WCNSF: The Most Haunting Acronym the World Has Produced

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Sen. Raphael Warnock took to the Senate floor Wednesday night to address the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, saying that he would be speaking more as a pastor than as a politician, more to the people in harm’s way than about the geopolitics. He delivered a brutal sermon all the way through, but the part that landed on me like a sack of bricks was about an acronym now being used by relief agencies and the surviving hospitals in Gaza. 

Warnock said a prayer for 13-year-old Donia Abu Mohsen, whose entire family was killed in an Israeli bombing. She herself was wounded and had her right leg amputated. 

“There’s an acronym used in Gaza, WCNSF: ‘Wounded child with no surviving family.’ According to media reports, an estimated 17,000 Palestinian children fall under that category,” Warnock said.

That WCNSF number is also in constant flux, with new children being added daily, and children being removed. Donia is no longer on that list: Israel struck her hospital and killed her. 

Today, I want to talk about the role the media, and in particular the New York Times, have played as an accomplice to the world-historic crime we’re watching unfold.

These are dark times. Israeli civilians have set up bouncy castles outside the Gaza Strip fence — deep into territory controlled by the Israel Defense Forces — where they are protesting the delivery of humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave. “Get ready, there will be inflatables, cotton candy, and popcorn and slushies,” said one festival organizer. “We are preparing for the people of Israel, come.” 

Those carnivals go hand in glove with Israeli restrictions on aid entering Gaza. The IDF has set up byzantine obstacles that require trucks to be loaded and unloaded multiple times, leaving hundreds idling. At least a thousand are needed every day and often fewer than a hundred get through. The goal is starvation and disease — and it’s working. This week, hungry Palestinians waiting for a flour convoy were fired on by the IDF. At least a hundred were killed, some of them run over by tanks in unforgettable, gruesome fashion. Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, praised the gunmen, saying they were acting in self-defense, and that the massacre simply shows that it is a mistake for Israel to allow in any aid at all. Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy initially claimed that IDF forces fired on the crowd in self-defense, but later claimed they never opened fire. Human rights groups and media organizations have confirmed the flour massacre, as it’s become known, was carried out by the IDF. It happened again Saturday morning.

How is the world allowing this to happen? One answer to that question goes back to the shock and horror we all felt on October 7, when Israeli civilians holed up in safe rooms or fled from a rave as Hamas broke its way past Israeli defenses. As Warnock noted in his speech, 787 civilians were killed that day, along with hundreds of soldiers and security personnel, while hundreds more were taken hostage. A day of horror.

Anat Schwartz, a filmmaker who was later commissioned by the Times to report on Hamas’s atrocities, liked a social media post that argued that Israel should discard the idea of proportionality in its response to the attack. “One principle that needs to be abandoned today: proportionality. Need a disproportionate response,” the post read. “Turn the [Gaza] Strip into a slaughterhouse.”

One of the more heinous and unforgettable crimes on October 7 became part of a video Israeli officials screened around the world in private showings. A father and two children run to an outdoor shelter, but a militant sees them and throws a grenade into it. The father is killed. “Why am I alive?” one child cries as he is dragged back to the house. The man then casually drinks water in their kitchen. The two children are eventually able to escape amid an exchange of gunfire, but the ordeal will have forever changed them. They’ll grow up without a father. The callousness coupled with the attack on innocent civilians rightly shocked the world. In all, 36 Israeli children were killed that day, and many more were left orphaned or without one of their parents. 

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As the days went on, and October turned to November, the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza climbed into the thousands. Proportionality may have been discarded by the IDF, but it still mattered to the world. Israel’s ability to continue prosecuting the war could no longer be justified as a proportional response. Global opinion was turning. Israel came under intense pressure to reach a ceasefire deal in exchange for the release of the hostages. 

In order to change the equation, the attack on October 7 needed to be understood globally in much different terms, Israeli officials recognized. The degree of suffering by innocent civilians was no longer a helpful comparison.

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Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians

The attack and the attackers needed to be understood as different in kind. They needed to be understood as animals, as beasts, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet routinely say. So those Israeli officials shifted focus from the number of Israeli victims, which by then paled in comparison to those killed in Gaza, and instead talked about the nature of the attack — specifically, the claim that Hamas had used rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. Animals.

It’s important to contextualize that moment in time. In a recent article, my colleague Jeremy Scahill, who also co-reported a piece with me this week, put it this way: 

In late November, as the civilian death toll in Gaza climbed, Israel was struggling to retain its dominance of the narrative. Global demands for a ceasefire were mounting, and even some of Israel’s allies were expressing horror at the indiscriminate killing of women and children and the worsening humanitarian catastrophe.

A weeklong truce, during which captives were exchanged, raised hopes that a more enduring peace deal could be on the horizon, despite Israeli insistence that that was out of the question. “A prolonged ceasefire that allows more hostages to be released, and that evolves towards a permanent ceasefire linked to a political process, is something we have consensus on,” said the EU’s top foreign policy official Josep Borrell.

Days earlier, the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium traveled to the Rafah border to push for such a deal and drew the fury of the Israeli government when they publicly condemned the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians. Eli Cohen, then the Israeli foreign minister, accused the leaders of offering “support [for] terrorism,” while Netanyahu released a statement condemning them because they “did not place total responsibility on Hamas for the crimes against humanity it perpetrated.”

