JERUSALEM — The United Nations and other organizations have presented credible evidence that Hamas militants committed sexual assaults during their October 7 massacre in southern Israel. Although the number of attacks is unclear, photographs and videos of the aftermath of the attack show bodies with their legs spread, clothing torn, and blood near their genitals.
However, other accounts of that day turned out to be false. They include two debunked testimonies from volunteers with the Israeli search and rescue organization ZAKA, whose stories helped fuel a global confrontation over whether sexual violence occurred during the attack and on what scale.
Some allege that the accounts of sexual assault were intentionally fabricated. Zaka officials and others dispute this. Still, AP’s examination of Zaka’s handling of the now-debunked stories shows how information can be clouded and distorted in the chaos of conflict.
The accounts have fueled skepticism and sparked intense debate about the scope of what happened on October 7, a debate that is still playing out on social media and in protests on college campuses.
Here are key takeaways from AP’s look at how these stories originated:
One version that turned out to be unfounded came from Chaim Otmazgin, a ZAKA volunteer who collected bodies after the attack.
After tending to dozens of shot, burned or mutilated bodies in Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the most affected communities, Otmazgin arrived at the house that would put him at the center of a global confrontation. He found the body of a teenager separated from two of his relatives. Her pants, he said, were down. He assumed that meant she had been sexually assaulted.
Otmazgin says he told reporters and lawmakers details of what he had seen and asked if they could have any other interpretation. He today maintains that he never openly said that the girl whose body he saw had been sexually assaulted. But his account strongly suggested that was the case.
Almost three months later, ZAKA discovered that Otmazgin’s interpretation was wrong. After cross-checking with military contacts, ZAKA learned that a group of soldiers had dragged the girl’s body across the room to make sure she was not booby-trapped. While they were doing that, they pulled down his pants.
The other debunked account came from Otmazgin’s colleague Yossi Landau, also a long-time volunteer working at Be’eri. In the days and weeks following the attack, Landau told the world’s media what he thought he saw: a pregnant woman lying on the ground, the fetus still attached to the umbilical cord torn from her body.
But Otmazgin, who was supervising the other ZAKA workers when he said Landau frantically called him and others to the house, did not see what Landau described. Instead, he saw the body of a large woman and an unidentifiable piece tied to an electrical cord. Everything was charred.
Otmazgin said he told Landau that this was not a pregnant woman. Still, Landau believed her version and went on to tell the story to journalists who circulated the story internationally.
Israel was caught off guard by the ferocity of the Oct. 7 attack, the deadliest in the nation’s history. Around 1,200 people were killed and 250 were taken hostage. It took days for the military to clear the area of militants.
There were hundreds of bodies scattered across southern Israel, with various signs of abuse: burns, bullet holes, signs of mutilation, marks indicating that the bodies had been tied up. Confusion reigned over who was dead and who was taken captive.
Standard protocols for dealing with attacks, which Israel frequently faced on a much smaller scale in the early 2000s, collapsed. The army focused on fighting militants still hiding in southern Israel. A ZAKA spokesman said police forensic teams were concentrated in the southern towns of Sderot and Ofakim. Otmazgin said there were forensic workers on the kibbutzim, but dispersed.
The mammoth task of gathering the dead fell to ZAKA, a private civil body made up of 3,000 volunteer workers, mostly Orthodox Jews. The organization focuses on giving each victim a proper Jewish burial. I had never witnessed anything like the carnage of October 7th. ZAKA’s main experience with victim identification before then was limited to distinguishing militant attackers from their victims, without determining who was a victim of sexual assault.
That means bodies that might have shown signs of sexual assault could have escaped examination. Instead, they were loaded into body bags, sent to a facility to be identified and sent for quick burial.
Almost immediately after October 7, Israel began allowing groups of journalists to visit the devastated kibbutzim. During the trips, journalists found that ZAKA volunteers were among the most accessible and willing to talk.
The group’s usual media protocols were circumvented, and volunteers who would normally be vetted by ZAKA’s spokesperson before being interviewed spoke directly to journalists, drawing conclusions about what they saw, even though the group acknowledges that its volunteers They are not forensic workers.
After false accounts of sexual assault spread in the international media, the process of debunking them seemed, at times, to take center stage in the global dispute over the events of October 7.
Some of Israel’s critics seized on the debunked ZAKA and other false accounts as evidence that the Israeli government distorted facts to justify the war, in which more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Department. officials.
The vociferous debate belies a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that a sexual assault occurred that day, even though its extent remains difficult to determine.
A UN investigative team found “reasonable grounds” to believe that some of those who stormed southern Israel on October 7 had committed sexual violence, including rape and gang rape. But U.N. investigators also said that in the absence of forensic evidence and testimony from survivors, it would be impossible to determine the extent of such violence. Hamas has denied that its forces committed sexual violence.
Investigators described Otmazgin and Landau’s versions as “unfounded.”
The UN report sheds light on the issues that have contributed to skepticism about sexual violence. He said there was “limited crime scene processing” and that some sexual assault evidence may have been missed due to “the interventions of some insufficiently trained volunteer first responders.” He also said the global scrutiny of the accounts that emerged from Oct. 7 may have deterred survivors from coming forward.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
