Typical false reporting by the New York Times – The Intercept

It’s been nearly two months since The Intercept published our first story exposing internal strife about the New York Times’s blockbuster story alleging systematic sexual violence by Hamas during the October 7 raid.

Since then, rather than acknowledging the holes in their reporting, the Times has launched an internal “witch hunt” to track down anyone who might have leaked information to The Intercept.

Worse yet, the union that represents Times newsroom employees says that staff are being “targeted for their national origin, ethnicity and race,” while members of the paper’s internal Middle Eastern and Arab employee group faced “particularly hostile questioning.”

When the Times reported that Hamas had systematically used rape as a weapon of war, it sent shockwaves through Washington and completely upended the public debate about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.

Before the story, global sentiment was quickly shifting toward demanding a lasting ceasefire and ending the slaughter of Palestinian civilians and children. South Africa had just presented its meticulous case charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The tide was turning against Israel’s war.

After the Times’s explosive headline, the focus shifted completely. The Israeli government had spent weeks trying to drum up news coverage elevating claims of systematic, widespread sexual violence, and the Times article cemented that narrative.

One of the reporters who bylined the story was forced to apologize when it was discovered she had “liked” a social media post calling Palestinians “human animals” and urging Israel to “turn the [Gaza] strip into a slaughterhouse.”

After the story was published, she said that her initial outreach to Israeli hospitals and health clinics hadn’t turned up a single complaint about sexual violence on October 7.

Instead, the reporters turned to sources that included a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization that has been documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about October 7, like debunked allegations of Hamas fighters cutting the fetus from a pregnant woman’s body.

Even the spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri, the village where the Times specifically claimed rapes had occurred, told The Intercept that two of the victims singled out in the Times report “were not subjected to sexual abuse.”

And yet leaders in the Israeli government and its U.S. patrons point to the article’s dubious claims to defend the ongoing attack against Gaza, which has killed over 31,000 people and pushed huge swaths of the population to the brink of famine.