Kibbutz Be’eri on New York Times Sexual Assault Story: “Not True”

Two of the three victims specifically singled out by the New York Times in a marquee exposé published in December, which alleged that Hamas had deliberately weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, were not in fact victims of sexual assault, according to the spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri, which the Times identified as the location of the attack.

The rejection of the Times reporting in the kibbutz by Be’eri spokesperson Michal Paikin further undermines the credibility of the paper’s controversial December article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”

The Times article described three alleged victims of sexual assault for whom it reported specific biographical information. One, known as the “woman in the black dress,” was Gal Abdush. Some of her family members have contested the claims made by the Times. The other two alleged victims were unnamed teenage sisters from Kibbutz Be’eri whose precise ages were listed in the New York Times, making it possible to identify them.

According to data from the Israeli government’s public list of the victims who died at the kibbutz during the October 7 attacks, as well as a memorial page established by the community itself, the victims in Kibbutz Be’eri matching the description in the New York Times article were sisters Y. and N. Sharabi, ages 13 and 16. (The Intercept has identified the girls but is not printing their first names.)

“No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.”

When asked about the claims made by the New York Times, Paikin independently raised their name. “You’re talking about the Sharabi girls?” she said. “No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.” Paikin also disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets. “It’s not true,” she told The Intercept, referring to the paramedic’s claims about the girls. “They were not sexually abused.”

“We stand by the story and are continuing to report on the issue of sexual violence on Oct. 7,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told The Intercept.

A spokesperson for the Israeli government, Eylon Levy, played a lead role in connecting the anonymous paramedic with international media outlets.

As The Intercept previously reported, Anat Schwartz — an Israeli filmmaker who, before joining the Times, appeared to have no prior experience reporting the news — was hired by the paper to investigate sexual violence on October 7. She worked under Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, and alongside Adam Sella, who was contracted shortly after October 7 to work for the Times; Sella’s own journalism experience was mostly writing about food and culture. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor and the former media columnist for the New York Times, reported Sunday that Sella recommended his uncle’s partner, Schwartz, to the Jerusalem bureau chief, and she was brought on board for the investigation. Schwartz told Israeli Army Radio she had personally conducted over 150 interviews for the story.

In a podcast interview produced by Israel’s Channel 12 in January, Schwartz described in detail how she sought to confirm that the girls had been sexually assaulted. She said she first learned of the case when she saw an interview with a man identified as a paramedic from an elite Israeli military unit. The Israeli government coordinated media interviews with the paramedic, who did them with his back turned to the camera to avoid being identified.

In her podcast interview, Schwartz said that she had been unable to find a second source to confirm the paramedic’s account. “I don’t have a second source … for the paramedic with the girls in Be’eri,” she said. “This stage of [getting the] second source, it took a very long time.” While she mentions the second source, in the interview Schwartz does not mention any specifics about actually finding one, and the Times report does not cite any other corroborating witness for its portrayal of the condition in which the girls were allegedly discovered by the paramedic.

In the report, the Times presents unnamed “neighbors” at Kibbutz Be’eri who “said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.” According to the family, however, not even that detail is accurate.

A recent interview in the Israeli media with the Sharabi sisters’ grandparents offers details that directly contradict the Times reporting that the girls at Kibbutz Be’eri were sexually assaulted on October 7. “They were just shot — nothing else had been done to them,” their grandmother Gillian Brisley told Channel 12. (A U.K.-based lawyer for the Brisley family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The family also gave several interviews to international news outlets before “Screams Without Words” was published that provided information that undercuts the assertions in the Times article, raising questions about why the paper did not include these publicly available details.

The Brisley family and relatives in Israel who lived with the Sharabis at Kibbutz Be’eri have never asserted that the girls were sexually assaulted. In numerous interviews, the Brisleys have maintained the girls were killed alongside their mother.

According to the Times report, “Screams Without Words”:

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in “an elite unit.”

On February 29, Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast a feature story on the grandparents, who traveled from Britain to the kibbutz to view the home where their loved ones died and to meet with neighbors, family members, and officials. In the interview, the Brisleys’ description of the deaths of their daughter, Lianne, and their granddaughters contradict virtually every detail, outside of the Be’eri girls’ ages and that they were killed, presented in the Times article.