Anyone can look back at Israel’s four-month war against Gaza and trace a pattern: Israel chooses an issue and demands global attention to its agenda at the expense of any other matter.

It was at this moment that the Israeli government decided it needed to remind the world of Israel’s victimhood and launched a new phase of the hasbara campaign. It began accusing the international community of standing silent in the face of what Israeli officials described as a widespread campaign of rape and sexual violence aimed at Jewish women and orchestrated by Hamas on October 7. By early December, the issue had become a major focus of conservative media and Israel’s allies.

The problem, though, was that Western coverage largely included the caveat that Israel had not presented evidence that such assaults had been part of a Hamas campaign, or that such attacks had been carried out on a large scale.

But on December 4, 2023, Israel rolled out a coordinated global campaign to take the charge that extra step further: that Hamas itself deliberately deployed rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women. The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations joined Sheryl Sandberg at the U.N. for a press conference launching the campaign. Sandberg also appeared on CNN and wrote an op-ed for the network. Her criticism, and that of the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., was aimed in a bank-shot way at feminist organizations. New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who spoke alongside Sandberg at the event, blasted the silence. “When I saw the list of women’s rights organizations who have said nothing, I nearly choked,” Gillibrand said. “Where is the solidarity for women in this country and in this world to stand up for our mothers, our sisters and our daughters?”

Feminist organizations were caught flat-footed. They didn’t know there was a systemic campaign of rape they were supposed to condemn. The charge was ludicrous. What women’s rights organization would stay silent on mass rape?

Also on December 4, the New York Times published multiple articles about Sandberg’s U.N. event, but the most important, for our purposes, was bylined by Jeffrey Gettleman, Adam Sella, and Schwartz. The story they published December 4, “What We Know About Sexual Violence During the Oct. 7 Attacks on Israel,” paired quotes pulled from Sandberg’s CNN op-ed with the claim that Israel had collected reams of forensic evidence that would prove the case. The case seemed like a slam dunk. The next day, Netanyahu condemned women’s rights groups for their silence, and Biden joined in that evening.

But four days later, The Times appended a revealing correction to its article: “An earlier version of this article misstated the kind of evidence Israeli police have gathered in investigating accusations of sexual violence committed on Oct. 7 in the attack by Hamas against Israel. The police are relying mainly on witness testimony, not on autopsies or forensic evidence.”

We now know that the trio had begun work on an investigation into sexual assault not long after the attack of October 7. The Times published its full, blockbuster article at the end of December, leaving the strong impression that after months of reporting, they’d been able to confirm the Israeli allegations. The story, called “Screams Without Words,” took the allegations beyond the level of rumor and firmly implanted the idea in the public consciousness that Hamas had used rape as a weapon of war. These were animals.

A story we published at The Intercept this week calls into question the reporting behind that article. Our story is based heavily on an interview Schwartz gave in Hebrew on a podcast produced by Israel’s Channel 12. Because Schwartz was new to investigative journalism, she may not have understood how much she was giving away in that interview. 

Schwartz and her partner’s nephew, Sella, began their investigation where one would expect: by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. Schwartz described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”

As Schwartz began her own efforts to find evidence of sexual assault, the first specific allegations of rape began to emerge. A person identified in anonymous media interviews as a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669 claimed he saw evidence that two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their bedroom. The man made other outrageous claims, however, that called his report into question. He claimed another rescuer “pulled out of the garbage” a baby who’d been stabbed multiple times. He also said he had seen “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses … with the blood of the people that were living in the houses.” No such messages exist, and the story of the baby in the trash can has been debunked. The bigger problem was that no two girls at the kibbutz fit the source’s description. In future interviews, he changed the location to Kibbutz Be’eri. But no victims killed there matched the description either, as Mondoweiss reported.

After seeing these interviews, Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.” 

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The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé

I’d encourage you to read the full story if you haven’t yet. What it shows is that when the reporters were unable to find confirmation for their tips or suspicions, despite scouring the country, the article then relies on anonymous Israeli officials and/or dubious, discredited sources. The resulting article reads with certainty that never existed. In the two months since, Israel has turned a desperate situation into an apocalyptic one — relying, in large part, on the media’s ability to dehumanize the Palestinians being put to death. 

In the first bit of not-completely-awful news in a very long time, the flour massacre seems to have nudged the Biden administration into action. The White House on Saturday joined Jordan in air-dropping food into Gaza, which gets around the Israeli blockade, just as the U.S. did when the Soviet Union blockaded Western Germany. It is too late for many, but that’s no reason to give up on the millions still struggling to survive. 

Six Democrats just returned from a trip to Israel and put out a rather remarkable joint statement. Among them is Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee and a longtime AIPAC ally. “We are deeply worried that Prime Minister Netanyahu is moving toward the total destruction of Gaza and has demonstrated an utter disregard for Palestinian lives,” they write. If that’s not effectively an endorsement of South Africa’s charge of genocide, I don’t know what is.

The cynical response of the New York Times to our reporting has been dispiriting. The paper, instead of investigating its reporting process and product, has launched a leak investigation to find our sources. According to the Times union, the leadership is disproportionately interrogating Middle Eastern and North African staffers, and especially ones who used proper channels to critique the coverage. 

The Times is making same bigoted mistake the Biden campaign made in Michigan, assuming it is only Arabs who are horrified by the genocide. As the “uncommitted” vote in Michigan showed, the revulsion is universal. We are all in this together.