ScheerPost Washington Post Erases Israeli Minister’s Farfetched October 7 Rape Claim at His Request
By Wyatt Reed / The Grayzone
The Washington Post has quietly removed an outlandish claim by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Hamas battle plans included specific instructions on which Israeli troops should be raped during their October 7 incursion.
In the original article, which was published on November 12 and promoted as a Washington Post “exclusive,” Gallant is quoted as telling the outlet: “We know from interrogations that Hamas came in with detailed plans of their attack, including which commander should rape which soldiers in different places.”
A day later, the allegation disappeared from the piece, which had been amended to include the following “correction”:
“A previous version of this article included a quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that was not authorized for publication. The quote has been removed.”
The act of self-censorship was seemingly first spotted by a social media user who suggested that the embarrassing incident was the result of what they described as “the Israeli way” of propaganda: “Privately lying to a journalist to shape her coverage, then scrambling to correct the record when the journalist accidentally prints the lies you told her in confidence.”
WaPo had a story in November that originally included an insane quote from Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: "Hamas came in with detailed plans of their attack, including which commander should rape which soldier in different places," which they removed at Israel's request pic.twitter.com/fqp8Sz6Ey3— 12 Ball (@BoltzmannBooty) January 2, 2024So far, not a single supposed victim of what one Associated Press headline insisted were “‘widespread’ sexual crimes by Hamas” on October 7 has come forward to publicly testify about the allegations. But this has not stopped senior US administration officials from accepting Israeli claims at face value.
US President Joseph Biden has condemned as “appalling” what he described as “reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive — of women’s corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them.”
But as The Grayzone has revealed, many of the most incendiary claims of sexual violence appear to have been fabricated by Israeli soldiers or members of ultra-Orthodox “rescue organizations” which immediately exploited their newfound prominence to raise millions of dollars.
Further, many residents of frontline kibbutzim and attendees of the Nova music festival were killed by Israeli forces.
Israeli Lt. Col. Golan Vach suggests his tanks killed at least 19 Israelis, including 8 children, in one strike on 10/7During this presser on 10/14 in front of a destroyed kibbutz home (resembling the Pessi Cohen home in Kibbutz Beeri), Vach said, "This destruction is due to… pic.twitter.com/TRe0MopyJo— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 1, 2024Now, in what Israeli media describes as the “largest claim ever filed in Israel against a state body for negligence,” a firm representing 42 survivors is seeking nearly $55 million in damages from the Israeli army, intelligence, and police for failing to prevent the October 7 attack and neglecting to notify event organizers of the clashes.
“All that the defendants had to do was to call the organizers responsible [for the party] to disperse the festival in light of the warnings that were received,” the claim states. It concludes: “It is incomprehensible that the defendants did not order the immediate dispersal of the festival.”