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Mainstream Media Is Ignoring Israel’s Sexual Torture

By
Branko Marcetic

For the past two weeks, a sickening scandal around Israeli torture of Palestinians has roiled the country’s politics. Many Americans likely have no idea about it, because mainstream media is all but ignoring it.

People walk past the New York Times building on July 27, 2017, in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

For the past few weeks, Israel has been caught up in a scandal around torture at its Sde Teiman detention camp involving an act so nauseatingly heinous, you should only keep reading if you have a strong stomach.

In late July, ten Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers at the facility were arrested for raping a male inmate, specifically by inserting something into his anus that damaged his internal organs and necessitated surgery to save his life. The arrests sparked a riot by far-right politicians and other extremists outraged at the punishment, who stormed the prison and another military base.

Then, at the start of August, respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a report detailing the unspeakable torture at the facility, titled “Welcome to Hell.” Roughly a week later, as the soldiers went on trial, both the United States and the European Union felt the need to publicly express horror at the torture and call for an investigation. About this same time, video footage of the rape was unearthed and publicly released.

If you’re a devoted New York Times reader, you likely have no idea almost any of this happened.

That’s because the paper of record, which has come under fire over the past ten months for its coverage of the war, has hardly covered the scandal, and when it has, has tended to entomb the news far beyond its front page, where most readers are likely to see it. This despite the paper’s extensive coverage of the sexual violence carried out by Hamas fighters on October 7, which it has received widespread calls for review and potentially even retraction after independent reporters found serious issues with its sourcing and accuracy.

The Times is far from alone. The IDF rape scandal has fared little better across some of the United States’ top newspapers and cable news websites, where it has similarly either been entirely ignored or tucked away from most readers’ eyes.

Yet the appalling conduct of the Israeli military — to which US taxpayers have paid at least $12.5 billion in aid over the past ten months, more than the budget of many US government programs and whole federal departments  — is highly relevant to the public that consumes these news outlets. And the dearth of coverage of the IDF’s rape of Palestinians it has kidnapped stands in stark contrast to the lurid, monthslong US media focus on Hamas’s sexual violence against civilians and its kidnapped hostages.

News Unfit to Print

The Times did cover the IDF’s rape of a prisoner on July 29, the day that the Israeli military reservists responsible were arrested, in a story headlined “Israeli Troops Held for Questioning in Prisoner Abuse Investigation.” Though framed around the political fallout from the troops’ arrest, not around the widespread abuse alleged at the Sde Teiman base where the rape happened, the piece did take care to immediately note they were accused of “severe sexual abuse of a Palestinian prisoner” who “had been hospitalized with a serious injury to his anus.”

Yet despite the story’s importance, it’s unlikely many readers ever saw it. The story only briefly made it to the front page of the paper’s web edition, on the evening of July 29, where it was buried way down below the latest presidential race intrigue, the Venezuelan election, Olympics news, and the story of a man who lost his retirement savings to internet scammers. Even then, in the “Middle East Crisis” section, it took second billing to a report on the Israeli cabinet approving retaliation against a rocket strike that had killed twelve children in the occupied Golan Heights. By the next morning, it was gone again.

The vast majority of Americans get their news from digital devices, websites, and apps at least some of the time. But it was no better when it came to the Times’s print edition. The story, which was published on page A5 of the July 30 edition of the paper, wasn’t featured on the front page, nor was it featured there in the list of stories to look out for in the following pages.

And that’s it. Apart from one story a day later — again framed around the internal political fallout from the arrests, and how the crisis had “revived a deeper and older battle over the nature of the Israeli state and who should shape its future” — the Times has not touched the matter again: not when B’Tselem released its report, revealing the shocking scope of torture and abuse in Israeli prisons; not when the Israeli doctor who had reported the abuse revealed further, sickening details about what soldiers did to the prisoner; not when the footage of the rape was publicly released a week ago.

A Wider Absence

The Times’s top newspaper rivals were marginally better — with an emphasis on “marginally.” The Washington Post’s story, which briefly referenced the Sde Teiman rape as part of a report on Palestinian prisoner mistreatment more broadly, appeared way down on its front page on July 29, eventually bumped from it in favor of a story on Benjamin Netanyahu’s Golan Heights response. The Post also never covered B’Tselem’s report (though it was briefly mentioned in an op-ed column for the paper this week), but it did report on the leaked video.

The right-leaning Wall Street Journal did a little bit better. The Journal has covered the story three times over the past two weeks, though the reports only appeared on the front page twice, and one of those times, it was included way, way down under the “world” section only the morning after the story was published on July 29, disappearing by the afternoon of the next day.

