Israel/Palestine

On January 28, The Intercept revealed that “The New York Times pulled a high-profile episode of its podcast ‘The Daily’ about sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject.” This was the story that sent Times editors into their bunkers.

A lengthy follow-up report on Wednesday was even more devastating. The new report painted Anat Schwartz as an incompetent propagandist. Schwartz had liked a tweet calling on Israel to turn Gaza “into a slaughterhouse.” The tweet described Palestinians as “human animals.” The Intercept also quoted from a radio interview Schwartz gave in Israel where she admitted that when it came to evaluating evidence of sexual violence, “I have no qualifications.”

Schwartz relied heavily on Zaka, described by The Intercept as “a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization that has been documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about the events of October 7, including debunked allegations of Hamas operatives beheading babies and cutting the fetus from a pregnant woman’s body. Its workers are not trained forensic scientists or crime scene experts.” Another major source, Shari Mendes, has repeatedly made demonstrably false claims.