October 7 'rape claims' debunked as Israeli propaganda unravels

Chaim Otmazgin had tended to dozens of shot, burned or mutilated bodies before he reached the home that would put him at the centre of a global clash and Israeli propaganda.

Working in a settlement that along with Israeli military facilities were raided by Hamas fighters on October 7, Otmazgin — a volunteer commander with ZAKA, an Israeli search and rescue organisation — saw the body of a teenager, shot dead and separated from her family in a different room. He "thought" that was evidence of sexual violence.

He alerted journalists to what he’d seen. He recounted the details in a nationally televised appearance in the Israeli Parliament. In the frantic hours, days and weeks that followed the raid, his testimony ricocheted across the world, mostly peddled by Israeli and sympathetic Western media.

But it turns out that what Otmazgin thought had occurred in the home at the Jewish settlement that was once an Arab village and a farm hadn’t happened.

Many accounts from that day, like Otmazgin's, proved untrue.

"It’s not that I invented a story," Otmazgin claimed The Associated Press in an interview, detailing the origins of his initial explosive allegation — one of two by ZAKA volunteers about sexual violence that turned out to be unfounded.

"I couldn't think of any other option" other than the teen having been sexually assaulted, he said. "At the end, it turned out to be different, so I corrected myself."

But it was too late.

Debunked accounts like Otmazgin's have encouraged skepticism and fuelled a highly charged debate about the scope of what occurred on October 7 — one that is still playing out on social media and in college campus protests.

Some allege the accounts of sexual assault were purposely concocted. ZAKA officials and others dispute that. Regardless, AP's examination of ZAKA's handling of the now debunked stories shows how information can be clouded and distorted in the chaos of the conflict.

As some of the first people on the scene, ZAKA volunteers offered testimony of what they saw that day. Those words have helped journalists, Israeli lawmakers and UN investigators paint a picture of what occurred on October 7. [ZAKA, a volunteer-based group, does not do forensic work. The organisation has been a fixture at Israeli disaster sites and scenes of attacks since it was founded in 1995. Its specific job is to collect bodies in keeping with Jewish law.]

Still, it took ZAKA months to acknowledge the accounts were wrong, allowing them to proliferate. And the fallout from the debunked accounts shows how the topic of sexual violence has been used to further political agendas.

Israel points to "sexual violence" on October 7 to justify its wartime goal of neutralising any repeated threat coming from Gaza. It has accused the international community of ignoring or playing down evidence of sexual violence claims, alleging anti-Israel bias.

Many have now seized on the ZAKA accounts, along with others shown to be untrue, to allege that the Israeli government has distorted the facts to prosecute a war — one in which more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, majority of them women and children.

Body bags and rocket fire

Israel was caught off guard by the ferocity of the Hamas raid, the deadliest in the nation's history. About 1,200 people were killed during the blitz as well as Israeli's haphazard military reaction -that allegations suggest did not distinguish between Hamas fighters and Israelis- and 250 taken hostage. It took days for the military to take control of the area.

Israeli military told the AP that the army did not do any forensic work in the wake of October 7.

Otmazgin said forensics workers were present in the settlement but spread thin and could not follow standard — and painstaking — protocols because of the scale of the raid. He said forensics teams in the area mostly instructed ZAKA on how to help identify the bodies.

"People seem to have expected that the aftermath of the attack would be like a movie, that immediately the police would come, that everything would be very sterile and very clean. People who don’t live in a war zone do not understand the horrific chaos that took place that day," said Orit Sulitzeanu, the executive director of The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel.

The group has spent months trying to gather evidence of sexual violence that occurred that day, sifting through many accounts emerging from the chaotic early days just after the attack. "Some of those stories that turned out not to be true were not lies," she said. They were, she said, "mistakes."

Debunked stories

Otmazgin said he was the origin of one of two debunked stories by ZAKA volunteers about the so-called sexual assault.

He said he entered a home in Kibbutz Be'eri, one of the hardest-hit settlements, where nearly 1,000 was killed, and found the body of a teenage girl separated from two of her relatives. He "assumed" that meant she had been sexually assaulted.

"They slaughtered her. They shot her in the head and her pants are pulled down to here. I put that out there. Have someone give me a different interpretation," he said then, showing an AP reporter a photo he took of the scene, which he had altered by pulling up the teenager’s pants.

Today, he maintains that he never said outright that the girl whose body he saw had been sexually assaulted. But his telling strongly suggested that was the case. Otmazgin says he told journalists and lawmakers details of what he'd seen and asked if they might have some other interpretation.

Nearly three months later, ZAKA found out his interpretation was wrong. After cross-checking with military contacts, ZAKA found that a group of soldiers had dragged the girl's body across the room to make sure it wasn't booby-trapped. During the procedure, her pants had come down.

