate qualifications and expertise.".
This included „misinterpreting the »post-autopsy fistfight posture« (a »boxer-like« posture with bent elbows, clenched fists, spread legs, and bent knees) due to burn injuries as a sign of sexual assault; misinterpreting the dilation of the anus due to post-autopsy lesions as a sign of anal penetration; and mischaracterizing the abrasion of gunshot wounds to the genitals as targeted genital mutilation with knives.”.
The Civilian Commission report repeatedly relies on statements from first responders – who are not forensic experts – about the condition of the bodies, including that of Israeli military reservist Shari Mendes, who was at the Shura military base as it was being used as a temporary morgue on October 7.
Mendes appears in the 2024 Sandberg film, where he recounts his horrific allegations of bloody underwear, naked bodies, and systematic sexual mutilation.
His claims are contradicted not only by the Patten report, but also by the findings of Israeli pathologists.
As Haaretz reported in April 2024: „Five forensic pathologists worked at the Shura base, where most of the bodies were taken for identification. In this capacity, they also examined the bodies that arrived fully or partially naked to check for the possibility of rape. According to a source familiar with the details, no signs of sexual intercourse or genital mutilation were found on these bodies.”
The point is that the Civil Commission report is the latest attempt to revive Israel’s mass rape hoax at a time when Israel is being scorned and isolated worldwide for its genocide in Gaza. The narrative invokes well-known racist and colonial clichés of indigenous savages raping white settler women.
But a „comprehensive” report that uses unreliable sources, cites debunked media reports as evidence, fails to quantify the number of victims, and continues to fail to confirm the existence of a single specific rape victim—living or dead—does not save Israel’s mass rape scam. It confirms its bankruptcy.
Original article: electronicintifada.com
