⚠️ UN Expert: “No Independent Investigation Found Rape on October 7th.”

Reem Alsalem exposes how a weaponized lie fueled genocide while Israel’s real sexual violence was ignored.

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“No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”

This week, one of the most important sentences of the entire genocide was written by a United Nations official — and just like that, a central pillar of Israel’s propaganda campaign completely collapsed.

Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, posted this:

“No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza. No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”

That is not a random activist talking.
That is the UN’s official expert on sexual violence against women and girls.

And she’s not speaking loosely. She is speaking after reviewing the actual UN record on the allegations of mass rape on October 7th — allegations that Israel and Western governments used as emotional fuel to justify the genocide in Gaza.

Let me say something clearly before we go deeper:

I have never needed an Israeli, an American, or a UN investigator, to “confirm” what Palestinians say happened to them. Palestinian testimony has always been enough for me. It meets every moral and evidentiary standard I require.

But here, the point is not to validate Palestinians. The point is to expose the people who lied about them.

Because now we have a UN Special Rapporteur saying that no independent investigation has found evidence that rape took place on October 7th, and that the story Israel spun has been debunked — while Israel’s own, very real sexual violence against Palestinians has been systematically ignored.

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What the UN record actually shows

Here is what Alsalem lays out when she expands on that X post in a recent interview and write-up:

• She explains that the widely cited report by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC) was never meant to be investigative. Its mandate did not include forensic verification; it compiled allegations and secondary reports but did not independently prove anything.

• She points to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, which did have a fact-finding mandate and issued a report in June 2024. That body stated clearly that it “has not been able to independently verify such allegations, due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities.”

• She says, in plain language, that the narrative Israel constructed about mass rapes by Palestinians on October 7th has been “completely debunked by an independent body.”

• And she adds that while Western governments and legacy media fixated on unverified claims about Palestinian rapists, they ignored the documented pattern of Israeli sexual violence against Palestinian men and women — a pattern backed by years of evidence.

That’s not me talking. That’s the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls analyzing UN reports and calling out her own system.

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How a lie became the emotional engine of a genocide

From the earliest days after October 7th, we watched this happen in real time.

Israeli officials and their media allies began seeding gruesome, unverified stories: babies beheaded, pregnant women disemboweled, mass rapes at music festivals and kibbutzim. Major outlets ran them on the front page. Politicians repeated them into microphones. Feminist organizations that had never once spoken up for Palestinian women suddenly found their voices — to cry for vengeance on the basis of a story that had not been proven.

And every time Israel leveled another apartment building, flattened another block, bombed another hospital, people would say:

“But did you hear what Hamas did to those women?”

The allegations became a kind of moral coupon, endlessly redeemable. You could cash it in for any atrocity you wanted.

Now the UN’s own investigating structures are essentially saying:

• There was no independent verification that those rapes occurred.

• Israel obstructed investigations that might have proved anything one way or another.

• And Western governments and media ran with the story anyway — while a genocide was unfolding.

That isn’t just sloppy. That is complicity.

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The colonization of Western feminism

Alsalem goes even further. She talks about the “incoherence of Western feminism that parrots debunked reports while simultaneously egging on a genocide.”

She is naming a reality that a lot of people on the ground have felt for years.

We have watched:

• White liberal feminists who can write a dissertation on “believe all women” go completely silent when Palestinian women describe being beaten, stripped, and threatened with rape in Israeli prisons.

• Big NGOs and celebrity activists amplify every allegation against Palestinians — no matter how thin — while ignoring the mountains of testimony about Israeli soldiers using sexual humiliation, groping, threats of rape, and actual rape as tools of occupation.

• Governments invoke “violence against Israeli women” as a justification to bomb UN shelters filled with Palestinian women and girls.

Alsalem is saying out loud what needed to be said:

Western feminism, at its worst, has become a colonial project. It centers the pain of certain women (usually white, Western, or aligned with Western power) and erases the suffering of others (Muslim women, women in hijab, women in occupied lands) — even when those women are facing the same, or worse, violence.

In this case, it helped pave the way for the slaughter of more than 20,000 Palestinian women and children in Gaza.

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Meanwhile, Israel’s sexual violence is real — and documented

Think about the contrast.

On one side, you have unverified, unproven allegations about October 7th that Israel has not allowed independent investigators to access fully, and that the UN Commission of Inquiry says it could not verify.

On the other side, you have:

• Palestinians who have testified for decades about being stripped, groped, threatened with rape, and raped in interrogation rooms and prisons.

• The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights now documenting systematic sexual torture — women being raped repeatedly by soldiers, men being raped with objects and dogs, teenagers being assaulted with bottles, detainees being filmed naked and threatened with having their rape videos posted online.

• Israeli guards and nurses themselves telling AP that prisoners were kept chained until their limbs rotted, that dogs were set on detainees, that facilities like Sde Teiman were called “graveyards” because so many prisoners died there.

• Autopsy reports showing broken ribs, brain bleeds, old bruises layered on fresh ones, and the body of a 17-year-old boy who literally starved to death in Israeli custody.

That is evidence.
That is testimony.
That is forensic data.
That is corroborated by multiple sources, including Israelis inside the system.

And yet Western media, politicians, and many self-described feminists have almost nothing to say about it.

They shouted about unproven Palestinian rapes.
They whisper, if anything, about Israel’s very real sexual violence.

This is not an accident. It’s part of how empire works.

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Manufactured consent, stripped naked

The story is brutally simple:

1. Israel needed an emotional narrative to transform justified anger over its occupation into moral permission for a genocide.

2. Allegations of rape — the most emotionally charged crime in the public imagination — became that narrative.

3. Western governments and media repeated the story before it was verified, and then kept repeating it even as serious questions emerged.

4. The UN’s own independent investigative structures now say they could not confirm those claims and were blocked by Israel from doing their jobs.

5. Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing, documented sexual violence against Palestinians is pushed to the margins, if it’s mentioned at all.

That is what Reem Alsalem is calling out.

She is not saying no crimes were committed on October 7th. She’s not saying every allegation is false. She is saying:

• No independent investigation has confirmed the mass-rape narrative we were sold.

• Israel obstructed attempts to verify it.

• The story was used to justify genocide.

• And there is a mountain of evidence of Israeli sexual violence that the world is ignoring.

That’s a moral indictment of governments, media, NGOs, and whole movements that claim to care about women.

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What this means for us

For me, Alsalem’s statement doesn’t change what I believed about Palestinians. I believed them before, and I believe them now.

What it does change is the level of responsibility on those who helped spread the lie.

Everyone who shouted that Palestinians were “rapists” while Israel bombed hospitals owes an apology — and more than an apology. They owe material solidarity to the people whose slaughter they justified.

Everyone who used unverified stories as a shield for their own cowardice now has to ask themselves: What am I going to do with the truth?

Because now the truth is on the record, from inside the UN itself.

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Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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