Otmazgin said it took time to learn the truth because the soldiers who moved the body had been deployed to Gaza for weeks and were not reachable. He said he recognised that such accounts could cause damage, but he believes he rectified it by correcting his account months later.

A military spokesperson said he had no way of knowing what had happened to every body in the assault's immediate aftermath. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations.

Another account with details similar to Otmazgin's but attributed to an anonymous combat medic has also come under scrutiny after emerging in international media, including in a story by the AP. But the medic did not disclose where he saw the scene.

The military would not allow to make the medic available for further interviews, so it was not possible to reconcile the two accounts or verify the medic’s.

Second account: Everything was charred

Yossi Landau, a longtime ZAKA volunteer, was also working in Be’eri when he entered a home that would produce the second debunked story. Landau would recount to global media what he thought he saw: a pregnant woman lying on the floor, her fetus still attached to the umbilical cord wrenched from her body.

Otmazgin was overseeing the other ZAKA workers when he said Landau frantically called him and others into the home. But Otmazgin did not see what Landau described. Instead, he saw the body of a heavy-set woman and an unidentifiable hunk attached to an electric cable. Everything was charred.

Otmazgin said he told Landau that his interpretation was wrong — this wasn’t a pregnant woman. Still, Landau believed his version, went on to tell the story to journalists and was cited in outlets around the world.

Landau, along with other first responders, also told journalists he had seen beheaded children and babies. No convincing evidence had been publicised to back up that claim, and it was debunked by Haaretz and other major international media outlets.

It took some time for ZAKA to understand that the story was not true. Otmazgin also told Landau to stop telling the story, but that wasn’t until about three months after the attack when ZAKA was wrapping up its work in the field. The United Nations said Landau’s claim was unfounded.

Otmazgin said it has been difficult to rein Landau in, both because he vehemently believes in his version and because there is no way to stop journalists from engaging with him directly.

AP journalists attempted to reach Landau multiple times. While he answered initial inquiries, he was ultimately unreachable.

'We are not forensic experts'

Almost immediately after October 7, Israel began allowing groups of journalists to visit the ravaged settlement. On the trips, journalists found ZAKA volunteers onsite to be some of the most accessible sources of information and some shared what they thought they saw, even though, as Moti Bukjin, ZAKA's spokesperson notes, "we are not forensics workers."

"They pretend to know, sometimes very naively, what happened to the bodies they are dealing with" said Gideon Aran, a sociologist at Hebrew University who wrote a recent book on the organisation.

Bukjin said that the group's usual media protocols faltered and that volunteers, who he said typically were vetted by him before being interviewed, were speaking to journalists directly. "The information is wild, is not controlled right," said Peretz, the first-time volunteer. He said he took photos and video of what he saw even though he was told not to and was interviewed repeatedly about what he witnessed.

Other first responders also offered accounts — of babies beheaded, or hung from a clothesline, or killed together in a nursery, or placed in an oven – which were later debunked by Israeli reporters.

ZAKA is a private civilian body made up of 3,000 mostly Orthodox Jewish volunteer workers. As part of its role to ensure burial according to Jewish law, its volunteers scour crime scenes for remains to bury each body as completely as possible.

Debunked accounts vs evidence

After untrue accounts of sexual assault filtered into international media, the process of debunking them appeared, at times, to take centre stage in the global dispute over the facts of October 7.

No digital materials showed the alleged sexual violence in real time, a UN report said.

The investigators described the accounts that originated with Otmazgin and Landau to be "unfounded." Regarding Otmazgin's original account, they said the "crime scene had been altered by a bomb squad and the bodies moved, explaining the separation of the body of the girl from the rest of her family."

Otmazgin said he publicly corrected himself after discovering what had transpired, including to the UN investigators he met.

The UN report shines a light on the issues that have contributed to the skepticism over sexual violence. It said there was "limited crime scene processing” and that some evidence of sexual assault may have been lost due to “the interventions of some inadequately trained volunteer first responders."

Pulling focus from victims

In the fraught global discourse surrounding October 7 and the war it sparked, sexual violence has been a particular point of tension.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as prominent figures such as former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top technology executive Sheryl Sandberg, have called out what they saw as global indifference toward Israeli women who were sexually assaulted in the attack.

Some critics of Israel's war, meanwhile, have raised questions about the weight of the evidence, using debunked testimonies, including from ZAKA volunteers, to do so. The site oct7factcheck.com, which says its aim is to combat "atrocity propaganda" that could "justify military or political actions," has repeatedly challenged investigations in mainstream media about sexual violence.

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, said a long history of what he calls Israeli disinformation and propaganda has fuelled global skepticism over the claims.

The debunked ZAKA stories, he said, contributed to the sense that Israel exaggerated accounts of atrocities committed by Hamas to dehumanise Palestinians as its military continues its deadly genocidal war in Gaza.