“They were found between the ‘mamad’” — the house’s safe room — “and the dining room and it’s an awful thing to say, they were just shot — nothing else had been done to them. They were shot,” said Gillian Brisley. “A soldier said he saw our daughter” — the girls’ mother — “but she was covering the two girls and they were shot,” added her husband, Pete, the girls’ grandfather. “The seventh of October was the saddest day of my life.”

Months before the Times story was published on December 28, the Brisleys had already given an interview to the BBC offering details contradicting the depiction that would later appear in the Times, including the assertion the girls were found alone in a room. Gillian Brisley told the BBC on October 30 that the teenage girls were “found all cuddled together with Lianne doing what a mother would do — holding her babies in her arms, trying to protect them at the end.” Brisley said it was a “small comfort but a comfort nevertheless.”

On October 24, the Israeli news site Walla published a story about the family, which also said the girls were killed alongside their mother. Sharon Sharabi, whose brother Eli was the father of the two girls and was kidnapped that day and reportedly taken to Gaza, said that Palestinian fighters entered the family home, broke into their safe room, and killed Lianne and the two girls. “Lianne and [Y] were only identified through dental records, and [N] by DNA,” he said. He did not specify where the forensic examinations had taken place. N was initially reported missing for two weeks because her body had yet to be formally identified.

“I’ve heard all the versions. What’s the truth? I don’t know.”

Sharon Sharabi told The Intercept that his family has not been provided with any specific details about his nieces’ deaths that would allow him to draw a firm conclusion about what happened to them that day. “To tell you concretely what happened in Be’eri, or what happened at the house of the Sharabi family, I don’t have an answer for you,” he said. “There is certainly no credible information I can give you, only testimonies of ZAKA” — private rescue workers — “or of military personnel who arrived at the scene first and saw the atrocities. So any information I might give you is information that I’m not confident about, and therefore I would rather not give it [at all].”

He added, “I’ve heard all the versions. What’s the truth? I don’t know.” Sharabi emphasized that he firmly believes there was widespread sexual violence committed during the attacks of October 7.

Before the Times published its exposé, the Israeli military paramedic claimed in interviews with the Washington Post, CNN, and an Indian news channel to have seen evidence that two girls had been sexually assaulted at a kibbutz. “One was on the bed. Her arm was dangling from the bed frame. Her legs were bare, with bruises, and she had a bullet hole in the chest-neck area,” he told the Post. The details of the recollection closely matched those the paramedic gave to the Times.

The paramedic’s story was met with skepticism by the news site Mondoweiss. In his first interview, on October 25, with an Indian news channel, the paramedic said he witnessed the scene at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, not Be’eri.

According to the official records of October 7 deaths at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, there were no victims that matched the age estimates offered by the paramedic. The closest possible match would have been sisters who were 18 and 20 years old, who were killed at their home at the kibbutz along with their parents.

When Levy, the Israeli government spokesperson, promoted the Indian TV interview on social media that day, he posted an edited portion of the interview which removed reference to Nahal Oz. Instead, Levy wrote in a tweet that it had occurred at Kibbutz Be’eri, where official records indicated two teenage sisters roughly matching the paramedics description had been killed. “Israeli special forces paramedic describes the aftermath of the brutal rape and execution of Israeli girls in Be’eri during the October 7 Massacre,” Levy tweeted October 25. In a subsequent post, he wrote, “If media want to interview this special forces paramedic about the horrors he saw in the kibbutzim on October 7, drop me a message in my DMs.” When the paramedic was later interviewed on CNN, on November 18, he maintained he had seen the two girls at Kibbutz Be’eri. In his tweet, Levy implied that the paramedic had been to multiple kibbutzim.

By the time Schwartz met the paramedic, the location of the scene was fixed at Be’eri. Schwartz said during her podcast interview that she put extensive effort into trying to confirm the paramedic’s story. “I said, if I want information about the rapes, I have to call the kibbutzim — and nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.”

