Talk:Sexual and gender-based violence in the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel

Close paraphrasing

Certain relatively recently added sections on the most recent UN report and a Re'im festival testimony are too closely paraphrased. In the latter paragraph the quotes at the start are spliced differently than in the TOI article [1] but apart from that it's nearly verbatim.

For example, we say that the commission

found "no credible evidence" that Palestinian forces had been ordered to commit sexual violence, and consequently were unable to make conclusions on the matter. ... the Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate or contradicted by other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment.

The UN report (pp. 7, 19) says,

The Commission did not find credible evidence, however, that militants received orders to commit sexual violence and so it was unable to make conclusions on this issue. ... [T]he Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment.

We say that

In his testimony, aware of the doubts cast on survivors of sexual violence on 7 October, D. presented medical opinions of the harm that was done to him as well as sat for a polygraph test. He also revealed that he is one of more than 100 survivors of the music festival in a major lawsuit suing the State of Israel for more than NIS 500 million ($137 million) in government support.

while TOI says,

aware that some are casting doubt on testimony of sexual violence on October 7, [D.] has presented various sources with medical opinions that testify to the harm done to him, as well as sitting for a polygraph test. His testimony is also included in a major lawsuit filed by more than 100 survivors of the Supernova festival against the State of Israel, demanding more than NIS 500 million ($137 million) in government support.(Notability of the lawsuit?)

Part of the reason I bring these here instead of fixing them myself is that I would probably also shorten them considerably and that may be unacceptable to some. ByVarying | talk 08:19, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

I've removed some of the close paraphrasing you're talking about from the UN report section. TRCRF22 (talk) 19:47, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Extra source

The principle should be that, while we need to create articles like this from breaking news and mainstream updates, at some point we should, as they appear, gradually replace them with studies from strong RS that review the phenomena at a distance. The Lemkin Institute is one of the best sources for covering this still obscure story about rape. This came out 9 February, and is still neglected.It both accepts that sexual violence did occur, and yet is highly critical of its weaponization. Neither this article nor the other (Sexual and gender-based violence in the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel) use it, and both should.

Nowhere is the need for these things more apparent than in the case of sexualized violence against women during Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel. Accurate reporting on gender-based violence committed by Hamas militants has been hampered by the failure of emergency response personnel to document evidence of sexualized violence in the wake of October 7. Accurate reporting has been further hampered by the efforts of the Israeli state to use sexualized violence in a politicized manner to justify the genocide it is committing in response to Hamas’ attacks. Both of these hindrances have led to a situation where the reliability of evidence of sexualized violence on October 7 is either overstated or belittled.. . . This analysis has led us to conclude that ultimately it is not the absence of physical evidence that has stood in the way of a unified international outcry regarding sexualized violence on October 7, but the instrumentalization of sexualized violence by the Israeli state for propaganda purposes that seek to dehumanize Palestinian men and justify genocide.Statement on the Evidence of Sexualized Violence Against Israeli Women During Hamas' Attack on October 7, 2023 Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security10 February 2024

I suggest editors download it, and review the article in the light of its observations. Nishidani (talk) 22:18, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

"propaganda purposes that seek to dehumanize Palestinian men and justify genocide" In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: D'oh!. This is not a new phenomenon, the Israelis have been using such propaganda for decades. And last I checked the Sabra and Shatila massacre is still within living memory. We already have United Nations findings from 1983 that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were responsible for genocide. What stops them from doing it again and again? Dimadick (talk) 01:26, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

The Lemkin Institute text seems pretty good to me (apart from the amount of credence it gives to a Twitter thread by Max Blumenthal, which doesn't inspire confidence in reliability), but I'm not sure how noteworthy it is given it has had zero secondary coverage and the Institute itself doesn't seem like a very solid organisation from its website or our article. BobFromBrockley (talk) 17:36, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

It is a secondary source, 'Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources, i.e., a document or recording that relates to or discusses information originally presented elsewhere,' so why are you asking for secondary coverage of a secondary source? One cannot mention Blumenthal as a primary source, but you can if cited in a secondary source, as he is there. The paper refers to many primary source arguments, and interprets them critically.Nishidani (talk) 18:59, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

It is also worth checking that the account Winter_queen_lizzie may in fact be a fake account stemming back to an account, hyphen, originally created in Hebrew.

Note: I have been around Wiki for 18 years and have never seen so much twisting, misinformation, fakery and propaganda posted on our pages before. HuttonIT (talk) 15:33, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 24 August 2024

Remove duplicated link (#1/#4) in the ‘See also’ section. Polyna V. (talk) 14:51, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

 Done, thanks for letting us know! Alaexis_¿question? 19:04, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

The "see also" section

I'm not clear on the relevance of several links in the "see also" section. In particular, Deir Yassin massacre seems only tangentially relevant as an example of another massacre during this conflict, and considering there are dozens of articles on similar incidents there doesn't seem to be a reason why this specific page was chosen. Sde Teiman detention camp is slightly more relevant in that both pages cover sexual violence during the same conflict, but they aren't really related to one another and aren't particularly similar so I'm not sure it merits inclusion in the See Also. The link to Accusation in a mirror is also quite concerning, as not only is it completely irrelevant, but invocations of the concept have often been used to deny Hamas atrocities by pointing out that Israel is doing the same.

Looking at the page history, it seems that all three links were added by the same user. @FourPi, could you please explain your rationale for adding these links to the See Also section, or do they need to be removed? TRCRF22 (talk) 11:25, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@TRCRF22 Considering FourPi was identified as a sock and banned, I wouldn't expect a response from them. -- Cdjp1 (talk) 14:23, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Quantification should be included

To @Stephan rostie, you removed the reference to "dozens" in the lede though it had been the result of a consensus sought here to resolve the lack of a qualifier issue. Although the source is an Israeli government official, it's the lead official who was involved in the investigation cited in the NYT as noted in the reference, and the same figure is cited in NBC News and BBC also citing other police and other officials. So I believe this satisfies RS.

The dozens figure is moreover already included on the main body of the page in the evidence section:

In a review of evidence mainly provided by the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli officials, NBC News stated that the evidence "suggests that dozens of Israeli women were raped or sexually abused or mutilated".

As you can see from the prior discussion in talk, dozens is the best we've got for accurate figures, so either it's included or there is no qualifier and it's left open-ended, and based on the content of the page it gives the (mistaken) impression that the figures are in the hundreds or thousands, which is grossly inaccurate and contradicts the figures given by Israeli officials in charge of the investigation.

It may be worth adding a paragraph in the main body collecting all the various figures cited from the various reports, maybe even with its own sub-section titled "Quantification". The best place for that would be in the Evidence category imo. If that is added in the main body, then a sentence can be added after the lede as it currently is along the lines of: "although the exact figures remain unclear and differ greatly per source." Raskolnikov.Rev (talk) 12:19, 16 September 2024 (UTC)