Findings from the AP investigation into how two debunked reports of sexual violence on Oct. 7 came about

JERUSALEM (AP) — The United Nations And other organizations have presented credible evidence that Hamas militants committed sexual assaults during their October 7 rampage in southern Israel. Although the number of attacks is unclear, photos and videos from the aftermath of the attack show corpses with their legs splayed, clothing torn and blood on their genitals.

However, other reports from that day proved untrue. These include two debunked testimonies from volunteers with the Israeli search and rescue organization ZAKA, whose stories helped fuel a global conflict over whether sexual violence what happened during the attack and to what extent.

Some claim the reports of sexual assault were intentionally fabricated. Zaka officials and others dispute that. Regardless, AP’s investigation into Zaka’s handling of the now-debunked stories shows how information can be clouded and distorted in the chaos of the conflict.

The reports have stoked skepticism and sparked a heated debate about the scope of the Oct. 7 events that is still raging on social media and in other countries Protests on college campuses.

Here are the key takeaways from AP’s analysis of how these stories came to be:

The volunteers’ interpretations were flawed

One report, which turned out to be unfounded, came from Chaim Otmazgin, a ZAKA volunteer who collected bodies after the attack.

After tending to dozens of bodies that had been shot, burned or mutilated Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the hardest-hit communities, Otmazgin reached the home that would place him at the center of a global conflict. He found the body of a teenage girl who had been separated from two of her relatives. Her pants, he said, had been pulled down. He assumed this meant she had been sexually abused.

Otmazgin says he told reporters and lawmakers Details of what he had seen and asked if there was another interpretation. Today he claims he never directly said the girl whose body he saw was sexually abused. But his statements strongly suggested that this was the case.

Almost three months later, ZAKA found out that Otmazgin’s interpretation was wrong. After consulting with military contacts, ZAKA learned that a group of soldiers had dragged the girl’s body across the room to make sure she was not booby-trapped. In the process, her pants fell down.

The other debunked account came from Otmazgin’s colleague Yossi Landau, also a long-time volunteer who worked in Be’eri. In the days and weeks after the attack, Landau told global media what he thought he saw: a pregnant woman lying on the ground with her fetus still attached to the umbilical cord that had been ripped from her body.

But Otmazgin, who was supervising the other ZAKA employees when he said Landau frantically called him and others to the house, did not see what Landau described. Instead, he saw the body of a burly woman and an unidentifiable hunk tied to an electrical cord. Everything was charred.

Otmazgin said he told Landau that it was not a pregnant woman. Nevertheless, Landau believed his version and subsequently told the story to journalists, who spread the report internationally.

CHAOS AFTER THE ATTACK

Israel was rumbles by the intensity of the attack on October 7th deadliest in the country’s historyAbout 1,200 people were killed and 250 were taken hostage. It took days for the military to clear the area of ​​militants.

Hundreds of bodies lay scattered across southern Israel, bearing various signs of abuse: burns, bullet holes, signs of mutilation and markings indicating that the bodies had been bound. There was confusion as to who was dead and who had been captured.

Standard protocols for dealing with attacks, which Israel often faced on a far smaller scale in the early 2000s, broke down. The military focused on fighting militants still hiding in southern Israel. A ZAKA spokesman said police forensics teams were focused on the southern towns of Sderot and Ofakim. Otmazgin said forensics staff were in the kibbutzim but spread thin.

The monumental task of recovering the dead fell to ZAKA, a private civilian organization made up of 3,000 mostly Orthodox Jewish volunteers. The organization is committed to giving each victim a proper Jewish burial. Never before had it experienced anything like the October 7 massacre. ZAKA’s previous experience in identifying victims was limited to distinguishing between militant attackers and their victims, not determining who was the victim of a sexual assault.

This means bodies that may have shown signs of sexual assault may have escaped examination. Instead they were loaded into body bags, sent to a facility where she will be identified and forwarded for speedy burial.

Easy access to volunteers helped spread the stories

Almost immediately after October 7, Israel began To enable groups of journalists to visit the devastated kibbutzimDuring their travels, the journalists found that the ZAKA volunteers were among the most approachable and willing to talk.

The group’s usual media protocols were bypassed and volunteers, who would normally be vetted by the ZAKA spokesman before an interview, spoke directly to journalists and drew conclusions from what they saw, although the group acknowledges that its volunteers are not forensic experts.

After untrue reports of sexual assault began to circulate in the international media, the process of unmasking them appeared at times to be at the center of the global dispute over the facts of October 7th.

Some critics of Israel used the debunked ZAKA reports and other untrue reports as evidence that the Israeli government had distorted the facts to justify the war – in which more than 35,000 Palestinians took part were killed, many of them women and children, according to health authorities in the Gaza Strip.

The reports were false, but there is increasing evidence of sexual assault

The vociferous debate belies a growing body of evidence that supports claims that sexual assaults took place that day, although the extent of them remains difficult to determine.

A UN fact-finding team found out “reasonable reasons” to believe that some of those who stormed southern Israel on October 7 had committed sexual violence, including rape and gang rape. But U.N. investigators also said that without forensic evidence and testimony from survivors, it was impossible to determine the extent of this violence. Hamas denied that its forces committed sexual violence.

The investigators described the information provided by Otmazgin and Landau as “baseless”.

The UN report sheds light on the problems that have contributed to skepticism about sexual violence. It said there was “limited processing of the crime scene” and that some evidence of sexual assault may have been lost due to “the intervention of some inadequately trained volunteer first responders.” It also said global scrutiny of the accounts published on October 7 may have discouraged survivors from coming forward.