By The Grayzone
As the founder of the so-called Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, Israel lawyer Cochav Elkayam Levy has been a go-to source for Western media organizations pushing the narrative that Palestinian militants carried out sexual assault on a massive and systematic basis when they attacked Israel.
Elkayam-Levy has starred in a factually challenged CNN special on the topic narrated by the fervently pro-Israel host Jake Tapper, who identified her as “an expert in human rights law who organized a civil committee to document evidence.” Haaretz featured Elkayam-Levy as the subject of a puff piece which misleadingly claimed that her work “presents a horrifying picture that leaves no room for doubt: On October 7, Hamas terrorists systematically carried out acts of rape and sexual abuse.”
Then, on December 6, 2023, members of the White House National Security Council and Assistant to the President and Director of the Gender Policy Council Jennifer Klein hosted Elkayam-Levy in Washington to hear “about her work to gather testimony and document evidence of the events of October 7 and develop a comprehensive accounting of gender-based violence committed by Hamas.”
Now, the lawyer’s public relations extravaganza has earned her the Israel Prize, the most prestigious honor any Israeli citizen can receive from their government. “We must stand firm against the stark denial and the increasing tide of antisemitism,” she declared in a March 21 statement accepting the award.
Yet three days later, Israel’s largest newspaper, YNet, published a damning exposé accusing Elkayam-Levy of ripping off major donors, including a member of the Biden administration, spreading fake Hamas atrocity tales, and failing to deliver on her promise of a major report about sexual violence on October 7.
“People have disassociated themselves from her because her research is inaccurate,” an Israeli government official told YNet. “After all, the whole story is that they want to accuse us of spreading fake news, and her methodology was neither good nor accurate.”
Government officials were particularly incensed that Elkayam-Levy spread discredited claims that a Hamas militant cut a fetus from a pregnant woman before raping the woman – a lie first spread by confirmed fraudster Yossi Landau of the scandal-stained ZAKA organization. “The story about the pregnant woman who had her stomach cut open – a story that was proven to be untrue, and she spread it in the international press,” the official complained to YNet. “It’s no joke. Little by little, professionals began to distance themselves from her because she is unreliable.”
Elkayam-Levy further alienated the Israeli government by spinning her “Civil Commission” out of a one-woman operation she ran called the Deborah Institute, creating the sense that she was representing Tel Aviv in an official capacity. “In the beginning she was really very active, which was very nice,” a source told YNet. “Then it started calling itself a civilian commission. People got confused, members of Congress turned to people who work with Israel and asked what it is – ‘Israel built a commission?’ It’s a confusing name. And to the question of whether there is such a thing at all? Is there such a body? The answer is – no. It is the body. She is the civil commission.”
Through her Deborah Institute, Elkayam-Levy has raised millions of dollars. But if the government sources who spoke to YNet are to be believed, she conned wealthy American Jewish donors like Rahm Emanuel, currently the Biden administration’s ambassador to Japan, and channeled the money into her personal bank account.
According to YNet, Elkayam-Levy appealed for $8 million to launch her “Civil Commission,” requesting $1.5 million for “management and administration.” “Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador to Japan, donated money to her, she took donations from a lot of people, and started asking for money for lectures,” the Israeli official complained.
After more than five months of research, however, the publicity-hungry lawyer has produced nothing of substance to justify her massive fundraising haul. Indeed, the “atrocity report” Elkayam-Levy had promised supporters, which would have provided clear evidence of systematic sexual violence by Hamas on October 7, has yet to arrive.
Meanwhile, she reportedly attempted to obstruct a visit to Israel by United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten, whose report was ultimately touted by Israel as “proof” of sex crimes by Hamas despite Patten’s own admission that it contained no evidence and lacked any investigative mandate from the UN.
I first became aware of Elkayam-Levy’s penchant for fudging facts during a November 11, 2023 presentation she delivered to Harvard University’s Maimonides Society. There, she presented images of female Kurdish fighters killed in combat as Jewish Israeli women who had been killed and raped by Hamas militants at the Nova Electronic Music Festival on October 7.
After I exposed her glaring falsehood, Elkayam-Levy refused to correct her claim, taking to Twitter/X instead to thank me for promoting her work.
Elkayam-Levy’s fall from grace comes as the New York Times publishes a report casting further doubt on the paper’s already-discredited December 28, 2023 article alleging “systematic sexual violence” by Hamas on October 7. According to the March 25 Times report, an Israeli paramedic identifying himself as “G” (real name: Guy Melamed) lied to the paper when he claimed to have found the corpses of teenage girls in Kibbutz Beeri in a state of undress that clearly indicated rape. “Footage taken by an Israeli soldier who was in Beeri on Oct. 7… shows the bodies of three female victims fully clothed and with no apparent signs of sexual violence,” the Times stated.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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