"One man we spoke to from the festival site said he heard the “noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated”.
To our question about how he could be sure - without seeing it - that the screams he heard indicated sexual assault rather than other kinds of violence, he said he believed while listening at the time that it could only have been rape. "
How can they be certain if they didn’t see it? It’s a really weird one.
There are also weird accounts like killing mid-rape, and mutilating mid-rape, which sounds horrific, but unplausible in some ways. I can imagine both situations (killing and mutilation) probably happened, but during and at the same time?
There were also clashes between a serving soldier that said multiple, but hard to know. And other official figures that claim abundant and systematic. It does seem like a lot of official sources, and it’s weird that it’s all gone from little information on this to extensive comments from government, army officials.
The BBC article has the following “The BBC has not been able to independently verify this account, and Israeli media reports have questioned some testimony from volunteers working in the traumatic aftermath of the Hamas attacks.” but no real information about what was question, by who, and on what grounds. It’s hard to get a balanced account because BBC is printed it and all government quotes as fact.
I’m in no way downplaying what Hamas has done, 1,200 dead, and you’d expect many of these things to be barbaric and I do believe that rape did occur at various times. It’s just the way this information is being fed, it’s trying to turn public opinion following disgust of over 15,000 dead and probably close to half of that being women and children. How do you justify that level of human casualties? How do you paint yourself as the victims when you conduct yourself in that manner? I suspect stories of systematic rape surfacing after almost 2 months, when I’d have expected it to be out and on front pages after 2 weeks.
That’s why my point is not that it didn’t happen. We could infer that it did and it’s horrifying and monstrous condemnable behavior. My criticism is that it is Israel the one who is adamant of doing anything about it. They want absolute control of the narrative. Right now, the biggest hurdle for justice for the victims of the Oct. 7 attack is the IDF who are using their suffering as a political weapon to justify a genocide of the same scale as the Holocaust.
Just based on how it’s being used in the information sphere; they’re going less for factual account and more for dehumanizing Gazans. They want to go beyond justifying the death toll of their punitive campaign and make people not care about Gazans at all.
Do you have a source for this?
I read this on the BBC, and it felt very narrative driven:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67629181
For example, the following:
"One man we spoke to from the festival site said he heard the “noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated”.
To our question about how he could be sure - without seeing it - that the screams he heard indicated sexual assault rather than other kinds of violence, he said he believed while listening at the time that it could only have been rape. "
How can they be certain if they didn’t see it? It’s a really weird one.
There are also weird accounts like killing mid-rape, and mutilating mid-rape, which sounds horrific, but unplausible in some ways. I can imagine both situations (killing and mutilation) probably happened, but during and at the same time?
There were also clashes between a serving soldier that said multiple, but hard to know. And other official figures that claim abundant and systematic. It does seem like a lot of official sources, and it’s weird that it’s all gone from little information on this to extensive comments from government, army officials.
The BBC article has the following “The BBC has not been able to independently verify this account, and Israeli media reports have questioned some testimony from volunteers working in the traumatic aftermath of the Hamas attacks.” but no real information about what was question, by who, and on what grounds. It’s hard to get a balanced account because BBC is printed it and all government quotes as fact.
I’m in no way downplaying what Hamas has done, 1,200 dead, and you’d expect many of these things to be barbaric and I do believe that rape did occur at various times. It’s just the way this information is being fed, it’s trying to turn public opinion following disgust of over 15,000 dead and probably close to half of that being women and children. How do you justify that level of human casualties? How do you paint yourself as the victims when you conduct yourself in that manner? I suspect stories of systematic rape surfacing after almost 2 months, when I’d have expected it to be out and on front pages after 2 weeks.
That’s why my point is not that it didn’t happen. We could infer that it did and it’s horrifying and monstrous condemnable behavior. My criticism is that it is Israel the one who is adamant of doing anything about it. They want absolute control of the narrative. Right now, the biggest hurdle for justice for the victims of the Oct. 7 attack is the IDF who are using their suffering as a political weapon to justify a genocide of the same scale as the Holocaust.
Just based on how it’s being used in the information sphere; they’re going less for factual account and more for dehumanizing Gazans. They want to go beyond justifying the death toll of their punitive campaign and make people not care about Gazans at all.