Gaza welcomes AP debunking claims of sexual violence by Hamas on 7 October

The Gaza Media Office yesterday welcomed a report by the Associated Press (AP) which debunked accounts of sexual violence that surfaced after Palestinian resistance fighters infiltrated towns and villages around Gaza on 7 October and proven them to be untrue.

On Wednesday, AP published an article titled ‘How 2 debunked accounts of sexual violence on Oct. 7 fueled a global dispute over Israel-Hamas war’, the news agency quoted Chaim Otmazgin, an Israeli who had accused Hamas of committing sexual violence, as saying: “It’s not that I invented a story … At the end, it turned out to be different, so I corrected myself.”

In an interview with AP, Otmazgin and another colleague named Yossi Landau who initially claimed Hamas resistance fighters had committed rape and other acts of sexual violence during their cross-border attack, are now saying they were wrong and had misinterpreted what they saw.

Yesterday, the head of Gaza Government Media Office, Salama Marouf, said the AP report has confirmed the fabrications used by the Israeli propaganda machine against the resistance in order to justify Israel’s crimes and massacres against Palestinians.

Marouf added that the AP report, which was preceded by other media reports that had debunked numerous Israeli allegations, is a new scandal against the occupation and all those who had “blindly” adopted and promoted its baseless allegations, including international media outlets and prominent officials at the international level.

The Palestinian official condemned the “alignment” of these parties with the occupation’s narrative and their acceptance of it, without verification, saying it undermines their credibility and objectivity.

“These parties are required to acknowledge their mistake, retract it, and apologise to our people,” he said.

Read: Hamas rejects UN accusations of sexual violence in 7 October attack on Israel