Did the NYT and police desecrate a dead Israeli woman's corpse in print?

The New York Times owes the family of Gal Abdush—and all of us—an explanation.

It’s widely been accepted that Hamas defiled the bodies of Israeli women—before and after their deaths—in unspeakable ways.

Tragically, rape as an instrument of war is as old as time and probably as recent as today, January 4th, 2024, somewhere in the world. But the Hamas rape rampage on October 7th, we’ve been led to believe, was so sadistic as to be virtually unprecedented in modern times.

Over the course of the war, it wasn’t always a truism that Hamas committed sadistic rape sprees on October 7th. For months, the evidence offered up by the Israeli government of a widespread, top-down campaign of rape and other sexual tortures was met with skepticism. It was flimsy, inconsistent, second-hand, and often swiftly debunked.

A lot of people, including many liberal feminists, saw the skepticism as dangerous rape denialism and vigorous debates erupted about reasonable expectations for physical evidence in a war. A lot of people rightly pointed out that you can’t expect CSI-level forensics after a brutal military assault. To questions about why there were no survivor accounts, critics countered that dead women can’t tell their stories. Still, the accounts garnered a healthy skepticism. When an alleged witness, for example, claimed he’d watched Hamas gang-rape a woman “with the face of an angel” it wasn’t lost on critics that it sounded less like an accurate description and more like racist porn.

All of that changed when the New York Times published “Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” The feature is presented as a “two-month investigation by The Times.” The imprimatur of a New York Times investigative deep-dive citing multiple sources, then, settled the question and ended the debate: not only did Hamas engage in a gang-rape spree, but they desecrated women’s bodies—alive and dead—in ways that went beyond animalistic and into the realm of the Satanic:

Details like this:

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

It seems doubtful that one can cut off a breast with a box cutter in a very efficient way—in a manner that leaves enough time to also kidnap hostages while fighting the Israeli army. Or that Hamas paused their attack to play ball with a severed breast. There are other details in the story that, yes, read like racist wartime propaganda. In fact, all of the alleged witness statements are so extreme you wonder if less dramatic rape accounts ended up on the cutting room floor. I wanted to write something but I value my sanity and didn’t want to get yelled at on Twitter about rape forever, so I let it go.

But the family of one of the victims in the story, Gal Abdush, is speaking out. And what they are saying is a damning indictment of the Times. So please, don’t look at this as some kind of rape denialism on my part—I have absolutely no evidence that the rest of the crimes described in the story didn’t happen. But the Times owes the family—and its readers—an explanation.

The story opens with Abdush, a beautiful, young wife and mother. Wait, no, the story opens with “At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress. In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.”

The story chronicles her family’s nightmare. How they discovered that the dead woman in the black dress was their daughter, sister, mother. The top photo in the story shows her parents and her two sisters, visibly in agony from unfathomable grief.

This week, Abdush’s family claimed they were misled by the reporter into thinking the story was a profile honoring her life, not that she’d headline a story about rape. Her sister said they’d never have gone along with the Times if she’d known. That, on its own, is a damning breach of journalistic and moral ethics. For one thing, you’re not supposed to name a rape victim without permission. And the family gave the reporter permission to use her name for a story honoring her personhood and life; they did not give them permission to write about her “legs spread, vagina exposed” in the second paragraph of the top story on the front page of the New York Times.

Her mother said she only found out about the rape from the reporter. Did it not give the reporter pause that the police had told him she was raped, but had not told her mother?

More damning is that this week members of the family said there was no solid evidence she’d been raped. Mondoweiss has a rundown:

On December 29, the Israeli website ‘YNET’ published an interview with Etti Brakha, Gal Abdush’s mother. In the interview, the mother says that the family knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece in the Times was published: “We didn’t know about the rape at all. We only knew after a New York Times journalist contacted us. They said they matched evidence and concluded that she had been sexually assaulted.”

Again, the police didn’t bother to tell the family. But they shared the information with the reporter months later? OK.

Her husband Nagi was also killed. His brother’s timeline of events also throws the Times story into question:

Then, on January 1, Nissim Abdush, Nagi’s brother, appeared in an interview on Israeli Channel 13. During the 14-minute interview, Nissim repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped. He explained that his brother Nagi had called him at 7:00 in the morning, saying his wife was killed, and he was next to her body. Then he continued to communicate until 7:44 and never mentioned anything related to sexual assault. Nissim also stated that no official party informed them of these doubts or this investigation, neither the police nor forensic experts. In the interview, Abdush reiterated that his brother’s wife was not raped and that “the media invented it.”

Gal’s sisters also denied allegations of rape. Her sister Tali Barakha posted on Instagram, saying: ‘No one can know what Gal went through there! Also, what Nagi went through, but I can’t cooperate with those who say many things that are not true. I plead with you to stop spreading lies, there is a family and children behind them, no one can know if there was rape or if she was burned while alive. Have you gone mad? I spoke to Nagi personally! At 7 o’clock, Gal was killed by those animals, and they shot her in the heart. Nagi was alive until quarter past eight…”

Likewise, Miral Altar, Gals’ sister, wrote a comment on Instagram in response to a video of a hasbara account. Altar said: ‘I can’t understand all these reports. There were many difficult stories, why this story in particular? It’s based on only one video published without the family’s knowledge… It is true that the scenes in the video are not easy, but it’s clear that the dress is lifted upwards and not in its natural state, and half her head is burned because they threw a grenade at the car. I don’t want to be understood as if I’m justifying what they did; they are animals, they raped and beheaded people, but in my sister’s case, this is not true. At 6:51, Gal sent us a message on WhatsApp saying ’we are at the border, and you can’t imagine sounds of explosions around us’. At 7 o’clock, my brother-in-law called his brother and said they shot Gal and she’s dying. It doesn’t make any sense that in four minutes, they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?”

Other comments from Abdush family friends and relatives (whose relationships have been confirmed through social media connections) also suggest that the “Woman in the Black Dress” video itself lacks enough information to support the claim of rape.

How did this happen? And when will the Times stop ignoring it and by extension the Abdush family, whose already unimaginable trauma is clearly being compounded?

My speculative guess here is that the police fed the reporter the story assuming Abdush would appear in the article anonymously—then who could contest the reporting of a “two-month long Times investigation?” The other women are nameless, marked with vague descriptors like “copper-haired.” But the reporter—likely presuming the police were telling the truth—was able to get the family on the record (again—for an entirely different story honoring her life, not describing her “spread legs” in death).

A real person, with a real, grieving family, bolstered the credibility of the article even more than the stamp of respectability conferred by a “two-month long Times investigation.” What kind of monster could question a tale of rape after seeing the haunted looks on her sisters’ and parents’ faces?

And so a story of demonic “human animals” who committed mass gang rape as a weapon of war widely circulated, uncontested. Meanwhile, high-level Israel officials are pushing for the forced removal of Gazans into Africa and civilians are getting blown up and starving to death. Easier to do that if you think they’re not just human animals but demons.

I think the Times owes everyone an explanation.