CNN report claiming sexual violence on October 7 relied on non-credible witnesses, some with undisclosed ties to Israeli govt

Editor’s Note: The authors of this report are based in Palestine and have requested anonymity in the face of the persecution, violence, and threats from Israeli authorities, which would put them in severe danger.

On November 18, 2023, CNN aired a report by journalist Jake Tapper. The report claims to provide testimonies on “rape crimes” against Israeli women that allegedly took place on October 7, 2023. Within a few hours of the publication of the CNN report, an international media campaign by Israel and pro-Israeli groups was launched. Other media outlets, including The Washington Post, based their reporting on CNN’s report. Feminist activists and groups who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza were also targeted as part of this campaign. Samantha Pearson, the director of the Sexual Assault Centre at the University of Alberta in Canada, was fired from her job a few hours after the airing of the report. She had signed a letter on October 25 that stated that the accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence remains “unverified.” The letter did not say that sexual violence did not occur but that there was no sufficient evidence yet to support these accusations. 

The CNN report represents a serious breach of professional conduct, which we detail in this piece. The most concerning aspect of the report is the fact that every single witness and “expert” in the CNN report proves to either be lacking in credibility or have ties to Israeli government officials and institutions. A deeper examination of the CNN report shows a series of manipulations and professional failures, including the fact that all witnesses that CNN claims to have “found” were featured in previous reports pitched and coordinated by the Israeli government, calling into question how much original reporting or fact-finding went into the CNN report. CNN’s failure to adhere to professional and ethical standards of responsible journalism also raises questions regarding CNN’s possible complicity with a political campaign orchestrated by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office to perpetuate unverified claims of mass rape, and a larger effort to dehumanize Palestinians in order to justify the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Civil human rights expert or National Security Advisor?

The CNN report begins with an interview with Cochav Elkayam-Levy. She is identified as an “expert in human rights law who organized a civil committee to document evidence.” The speaker is indeed an expert, but not of human rights law. In her former positions, including a post for the Israeli government’s Attorney General’s Office in the International Law Department, she provided the legal justification for Israeli officials committing human rights violations against Palestinians. She had previously published a “guidance for policymaking, government officials and legal advisors in the management of hunger strikes.” There, she provided a detailed legal manual to “standardization through legislation and regulation” for forced feeding – a brutal act of torture used to break political prisoners. In the same year, Israel legalized and regulated the “forced feeding” law to oppress and torture Palestinian prisoners protesting their administrative detentions through hunger strikes. 

Yet, CNN considered it appropriate to bring her as a human rights expert. In her interview, which opens the CNN report, Elkayam-Levy presents nothing but justifications for the absence of evidence and facts. While Elkayam-Levy claims to speak under the auspice of the “civil committee,” CNN hides the tight connections between her and the National Security Council for the Israeli Prime Minister. Elkayam-Levy is also the founder and director of the “Dvora Institute,” which works as a close advisory body to the Israeli prime minister’s “National Security Council.” The advisory committee for the Dvora Institute includes a former director of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, and three former officials in the National Security Council.

Soldier testimony doesn’t match up

The report then claims that CNN “found witnesses to the atrocities.” The report then presented a video of an Israeli soldier, showing his back only, identified by the letter “G,” claiming to be a paramedic of unit “669” – the Israeli Air Force Special Tactics rescue unit. 

In his testimony, the soldier says that during a search in the houses of “Kibbutz Be’eri,” during combat, he opened a door of a bedroom to find the bodies of two girls aged between 13 and 15, both killed, one of them naked with semen remains on her lower back.

Upon examining the names of all the girls killed in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7¹ to match the facts, no pair of Israeli teenagers meeting that description were found dead together.

For instance, the closest possibility to what the paramedic describes are the two sisters (“Y” – 13 years old) and (“N” – 16 years old). The two, however, were not found together, as claimed by “G.” According to the Israeli reports, the body of one of them was found with her dead mother at home, while the other sister and her father went missing for a few days. According to Ynet, “the family wished that the girl was kidnapped to Gaza, but a few days after the attack they found her body.”  

Surprisingly, very similar testimony was given on Republic, a right-wing conservative Indian TV channel, on October 25. Back then, a soldier of the same unit, 669, appeared in an interview with no name initials. Weirdly, the interview was widely ignored by Israeli media. This interview was arranged by Eylon Levy, the foreign media spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. At that time, Eylon Levy posted the interview on X/Twitter, claiming it was testimony from “Be’eri,” although the soldier of the first interview referred to another settlement, “Nahal Oz.”

Furthermore, according to an interview with Channel 13, the leader of the Kibutz Be’eri battle, Brigadier General Barak Hiram, counted 13 different military units that formed the combat force that were there – Unit 669 was not among them.

Everyone can become a forensic pathologist

The CNN report then brings two witnesses to talk about the conditions of the dead bodies they have seen. The first appears under a pseudonym for an unknown reason, despite showing her face and wearing civilian clothes from a private house. 

