“Between the Hammer and the Anvil”: The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Expose

Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma…

VT Foreign Policy

By Jonas E. Alexis

Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them.

ANAT SCHWARTZ HAD a problem. The Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official had been assigned by the New York Times to work with her partner’s nephew Adam Sella and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman on an investigation into sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 that could reshape the way the world understood Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. By November, global opposition was mounting against Israel’s military campaign, which had already killed thousands of children, women, and the elderly. On her social media feed, which the Times has since said it is reviewing, Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.”

“Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read the post. “Those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules.”

The New York Times, however, does have rules and norms. Schwartz had no prior reporting experience. Her reporting partner Gettleman explained the basics to her, Schwartz said in a podcast interview on January 3, produced by Israel’s Channel 12 and conducted in Hebrew.

Gettleman, she said, was concerned they “get at least two sources for every detail we put into the article, cross-check information. Do we have forensic evidence? Do we have visual evidence? Apart from telling our reader ‘This happened,’ what can we say? Can we tell what happened to whom?”

Schwartz said she was initially reluctant to take the assignment because she did not want to look at visual images of potential assaults and because she lacked the expertise to conduct such an investigation.

“Victims of sexual assault are women who have experienced something, and then to come and sit in front of such a woman — who am I anyway?” she said. “I have no qualifications.”

Nonetheless, she began working with Gettleman on the story, she explained in the podcast interview. Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is an international correspondent, and when he is sent to a bureau, he works with news assistants and freelancers on stories. In this case, several newsroom sources familiar with the process said, Schwartz and Sella did the vast majority of the ground reporting, while Gettleman focused on the framing and writing…