Investigation into the Times scandal has also been conducted by a host of independent sites and nonaffiliated journalists, notably Aaron Maté, October 7 Fact Check, Electronic Intifada and Max Blumenthal. These were all voices that had been skeptical of the allegation of systematic rape even before the Times story, so the article, with its many flaws, provided an ample target. But The Intercept (featuring the reporting of Daniel Boguslaw, Ryan Grim, and Jeremy Scahill) has offered the most comprehensive criticism, one that builds on the work of other reporters to make a particularly damning indictment of the Times.

On January 28, The Intercept revealed that “The New York Times pulled a high-profile episode of its podcast ‘The Daily’ about sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject.” This was the story that sent Times editors into their bunkers.

A lengthy follow-up report on Wednesday was even more devastating. The new report painted Anat Schwartz as an incompetent propagandist. Schwartz had liked a tweet calling on Israel to turn Gaza “into a slaughterhouse.” The tweet described Palestinians as “human animals.” The Intercept also quoted from a radio interview Schwartz gave in Israel where she admitted that when it came to evaluating evidence of sexual violence, “I have no qualifications.”

Schwartz relied heavily on Zaka, described by The Intercept as “a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization that has been documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about the events of October 7, including debunked allegations of Hamas operatives beheading babies and cutting the fetus from a pregnant woman’s body. Its workers are not trained forensic scientists or crime scene experts.” Another major source, Shari Mendes, has repeatedly made demonstrably false claims.

The first major narrative in the Times article details the alleged rape of Gal Abdush, who was murdered by Hamas. But The Intercept notes:

The Times report mentions WhatsApp messages from Abdush and her husband to their family, but doesn’t mention that some family members believe that the crucial messages make the Israeli officials’ claims implausible. As Mondoweiss later reported, Abdush texted the family at 6:51 a.m., saying they were in trouble at the border. At 7:00, her husband messaged to say she’d been killed. Her family said the charring came from a grenade.

According to Abdush’s sister, the short timespan makes the claim of rape impossible: “It doesn’t make any sense…. they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?” Abdush’s brother-in-law claims that “the media invented [the rape].”

The Times article is illustrated with a photograph of Abdush in a black dress. According to the photographer, Schwartz and Sella “called me again and again [to get the photo] and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara.” Hasbara is a term meaning public diplomacy designed to make Israel’s case to the world.

The issue of rape as a weapon of war is a serious one. If sexual violence was used by Hamas as a weapon of war, the world deserves a careful documentation of this fact. Alas, the New York Times article does nothing but muddy the water.

The Intercept correctly emphasizes that this is a story where necessary nuance and adherence to careful rules of evidence has been lost, noting:

The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a “second wave,” contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence. The central issue is whether The New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7”—a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war.

If the Times wanted to serve its readers and the world, it would launch a transparent investigation into this botched article, the biggest failure of journalism at the newspaper since Judith Miller’s infamous and discredited articles on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Just as Miller regurgitated war propaganda on behalf of the George W. Bush administration, the Times is now serving as a mouthpiece for Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet. But there’s little chance that the Times will come clean about this latest fiasco. As with Watergate, the ultimate question is how far does the scandal go up the chain of command?

The reporting in The Intercept suggests that the main instigator of the “Screams Without Words” investigation was Executive Editor Joe Kahn, who has long-standing pro-Israel sentiment, and whose father, Leo Kahn, was a longtime member of the board of CAMERA, a pro-Israel media watchdog. But could Kahn have acted without the approval and perhaps direction of the Sulzberger family, which owns the newspaper? The Nixonian strategy of stonewalling suggests that someone very high up is implicated in this debacle. Watergate proved that a scandal could topple a presidency. But what scandal is large enough to bring down the executive editor—or perhaps even the owners—of The New York Times?