October 7, 2023, marked the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, brutalizing and slaughtering over 1,200 civilians and abducting hundreds more into Gaza. Furthermore, Hamas deliberately used sexual violence and rape as a weapon to torture, terrorize, and humiliate women and grils. Despite Hamas terrorists documenting their atrocities and livestreaming and uploading videos and photos onto social media platforms, extremists on social media quickly began denying thevery fact of the sexual assault – narratives that gained traction and continue to be spread online today.
The denial of rape is an attempt to rewrite history - to obfuscate the deliberate crimes committed against women and redirect sympathy away from the victims and toward justification and celebration of their attackers. On this International Women's Day, CyberWell is sounding the alarm as a wake-up call for social media platforms. Social media platforms must be a safe space for women – all women – and not allow the dissemination of content that denies the experiences of victims of sexual assault and applauds their abusers – the Hamas terrorists. Platforms must enforce their existing hate speech and sexual violence policies, recognize denial
of October 7 sexual assault as prohibitive content, and remove these posts at scale.
No rape survivor has personally recounted
her experience, therefore there was no sexual assault.
Survivors of the terrorist attack and first
responders testifying to acts of sexual
violence that they witnessed or identified
are lying, and news outlets that report
on this issue are spreading fake news.
Israel is falsely accusing Hamas of rape for its own gain – to justify invading Gaza and to demonize the Palestinian resistance.
As Hamas members are driven by religious Muslim ideology, they would not rape a woman.
Hamas didn’t rape civilians, Israelis raped their own people.
*Note: Some October 7 deniers flip the narrative entirely, claiming that Hamas did not rape Israeli women, but rather that the IDF is raping Palestinian women. Regardless of the veracity of these claims,
the rape of one group of women never negates the rape of another.
*In an interview frequently cited by rape deniers, an Israeli officer says that “civilians did it (rape).” In the original Hebrew video, the officer refers to Gazan civilians who crossed into Israel after Hamas,
but rape deniers mistranslate his words and claim he refers to Israeli civilians as the rapists.
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