Screams Without Words

On December 28, 2023, The New York Times published an exposé entitled "'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7" on rape and sexual violence during the October 7 attacks and Gaza war, describing such violence as having been "weaponized" by Hamas. The investigative team, led by Times staffer Jeffrey Gettleman and including Israeli freelancers Adam Sella and Anat Schwartz, spent October to December 2023 collecting video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews from more than 150 people, and concluded that sexual assaults and mutilations of Israeli women and girls were carried out in least seven locations on 7 October. Critics of the piece have described it as atrocity propaganda. In February 2024, Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw published "Between the Hammer and the Anvil" in The Intercept, which called into question the journalistic practices that went into the making the piece as well as the qualifications and motivations of Anat Schwartz, an Israeli filmmaker who contributed to the piece. The editorial process behind the article was criticized, with concerns raised including the use of inexperienced reporters, an overreliance on witness testimony, weak corroboration, and a lack of supporting forensic evidence. The Times stood by its story, saying that it was "rigorously reported, sourced and edited".