Just days after the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militants, the Israeli press, amplified by the mainstream international media, was publishing horrific stories of the “mass” and “systematic” rape and sexual abuse of Israeli women.

There were even claims that the Palestinians had been given explicit orders to carry out rape. This was alongside lurid and mendacious claims about the slaughter, beheading, and, in one instance, cooking in an oven of babies.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utilised the claims to denounce Hamas’ “savagery” and justify Israel’s war of annihilation against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Now after 14 months of appeals for witnesses and evidence, Israeli prosecutor Moran Gaz has admitted her department has no evidence of any rapes or sexual assaults and is not filing any such cases for prosecution against the Palestinian attackers held in Israeli jails. Until recently, Gaz headed Israel’s Southern Prosecutor’s Office and was a member of the team investigating the militants arrested during the attack.

Speaking in an interview at the end of last month with the Israeli online daily Ynet, Gaz said that despite all their investigations, “In the end, we have no complainants.” No one came forward to give evidence. “We contacted women’s rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that they [those allegedly abused] simply did not contact them.” Apparently, no one came forward to give evidence, even confidentially.

Gaz said that in such circumstances, it would be very difficult to obtain justice, particularly for sexual offenses, and asked the public to lower their expectations. She said that “the vast majority of them will not be able to meet the threshold of proof in court, and the criticism will ultimately come to the prosecutor’s office—unjustly.”

Coming from someone like Gaz who believes that the Palestinians detained by Israel during the October 7 attack “have no right to live,” this can only mean that Israel does not have one iota of evidence to substantiate the rape or sexual abuse claims.

Once again, Israel’s propaganda about Hamas savagery, rape, mutilations and beheaded babies that it put out to justify the slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians has been revealed as a tissue of lies. But there has been little or no mention of Gaz’s admission in the mainstream media.

There was no forensic examination of the October 7 victims by the Israeli authorities. They were buried immediately, making it impossible to determine whether they had been subjected to abuse, how they had died or at whose hands.

The United Nations panel, led by Pramila Patten, that looked into the rape allegations last March stated explicitly that as far as the first day of the raid was concerned (the raid and the Israeli response lasted from early Saturday morning till Monday evening), they had been unable to verify any sexual violence.

Three of Israel’s claims were positively disproved and the rest were unverified, with many based on the “inaccurate” and “unreliable” claims of a group of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Furthermore, without forensic evidence and survivor testimony, it was impossible to determine the scope and veracity of other claims of sexual violence.

There were lurid claims of rape and sexual violence at the Nova rave and on the way back to Gaza. These had earlier been shown to be nonsensical given the timing of events, the known movements of the victims and the constant firing by Israeli helicopter gunships. Such was the firepower that around 360 of the Israeli victims were felled by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), not Palestinian fighters. Furthermore, the original Israeli death toll was reduced to around 1,140 when more than 200 burned corpses were found to be Palestinian not Israeli.

The UN’s report, cited by the international media as evidence of Hamas’ rape and sexual abuse, was the outcome of a fact-finding mission to “verify information.” But without a mandate or resources to carry out a full and legal investigation, it was unable to substantiate the allegations beyond reasonable doubt.

It is telling that just last week Israel blocked a request from the UN panel to carry out a further probe of the October 7 rape allegations, reportedly to avoid any scrutiny of rape and other abuse committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails, typically without charge. It prompted Israeli women’s rights groups to warn that this could lead to Israel, instead of Hamas, being added to the UN’s sexual violence blacklist.

According to a report in Ha’aretz, in addition to investigating alleged sexual violence by Hamas, Patten had demanded—and was refused—access to Israeli prisons to investigate sex crimes allegations against the IDF. The report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, “Welcome to Hell”: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps, has documented in great detail Israel’s systemic policy of abusing and torturing thousands of Palestinians in its custody.

The Israeli prosecutor’s acknowledgement that there is no evidence of rape and sexual abuse comes after Al Jazeera demonstrated that the lengthy report in December 2023 by the New York Times and similar media outlets of sexual abuse that garnered massive publicity was based on false or unreliable sources. But the lack of evidence did not stop Netanyahu and his fascistic cabinet colleagues parroting the claims, or the media continuing to give them ample coverage.

Israel’s entire narrative surrounding the events of October 7 has been shown to be a pack of lies. First of all, far from being unprovoked and “coming out of the blue”, the attack by Hamas militants was itself the product of countless deliberate provocations aimed at inciting retaliation, as then occurred on October 7. Al-Aqsa Flood provided the casus belli for a pre-planned campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians beginning with Gaza and then moving on to the West Bank and including Israel’s two million Arab citizens.

Secondly, there is mounting evidence that Netanyahu’s government and Israel’s army and security services knew a military incursion was about to happen—Egypt and Israeli soldiers have stated so quite explicitly—and that these warnings were ignored and the security forces stood down.

Once the attack took place, large numbers of Israeli casualties—at least 360—resulted from a massive military operation carried out by the IDF that lasted several days, using its infamous and secretive Hannibal Directive. But the exact number can only be confirmed by releasing the results of autopsies that would show the type of bullets used.

The Directive, formulated during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in 1986, aims to prevent the capture of Israelis by enemy forces, even at the cost of their lives. It implies the IDF should kill Israelis rather than allow them to fall into the hands of Hamas. The IDF’s massive deployment of firepower—that included helicopter gunships, tanks, heavy weaponry, hand grenades and armed troops—killed Palestinians, Israeli civilians, hostages and security personnel alike, and caused massive destruction of buildings in towns and villages in southern Israel.

Another lie, soon exposed, was that Hamas had planned to attack the Nova music festival, where the largest number of deaths occurred—364 people, including 17 police officers—and where 40 people were taken hostage. This was impossible as the festival organisers switched sites just two days earlier after the original location fell through. Palestinian fighters only found out about it by accident after the festival was then extended by a day at short notice, even though Israel had received warnings that an attack was imminent.

US President Joe Biden had famously to walk back his claim, featured on the front pages of Western newspapers, that he had seen pictures of beheaded children following Hamas’s attack. White House officials said, “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel.”

Washington, London, Paris and Berlin have regurgitated Israel’s lies and propaganda aimed at legitimising its mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to further their own plans to control the resource-rich Middle East, as part of a global war against Iran, Russia and ultimately China.

Netanyahu has reluctantly agreed to a ceasefire and a hostage and prisoner exchange as a result of pressure from incoming President Donald Trump—amid increasing unease among Washington’s Arab allies whose restive populations are seething over the scale of the death and destruction engulfing Gaza. But there is no reason to believe that such a ceasefire will hold.

Lebanon has witnessed hundreds of Israeli violations of the ceasefire agreement between those two countries since the end of November: including incursions, artillery and tank shelling, the demolition of homes and the flying of drones and warplanes. Furthermore, the IDF has failed to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon as required by the terms of the agreement.

There is enormous worldwide opposition both to Netanyahu and his fascist allies’ horrific war in Gaza and to workers’ own rotten governments internationally over their collusion with the Zionist butchers. But it needs a political perspective. An end to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians requires the repudiation of Zionism and the Jewish apartheid state and the establishment of a multinational state with full equality for its Palestinian and Jewish citizens as part of a United Socialist States of the Middle East.