How Israel Used The Mainstream Media To Do Damage Control Over Revelations About The Mass Rape Of Palestinians.

Israel Used The Mainstream Media To Relaunder The Mass Rape Hoax, a Strategy To Silence The Revelations About Actual Mass Rape Of Palestinians.

Israel’s Mass Rape: The ‘Biggest Hasbara Attack Israel Has Experienced Since Its Founding’.

Of all of Israel’s crimes committed against the Palestinians, the mass rape of Palestinian detainees seems to be the one Israel most desperately wants hidden from the public.

When a harrowing video depicting a rape of a Palestinian detainee was released from Sde Teiman, Israel’s rape/torture dungeon for detained Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the “discussion of the video”, “the biggest hasbara attack Israel has experienced since its founding”.

This was likely because the video was in no way an isolated incident, and is one example of an institutionalized and systemic system of mass rape that Israel has unleashed towards Palestinians.

“Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorize them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination”, the UN concluded in a little-reported-on investigation put out in March of last year .

In Israeli detention centres, the report noted, “detainees were routinely subjected to sexual abuse and harassment, and threats of sexual assault and rape were directed at detainees or their female family members.”

This included “cases of sexual and gender-based violence against male and female detainees in more than 10 military and Israel Prison Service facilities, in particular in Negev prison and Sde Teiman camp for male detainees and Damon and Hasharon prisons for female detainees”.

This included, “cases of rape and sexual assault of male detainees, including the use of an electrical probe to cause burns to the anus, and the insertion of objects, such as fingers, sticks, broomsticks and vegetables, into the anus and rectum” adding that “Female detainees were also subjected to sexual assault and harassment in military and Israel Prison Service facilities, as well as threats to their lives. The sexual assault and harassment included kicking the women’s genitals, touching their breasts, attempting to kiss them, and threats of rape”.

Since Palestinians have been released from Israeli detention centres in October of last year, human rights organizations have been collecting harrowing testimony after harrowing testimony detailing the rape and sexual violence they faced in Israeli torture dungeons.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, put out a report in November of last year which “collected new testimonies from a number of Palestinian detainees from the Gaza Strip who were recently released from Israeli prisons and detention camps” and found that “These accounts reveal an organized and systematic practice of sexual torture, including rape, forced stripping, forced filming, sexual assault using objects and dogs, in addition to deliberate psychological humiliation aimed at crushing human dignity and erasing individual identity entirely.”

This included the testimony of “a 42-year-old Palestinian woman and mother who was arrested while passing through an Israeli checkpoint set up in northern Gaza in November 2024” who said:

They put me on a metal table, pressed my chest and head against it, cuffed my hands to the end of the bed, and pulled my legs apart forcefully. I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me. I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus. I kept screaming and being beaten, and I could hear a camera—so I believe they were filming me. The rape lasted about 10 minutes. After that, they left me for an hour in the same position, with my hands cuffed to the bed with metal handcuffs, my face on the bed, my feet on the floor, and I was completely naked.

Again, after an hour, I was raped fully in the same position, with penetration into my vagina, and I was beaten while I screamed. There were several soldiers; I heard them laughing and the camera clicking as it took pictures. This rape was very quick and there was no ejaculation. During the rape they beat me with their hands on my head and back.

The report also documented the testimony of “A.A., a 35-year-old Palestinian man and father” who “was arrested while at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in March 2024” and said he, “was moved to a section I didn’t know inside Sde Teiman. During the first weeks there, amid repeated suppression operations, I was taken with a group of detainees in a degrading manner to a place far from the cameras—a passage between sections. We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me. Then one of the dogs raped me—the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces. The dog’s assault lasted about three minutes; the overall suppression lasted about three hours. Because of the severe beating, all of us sustained injuries across our bodies. I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation; I lost control because I could never have imagined experiencing such a thing. Afterward, a doctor stitched a wound in my head caused by the torture—seven stitches without anesthesia. I also suffered bruises, fractures in my limbs, and a rib fracture”.

In February of this year, the Committee To Protect Journalists (CPJ) collected testimony of Palestinian journalists who were tortured in Israeli detention, many of whom were raped and sexually abused.

“Two of the 59 Palestinian journalists also told CPJ they were raped in detention,” the report noted, documenting the case of journalist Sami al-Sai, who said, “he was taken to a small cell in Megiddo prison, and soldiers removed his trousers and underwear, and penetrated him with batons and other objects.”

This also included the testimony of journalist Osama al-Sayed, saying , “he and other detainees were stripped naked and attacked by trained dogs in Sde Teiman. He described the incident as rape, adding that soldiers laughed while filming the assault.”

