Israeli family of key case in NY Times report refutes story of alleged rape by Hamas fighters

from Press TV

The Israeli family of a key case in the New York Times report on alleged sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 renounces the published story, saying reporters have manipulated them.

On December 28, the New York Times published a story, claiming that fighters of the Palestinian Hamas resistance group allegedly committed a pattern of gender-based violence against Israeli women when the group carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity on October 7.

Authors of the report - Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, along with Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella – claimed that they had compiled the story based on over 150 interviews they conducted with purported victims or their families, mainly repeating October 7 testimonies that have been previously published and already debunked and discredited.

A third of the report, however, was devoted to the Abdush family, a working-class Mizrahi Jewish family who lost their daughter, Gal, known as “the woman in the black dress”, back then and how she was allegedly raped during the Hamas attack.

The report focused on footage that was captured on October 8 by a woman called Eden Wessely, who published it on her social media accounts. According to the report by the New York Times, “The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.”

A day after the report was published, the Israeli Ynet news site conducted an interview with Gal’s parents, who stressed that there is no proof she was raped, and that the paper's reporters interviewed them under false pretenses, saying that they knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece in the American daily was published. Furthermore, Gal’s sisters also strongly denied allegations of rape.

On January 1, Nissim Abdush, Nagi’s brother-in-law, repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped in an interview with Israeli Channel 13...

read more here