To its credit, the Journal did obliquely reference the B’Tselem report in a later story about how the United Nations and human rights groups had compiled instances of the IDF sexually abusing Palestinian detainees, which it featured prominently on its front page that day, accompanying it with a clearer description of what the scandal actually was than any other major paper: “Sexual-Abuse Case Rocking Israel’s Military Broke After Doctors Sounded Alarm,” read the headline, with a subhead noting that the detainee’s wounds “were so severe they needed surgery.” The paper has yet to cover the leaked video.

The Los Angeles Times has been a mixed bag. The paper has published four stories on or involving the unfolding incident, all republished from the Associated Press, on July 29 and July 30, and on August 7 and August12. Only two have ended up on the paper’s front page, both far down under the “More News” section: the July 29 story, which lacked details of the torture beyond being able to call it “substantial abuse,” and which was gone by the afternoon; and the August 12 piece, a more general story on abuse of Palestinian prisoners that made it onto the front page that afternoon with the headline, “Released Palestinians describe worsening abuses in Israeli prisons.” The LA Times did cover the video, albeit in a story that left its crucial existence off the somewhat generic headline, and didn’t cover the B’Tselem report, though it did allude to “reports by rights groups” exposing Sde Teiman’s “abysmal conditions and abuses” shortly before its release.

All of these papers did far better than USA Today, among the country’s top papers by both circulation and online readership, which has yet to do a single story on this major scandal currently roiling Israeli politics and society.

A Brazen Double Standard

It should go without saying that this would never be accepted if this degree and scale of sexual violence had, instead, been carried out by Palestinians against Israelis. We can say that, because we have objective proof: every single one of these newspapers prominently featured reporting on sexual violence inflicted by Hamas on Israelis on their front pages.

Most prominent was the New York Times, which made its problematic “Screams Without Words” report the leading story on the front page of its December 31 print edition. It was also the second-most prominent story on the front page of its Web edition on December 29, the day after it was officially published on the paper’s site, and where it remained even after being bumped lower down by the afternoon. Recall that the paper’s report on the IDF prison rape controversy late last month only briefly appeared way down its front page and was not so much as referenced on page A1 of its corresponding print edition.

While the Times’s rivals did not rereport that particular story, they did run various pieces on news about sexual violence on October 7 — like a widely covered March 2024 United Nations report that declared there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas soldiers sexually assaulted Israelis on the day, which the Washington Post and LA Times both covered.

Consistent with the LA Times’s coverage of the IDF scandal, the story’s position on its front page was not very prominent, nor was an earlier report compiling allegations of sexual violence by Hamas that appeared on its front page on December 7 (though both are still featured more prominently than its stories on the IDF prison rape scandal). The Post, by contrast, made and kept its story on that subject the second-highest story on its front page into the late evening.

The same day that “Screams Without Words” went to physical press, the Wall Street Journal published its own piece of reporting on the same subject, headlined “Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’: Murder, Sexual Violence and Torture on Oct. 7.” That piece was arguably the most prominent story on its front page that day, featured at the very top and accompanied by an image, where it remained until the early evening, when it was bumped to a slightly less prominent position at the top of the front page.

But the starkest contrast was at the USA Today, which despite not covering the IDF prison rape story whatsoever, ran and prominently featured its December 20 report on the sexual violence endured by returned Israeli hostages for many days. That story was not only at the top of its front page that day but remained among its “Top Headlines” there the next day, and continued to sit lower down on the front page until the 29th. The paper’s silence on the same type of abuse being inflicted on Palestinian captives is deafening.

The View from Cable

As disappointing as all this is, it has been absolutely abysmal when it comes to cable news outlets, which most of the voting public relies on and trusts to get their news, either by watching them on TV or by visiting their websites. Those websites are among the very top US news sites in terms of traffic.

The two most explicitly partisan major cable networks, MSNBC and Fox News, have simply not covered the IDF scandal at all. The closest to it is a June 7 segment on Chris Hayes’s show long before this latest incident and based on an earlier Times report on abuse at Sde Teiman, in which he implored his viewers to “not look away.” By contrast, both networks have run story after segment after story on the sexual violence carried out October 7, often taking people to task for playing down or ignoring the alleged attacks.

CNN has at least covered the story, albeit sequestering it way down its website’s front page the day that it broke. And while it did not cover the B’Tselem report, it has, to its credit, reported on both the video footage of the abuse and the US response to it, as well as publishing one of the earliest reports on IDF torture in the Sde Teiman center, back in May this year.

Some Lives Matter More

What all of this amounts to is a depressing fact that has been laid bare again and again throughout this war: Palestinian lives and suffering simply do not matter as much to US political institutions as Israeli ones. They don’t mean as much to elected officials, who have enthusiastically used the murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7 to cheer on and facilitate the murder of, at minimum, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. And they don’t mean as much to the mainstream US press, which has consistently displayed more care, attention, and sympathy for the suffering of Israelis in the tenor, focus, and even language used in its coverage.

Most of the US public does not share this double standard. But the media’s relative lack of interest in informing them about Israeli violence means many of them never learn about it.