The NYT also hired former Israeli intelligence officer Anat Schwartz, who had no prior journalistic experience and her nephew to be 2 of 3 co-authors on such that original high-profile, high-impact article. They clearly also failed to vet Schwartz (or deliberately ignored her bias), given that she is now known to have liked/upvoted social media posts that called Palestinians “human animals”, and told the IDF to “violate any norm necessary to achieve victory” and turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse”.
The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a “second wave,” contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence. The central issue is whether The New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7”—a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war.
The dumb part is certain people are now trying to bring up the cases of rape that did happen as some sort of gotcha to claim the NYT report was accurate (see the Reddit /r/news thread about the UN envoy statement right now).
When that wasn’t the issue with Anat Schwartz’ article in the first place. The claim was never that no instances of rape happened, we know they did, there’s video of it. The issue was her claim that sexual violence was an explicit part of Hamas’ strategy and goal on October 7th, which was completely unsubstantiated by her and the others involved. They, in fact, couldn’t find any evidence of the sort to back up the claim, but still reported the claim as accurate anyways.
Hamas is an evil terrorist group, but that doesn’t mean we should just open-faced accept pretty obvious propaganda and lies about them. The truth matters, especially in conflicts like this.
