Israeli kibbutz near Gaza says allegations of sexual abuse on Oct. 7 'not true': Report

By Seda Sevencan

ISTANBUL (AA) - Countering a controversial New York Times article on the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, an Israeli kibbutz located near the Gaza Strip strongly rebuffed allegations that two of its members had been sexually abused.

According to a report by The Intercept online, Michal Paikin, a spokesperson for Kibbutz Be’eri, issued a firm denial of the claims in the Times article “Screams Without Words": How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7, asserting, "It’s not true."

The Times article cited three alleged victims of sexual assault from Oct. 7, the day Palestinian group Hamas launched a cross-border raid into southern Israel, reportedly killing some 1,200 people.

One is identified as Gal Abdush, also known as the "woman in the black dress," whose family members have raised objections to the claims reported by The Times. The other two, unnamed teenage sisters from Kibbutz Be’eri, were described with enough detail in the article to potentially identify them as sisters with the last name Sharabi, age 13 and 16.

Paikin categorically rejected allegations about the sisters, saying that while they were shot, they were not subjected to sexual abuse, casting doubt on the Times story.

“You’re talking about the Sharabi girls?” she told The Intercept. “No, they … were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.”

Further undermining the credibility of the allegations, Paikin called into question the reliability of testimony by an Israeli special forces paramedic, a primary source for the Times article.

“It’s not true,” she said, referring to the paramedic’s claims about the girls. “They were not sexually abused.”

“We stand by the story and are continuing to report on the issue of sexual violence on Oct. 7,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told The Intercept.

- ‘They were shot … Nothing else had been done to them’

As The Intercept previously reported, Anat Schwartz, an Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official with no prior reporting experience, was assigned by The New York Times to collaborate with her partner's nephew, Adam Sella, and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman to investigate the sexual assault allegations.

Schwartz, speaking to Israeli Army Radio, stated that she personally did more than 150 interviews for the story.

In a podcast by Israel’s Channel 12, she explained her efforts to verify the sexual assault claims.

Schwartz initially heard about the case through an interview with a paramedic, but struggled to find a second source to confirm the paramedic's account. While she mentioned the need for a second source, she gave no details about finding one, and the Times report lacked any additional witnesses to corroborate the paramedic's description of the girls' condition.

The Times report also includes accounts from unidentified "neighbors" at Kibbutz Be’eri who claimed the girls' bodies were found separated from rest of their family. However, the family disputes even this detail as inaccurate.

“They were just shot, nothing else had been done to them,” their grandmother Gillian Brisley told Channel 12 in a recent interview.

Before the publication of the Times piece, the family provided interviews to various international news outlets. These interviews contained information that contradicted the claims made in the Times article. This raises concerns about why the paper did not incorporate these publicly available details into their report.

Pramila Patten, the UN special envoy for sexual violence, reported on Monday that her team discovered evidence suggesting sexual violence occurred during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

"In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and other armed groups against civilian and military targets throughout the Gaza periphery, the mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape," a UN report said.

These happened in at least three locations, it said: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re'im.

The report urged a full investigation into these incidents. However, the mission team was unable to determine whether sexual violence occurred in Kibbutz Be'eri.