The report identified her as a “volunteer” at the morgue of the Shura military base, where many bodies were brought for identification and preparation for burial. The witness previously appeared in a written report (including a photo of her in military uniform) where she was identified as a reservist corporal in the Israeli army who works as an architect in her daily life. In the written report in Ynet, published on October 31, 2023, she did not mention any claims of sexual violence. 

The second witness is Rami Shmuel, who Jake Tapper identifies as one of the organizers of the “Nova” festival. In fact, he is an organizer of the “UNITY” festival – another electronic music festival, held the day before the “Nova” in the same location. The two festivals are not connected.

CNN fails to mention the fact that Rami Shmuel was not present at the festival location during the attack. According to Shmuel’s Facebook post, published on the afternoon of October 7, he was “safe” in a villa in Netivot settlement.

Shmuel claims the next day that he joined efforts to search for bodies and survivors in the area in a personal, unofficial capacity. What Shmuel told his followers on the evening of October 8 did not have any hint of sexual violence: “An hour ago, I left the area, and the scenes are very, very difficult and (…) A war zone in every sense of the word. Hundreds of abandoned bullet-riddled cars, fires still burning in some open areas.”

The witness who ‘saw them’

The CNN report then continues, “On Tuesday, the police held a press briefing in which a witness said…” then the reporter moves to read a written quote shown on the screen. The quote suggests that the witness- a woman with no further information about her at all- saw while hiding with another paramedic that “They bent someone over and I understood he was raping her and then he was passing her on to someone else (…) I saw him chop off her breast and then he was throwing it towards the road, and they started playing with it.”

The report, here, hides many important facts that were reported in a detailed report in the Israeli media of the briefing that points to the following inconsistencies: 

1.) The woman was not present in the briefing, the police officers played a recording by her without further details. 

2.) The witness escaped from the music festival, what she describes was seen while hiding. 

3.) She was accompanied by a paramedic who said he didn’t see what she mentioned. 

4.) Both CNN and different media outlets who published this testimony purposely omitted the last part of the testimony: “I saw one of them carrying a naked girl on his shoulder, while the others were raising decapitated heads like in a kind demonstration of power.” 

This final claim has not been shared by any Israeli officials and raises serious questions as to the overall reliability of the witness.

Israeli campaign to promote the issue 

The CNN story ends with Tapper and Elkayam-Levy castigating the international community for ignoring these acts of violence against women. It is difficult to separate this framing from the very framing the Israeli government itself was also promoting at this time.

On November 13, the Israeli police conducted a briefing for journalists that, according to reports, promised new evidence regarding sexual violence on October 7. This is the briefing referred to in the CNN report. However, not reported by CNN was the apparent tension between journalists and police officers at the briefing over the absence of new information and clear evidence. The Police Chief refused to answer any questions, and the police media officer, Merit Ben Meir, engaged in a heated discussion with journalists where they made the intended message of the briefing clear, stating: “Based on the circumstances of the bodies, rape occurred, and there’s no room for questioning these events.”

A few days later, on November 17, more than twenty days after the Canadian activists’ letter was published, a tweet was posted by a Canadian Zionist organization attacking Samantha Pearson. 

A day after, on November 18, CNN published its report, and within a couple of hours, a media campaign against Pearson and other feminist groups began, leading immediately to her firing. 

On the morning of November 19, the Israeli press announced that the Foreign Ministry was intensifying its efforts to influence “global feminist organizations” and leveraging the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25 to highlight Israeli allegations regarding sexual assaults. In the evening of the same day, an advertising campaign was released featuring Israeli actresses and models repeating literally the same slogan that Jake Tapper ends his CNN report with: “If the rape of Israeli women doesn’t count as rape.”

Accountability 

History has taught us that genocide always requires the dehumanization and demonization of the annihilated people as human animals and savages. The CNN report is part of this dehumanization. The analysis presented here is not meant to deny the possibility that sexual violence against women may have occurred on October 7. It is about fair reporting and about ensuring that there is sufficient and reliable evidence to support these serious allegations. If sexual violence did occur, perpetrators must face severe punishment. This should be the responsibility of the Palestinians above all else. 

This is about seeking justice for the victims of these crimes and about the integrity of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which rejects sexual violence. Individual perpetrators ought to be held accountable for their actions. This must be achieved through a fair criminal process based on facts and evidence. Fair criminal process, we maintain, cannot be achieved in illegal Israeli military courts, in which conviction rates are over 99%.

Rather, we believe Israel’s goal is not to seek justice but to create pressure that silences the world and persecutes anyone calling for a ceasefire and an end to the war. The next step in this campaign is to escalate a witch hunt against every person who supports the rights of Palestinians. This is exercised with one single goal: the annihilation of the people of Palestine in Gaza. 

Notes

1. You can search for בארי and you’ll get the list. There is (as detailed in the longer report) another girl (12 years old) who had no other female teenagers with her. Another pair of sisters, 15 and 22, were missing for more than two weeks, and their family thought they were abducted. Which leaves us with the case in the report. ↩︎