Re “Mass rape”
and “burning babies”
You may have missed a Times investigative report last weekend which was free to read them but now you need to find it on archive ph with this headline:
Israel says Hamas weaponised rape. Does the evidence add up?
The Israeli government insists that Hamas formally sanctioned sexual assault on October 7, 2023. But investigators say the evidence does not stand up to scrutiny. Catherine Philp and Gabrielle Weiniger report on eight months of claim and counter-claim
One paragraph refers to the story of babies,
.Yossi, a volunteer from another religious group called United Hatzalah, told the reporters he had seen a “pyramid of bodies”, although no such thing was found. His description seemed to echo a photograph of a mountain of corpses at the crematorium mortuary at Dachau concentration camp. The now debunked story of the pregnant woman and her slaughtered foetus is well known from the pogroms. Many other erroneous tales involved babies — one Zaka figure claimed to have found a baby baked alive in an oven.
another paragraph,
Patten spoke movingly of her encounters with communities left traumatised by the terror attacks. “I saw the pain in their eyes,” she said. “It was a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors.” But she also hit back with unusual force against Israel’s refusal to look into the allegations by Palestinian women — to “believe Palestinian women”, in its own cadence — both in the present climate, where detentions have soared, and in the past, over decades, in which such allegations have been raised.
You might be interested in this AP May 22 article too,
How 2 debunked accounts of sexual violence on Oct. 7 fueled a global dispute over Israel-Hamas war
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-sexual-violence-zaka-ca7905bf9520b1e646f86d72cdf03244
Then there was this by Haaretz December 2023 which has to be read in archive ph too using the headline:
Hamas Committed Documented Atrocities. But a Few False Stories Feed the Deniers
The extensive evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 should not be contaminated by unverified stories disseminated by Israeli search and rescue groups, army officers and even Sara Netanyahu
Excerpt referring to the stories about babies,
The report above was later quoted on social media, often referenced as “dozens of beheaded babies,” though sometimes it was “burnt babies” or “hanged babies.” For example, the Foreign Ministry published an account by Col. Golan Vach from the Home Front Command, who said that in one house he found the bodies of eight burnt babies.
None of these investigative reports mean Hamas did not commit mass murder and atrocities, did not kill any children, or that no one was raped. It does however show that some stories that were widely circulated
were not true.