The latest propaganda effort signifies a desperation in the Israeli propaganda machine. Activists and journalists have rightly pointed out how the Israeli government has weaponized sexual assault allegations, deriving from ulterior motives rather than a place of genuine concern for women and children given Israel’s own horrific track record on rape and sexual abuse, and furthermore, its active censorship of human rights groups investigating sexual assault abuses of Palestinian children, which Josh Paul, former director at the U.S Department of State, admitted to CNN.
The U.S. State Department’s toothless allegation that the ceasefire ended because of Hamas’s barbaric desires towards women lacks credibility. However, the manufacture and escalation of a sensationalist media storm around October 7 allowed the Israeli government to reassert its hegemony over narratives surrounding events on that day. The wild descriptions of Hamas’s assaults re-center Hamas, thereby detracting from emerging investigations by news organizations that complicate the Israeli government’s account of a ruthless Hamas-led attack and probe the IOF’s complicity in slaughtering Israeli civilians, suggesting the IOF’s indiscriminate assault upon Hamas may have also caused the death of Israeli citizens.
In addition, emphasizing the brutality and inhumanity of Hamas’s attacks on October 7 increasingly serves to legitimize Israeli revenge. Israel’s assault lacks any semblance of proportionality, as the death toll exceeds 16,000, and widespread graphic videos document, extensively and in detail, the annihilation of Palestinians, including the incineration of infants and toddlers. Exaggerating the inhumanity of the Hamas attacks suggests there is an equivalency of the Israeli response; though not in scale, it purports to suggest Israel’s assault is equal in nature and brutality, and therefore, revenge upon a population of 2.2 million people is logical.