‘The Silence after the Screams’: How Western Media Helped Justify the Rape of Palestinians

Western media amplified Israel’s unverified claims of Hamas “mass rape” while downplaying documented Israeli sexual crimes. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

Western media amplified Israel’s unverified claims of Hamas “mass rape” while downplaying documented Israeli sexual crimes against Palestinians.

On Monday, November 3, a group of Israeli soldiers stood outside the Supreme Court in West Jerusalem wearing black masks. They weren’t there to apologize; they were there to defend themselves.

The soldiers, accused of torturing and raping a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, demanded “gratitude” for their actions. 

“Instead of appreciation, we received accusations,” one said defiantly. Israeli media covered the scene while Western outlets mostly ignored it.

The same soldiers are part of a criminal case that Israeli prosecutors reluctantly opened in 2024 after video evidence surfaced showing Palestinian detainees stripped, beaten, and sexually assaulted at Sde Teiman. 

One Palestinian man was hospitalized with seven broken ribs and a rectal tear, injuries consistent with violent sexual abuse. 

The Times of Israel reported the indictment of five reservists for “severe abuse,” while other sources cited evidence of sodomy inside the facility. 

Yet, in Western coverage, the word rape almost never appeared. Headlines spoke of “abuse” or “mistreatment,” as though sexual torture were a matter of workplace misconduct. 

Contrast this silence with the wall-to-wall coverage of October 7, when Israel accused Hamas fighters of “mass rape.” Those claims, still unproven, became the moral foundation of Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza.

In his latest interview with American journalist Candace Owens, political scientist Norman Finkelstein called the Israeli allegations “genocidal atrocity propaganda.” 

After examining more than 5,000 photographs and fifty hours of footage from that day, Finkelstein said he found “not a single shred of evidence of even one rape.” Yet those unverified stories, repeated endlessly by Western outlets, were enough to cast an entire population as subhuman and to legitimize the killing of more than 68,000 Palestinians.

In December 2023, the New York Times published a sprawling investigation titled “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” 

The article claimed Hamas fighters had systematically raped Israeli women during the attack. Its pages were filled with graphic descriptions and lurid imagery. The story relied on anonymous witnesses, unverified videos, and second-hand testimony, yet it was presented as conclusive evidence of mass rape.

Within days, it shaped international discourse. Then US President Joe Biden, European leaders, and prominent feminists invoked the Times’ story to condemn Hamas and morally justify Israel’s “retaliation”. 

But when journalists and scholars began checking the evidence, the story fell apart. Forensic experts found no physical proof of rape. Several of the supposed witnesses cited by the Times contradicted one another or were later discredited. 

In April 2024, more than 50 journalism professors sent a public letter demanding an independent review of the article’s sourcing and editorial process. The Washington Post reported internal dissent within the Times newsroom itself, where reporters said the piece had been “rushed” to meet political expectations.

Meanwhile, the Sde Teiman scandal, an Israeli atrocity supported by video evidence, medical reports, and judicial proceedings, has never received a fraction of the attention that the Times story did. This imbalance is not merely linguistic. It is structural, reflecting the hierarchy of human worth built into Western coverage of the war. 

This is how “atrocity propaganda” works. It does not require lies to function, only selective truth. By repeating unverified claims of Hamas rape while downplaying verified Israeli sexual crimes, Western media transformed journalism into a weapon of war.

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