“CPJ documented 17 journalist testimonies involving sexual violence and 19 more describing humiliating strip searches. The alleged acts included assaults on the journalists’ genitals, attempted forced penetration with objects, forced nudity and recording, threats of rape, and other methods of sexualized coercion,” the report added.

The report also added that “In December 2025, German journalist Anne Liedtke, detained aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla, alleged Israeli soldiers raped her while in custody. Italian journalist Vincenzo Fullone and Australian activist Surya McEwen made similar accusations.”

Euro Med Monitor, a human rights NGO, recently released the most comprehensive report detailing the mass rape of Palestinians, which showed “widespread patterns of sexual violence against detainees in the Gaza Strip, serving as a tool to break both individual and collective will and inflict serious physical and psychological harm,” including “direct sexual assault, assaults with instruments, and torture focused on the genitals.”

The report included 22 victim testimonies of detained Palestinians who faced rape or extreme sexual violence.

Mainstream Media Breaks The Blackout.

As the evidence piled up that Israel routinely used mass rape and sexual violence as a form of torture against Palestinian detainees, the mainstream media continued to ignore this story, much to the delight of Israel and its propaganda machine.

But the evidence became too overwhelming for the mainstream media to ignore.

On the 11th, the New York Times finally published an investigation (which was published under the option section despite the fact that it was a piece of straight reporting), showing that “in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

One important revelation from the testimonies recounted in the article was the fact that Israel repeatedly threatened the victims not to speak out, fearing the public would learn about the mass systemic rape it unleashed.

One victim told the paper, “They threatened that if I spoke up, they would rape me, kill me and kill my father”.

Another Palestinian farmer who faced rape in Israeli detention, according to the report, “called to say that he didn’t want his name used after all. He had just been visited by Shin Bet and warned not to cause trouble.”

Israeli Damage Control

After this report was released in the New York Times, Israel and its propaganda machine went into overdrive, doing damage control.

If the video released showing the rape of a Palestinian detainee was “the biggest hasbara attack Israel has experienced since its founding,” a report in the mainstream media showing that the rape was part of a“a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children” was even more damaging to Israel’s propaganda narrative.

“Today, the New York Times chose to publish one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press,” the Israeli foreign ministry wrote in response to the article.

Following this, Israel tasked its media propagandists to try to discredit the report.

Not finding any way to discredit it, Israeli propagandists zeroed in on attempting to debunk testimony from a victim showing that:

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

This testimony was backed up by other testimony revealing the use of trained dogs to rape Palestinian detainees, seen in the reports in the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Committee To Protect Journalists and Euro Med Monitor.

Pro-Israel propagandists have attempted to discredit this claim by claiming that dogs cannot be trained to rape.

But a minimal amount of research shows that dogs trained to rape have been used as a form of torture throughout history, including by Nazi torturer Klaus Barbie, the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile, the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt and by the U.S. in Afghanistan.

By claiming that dogs cannot be trained to rape, Israeli propagandists, while denying the Gaza genocide are also inadvertently denying the Holocaust and the crimes of the Pinochet and Mubarak regimes.

Furthermore, A Vice Magazine article from 2014 on bestiality documented the case of “a woman who trained dogs to have sex with other women”.

The Next Stage Of Damage Control: Reviving The Mass Rape Hoax.

Unable to disprove anything in the New York Times report, the Israeli Hasbara machine moved on to its next damage control tactic, reviving the mass rape hoax, the false claim that Hamas committed mass rape on October 7th.

On cue, every single Western mainstream media outlet began writing about a report that supposedly proved that mass rape occurred on October 7th, with articles taking this report’s claims at face value appearing in: the Daily Mail, CNN, BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post , the Globe and Mail, the AP and Australia’s ABC .

None of these outlets mentioned the fact that the report’s author, Kochav Elkayim-Levi, had been widely discredited , including by the Israeli mainstream outlet Ynet.

According to Ynet, Kochav Elkayim-Levi has a long history of spreading false stories, “For example, the story about the pregnant woman who had her stomach ripped open - a story that was proven to be untrue, and she spread it in the international press.”

“Professionals began to distance themselves from her because she was not credible”, Ynet noted.

As I showed in my last investigation, the report is nothing but a rehash of claims that have been debunked years ago, including by Israeli media.

For example, the mainstream Israeli journalist Ravid Drucker exposed the claims of supposed witness Rami Davidian as “stories fabricated from beginning to end” and “Hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred”, and yet Drucker is repeatedly cited as a credible witness in the report.

It is clear that the release of this fraudulent report was timed to be damage control after the New York Times report on Israeli mass rape.

Through covering this fraudulent report, virtually every Western news outlet showed not only that they are willing to ignore minimal journalistic standards, but they are also being used as willing participants in Israel’s damage control campaign to cover up its systemic rape against Palestinians.

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