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
Talk of rape began circulating almost before the massacres themselves were over. Much of it came from what Patten would later call “non-professionals” who supplied “inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations” of what they found, creating an instant but flawed narrative about what had taken place.
Meanwhile, the political establishment has opened a fresh battle with the UN over what the Patten report didn’t say: that sexual violence was beyond reasonable doubt, systematic, widespread and ordered and perpetrated by Hamas. Israeli advocates for the female survivors are now warning that the country’s refusal to co-operate with a full and legal investigation, which the carefully worded report was not, threatens the prospect of ever finding out the full truth about the sexual violence of October 7 and delivering justice for its victims.
It was not a legal investigation, Patten explained, as Israel had not allowed one: that mandate could only be fulfilled by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which Israel has refused to work with since its inception. She hoped that would change.
Patten made it clear there was sufficient evidence of acts of sexual violence to merit full and proper investigation and expressed her shock at the brutality of the violence. The report also confirmed Israeli authorities were unable to provide much of the evidence that political leaders had insisted existed. In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found.
Thanks for your opinion guy that claims israel is not an Apartheid state.
I've told you multiple times I'm ok calling it an apartheid state. This is like the 3rd or 4th time now. Go back to playing team sports now.
I don't think it's team sports. I think it's one of two things:
I initially thought they were way too committed and energetic about this stance they're taking about the UN report, to be any kind of shill, but now I'm less sure. They're certainly posting with a level of energy and aggressiveness that makes a lot more sense if it's their job, and usually people who have come by their counterfactual opinions organically have some kind of structure built up in their head for why it makes sense to them (Like they would say the UN report is crazy and biased and can't be trusted for some reason -- they wouldn't just insist for 2 days that it says a huge variety of very specific things that it doesn't say, and then just not address it on any level when someone points out the contradiction while continuing to go HAM on arguing about it. The second one sounds more like disinformation poster behavior to me.)
I don't really know. They don't act like most shills (or who I believe to be shills) that I have encountered. Like if you just looked at their comments arguing about Hamas, you probably wouldn't predict that their other singular area of focus in comments would be Biden and the Democrats. But the more that I look back over the conversation + take a look over their user, the more it makes sense to me as an explanation.
(Oooh... I just looked a little further; they also use the phrase "blue MAGA," and if you look back past the current conversation there's a lot more of a focus on Biden and Democrats and quite a concerted effort to link Israel's policies to Biden. The plot thickens.)
I've seen some of the other usual suspects use "blue maga" as well, along with the same biden and democrats rhetoric.
Yeah. It was virtually unknown on Lemmy up until around May 20th, when return2ozma and a few other accounts all started using it at the same time. It's sort of dropped off since then; I think their effort to make it catch on failed. But there are a few accounts that still like to drop it into conversation in perfectly natural fashion every now and again.
I think like a lot of propaganda, it's not meant to have any wild level of success on its own; it's more just one little piece that's designed to combine with a hundred other little pieces to create a sizable overall impact.