Eventually, she reached the unit 669 paramedic, identified in some media interviews as “G.” He relayed the same story he had told other media outlets. Schwartz cited this incident as a central reason she concluded there was organized sexual violence on October 7. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

Schwartz does not mention the unnamed neighbors who allegedly saw the two girls alone in the podcast.

It is unclear why the Times did not include the well-publicized statements from the Be’eri girls’ family members. Several of them have done interviews with Israeli media and international newspapers and TV networks, including the BBC, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph.

The case received significant media attention in the U.K. because Lianne was a British citizen who emigrated to Israel, and her children were dual citizens. The family has also been outspoken in pressuring the British government to put greater effort into freeing Lianne’s husband, Eli Sharabi, the father of the two girls, who is believed to be a hostage in Gaza. The Times article does not mention the fact that there are conflicting details and instead airs the single-sourced assertions offered by the paramedic. If Times reporters had other sources for this story, aside from neighbors who allegedly told the Times the girls were found alone, the readers were not given any indication of it.

On Monday, United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten reported that her team found information indicating sexual violence took place. “In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and other armed groups against civilian and military targets throughout the Gaza periphery, the mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im,” the report release said, calling for a full investigation. The special representative wrote, “Overall, the mission team was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri.”

The special representative found two high-profile cases of sexual assault alleged to have happened at Kibbutz Be’eri to be “unfounded.” In its coverage of the U.N. report, the Times sourcing on the alleged assaults in Be’eri moves from a singular first responder to plural, and claims that the sexual assault it identified was a separate incident than the two described by the U.N. “First responders told The New York Times they had found bodies of women with signs of sexual assault at those two kibbutzim, but The Times, in its investigation, did not refer to the specific allegations that the U.N. said were unfounded,” the Times reported. (“The plural ‘first responders’ is accurate,” said the Times spokesperson, without elaborating.)

The controversy around the Times coverage gained momentum last week after X user Zei Squirrel highlighted Schwartz’s social media activity, which included “liking” a post that expressed genocidal incitement against Palestinians in Gaza, calling to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.” The Intercept then published excerpts of an interview in which Schwartz offered revelatory details about the Times’s reporting process. For months, independent news outlets such as Mondoweiss, The Grayzone, and Electronic Intifada, as well as the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check, have been documenting a variety of problems with the Times story and highlighting inconsistencies.

On January 5, Laila Al-Arian, an Emmy and Polk Award-winning executive producer for Al Jazeera English, sent an email to New York Times international editor Phil Pan, as well as Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and the Times standards department, posing detailed questions about the veracity of the Times report. She received no response.

Amid mounting public scrutiny, the Times assigned its reporters to effectively re-report their story. The resulting article was published on January 29, and the paper has since maintained it stands by the original report.

Meanwhile, the Times newsroom is facing a serious internal conflict over its coverage of the war against Gaza. Shortly after the December 28 “Screams Without Words” article was published, the paper’s flagship podcast “The Daily” was tasked with converting it into an episode. After a review by producers, the original script, drafted to hew closely to the original article, was shelved, with a more circumspect and caveated script written.

The new script raised problems for the masthead. Running a watered-down version of the article would raise questions as to whether the paper was standing by its reporting amid criticism, including, most prominently, from the family of Gal Abdush. No episode of “The Daily” on the December 28 story has run to date.

The Intercept reported on the internal dispute at the Times in late January. The paper’s masthead responded not by reviewing its reporting, as it did after the debacle over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but instead by launching a highly unusual leak investigation. The Times union denounced the probe this weekend for racially profiling journalists with Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds. The probe, the union said, also focused on journalists who used proper Times channels to critique the reporting, as reporters are encouraged to do.

Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn responded to criticism of the internal probe Saturday in a companywide email, arguing that the leak investigation was proper because the whistleblowers had revealed details about an unpublished episode of “The Daily.” That argument, however, elides the reality that the dispute was not about something the Times did not publish, but rather about something that it did.

“They know better than anyone that leaks are desperate measures when people want to expose grave failures without any safe or efficient internal mechanisms,” said one Times source. “Trying to crush the messenger won’t make the basic fact that the story is a journalism failure go away.”