What Did—and Did Not—Happen in Khumsa

Recently, journalist Nahum Barnea wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth about an incident that allegedly took place in the Palestinian hamlet of Khumsa between Palestinians and Jews. We will use Barnea’s remarks to illustrate the method, because it is always the same method.

Barnea joined a tour of what he described as “the pogrom sites in the West Bank,” led by retired Major General Yaakov “Mendi” Or. The tours are organized for groups of what Barnea calls “senior members of Israel’s old elite.” Or, now 80 years old, appears nostalgic for the senior positions he held in the IDF and the Civil Administration during the height of the peace-process euphoria in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he participated in the ultimately fruitless negotiations with PLO terrorists in the hope of achieving peace.

To illustrate for Barnea and the readers of Yedioth Ahronoth just how cruel the local settlers are, and how grievously they supposedly harm innocent Arabs, Or told Barnea the following:

“There was a pogrom in Khumsa two months ago. They tied up all the residents and beat them. They fastened a zip tie around a toddler’s genitalia. They loaded the residents’ flock—400 sheep—onto a truck and disappeared. A CNN crew documented the attack. The video caused an uproar around the world.”

Sounds horrific, doesn’t it?

Well, welcome to the poison machine. This is how it works.

Khumsa is a small Bedouin herding community that settled illegally inside a designated military firing zone where entry is prohibited. On the night of March 13, perhaps—though we will shortly see that even this is unclear—a confrontation took place between the Bedouin squatters and a group of Jews whom they claim were masked.

According to one of the Khumsa residents, he was sexually assaulted in the manner described by Or.

(Incidentally, the fact that Or told Barnea the victim was a toddler demonstrates that he never bothered to watch the CNN video he claimed documented the attack. Had he done so, he would have noticed that the alleged victim was a fully grown man.)

I do not ask why Barnea accepted Or’s claims as fact without independently verifying them, as one would expect of a journalist. For decades Barnea has been obsessively committed to a campaign of portraying settlers in the worst possible light to the readers of Yedioth Ahronoth, and there appears to be no allegation he is unwilling to repeat in service of that cause.

But from Mendi Or’s perspective, why tell Barnea that the victim was a toddler? My guess is that one of the local Arabs told him so, exercising considerable creative imagination, and Or never bothered to check.

But was an adult male really sexually assaulted in the manner described? Was there truly a pogrom? Were all the residents tied up and beaten? Were 400 sheep loaded onto a truck and stolen?

The honest answer is that we do not know.

What we do know is that every image and video released from Khumsa after the incident shows the cluster of tents and structures standing intact, with no visible signs of destruction.

So where is the video that, according to Mendi Or, documented the attack?

Unlike Or and Barnea, I took the time to watch the “CNN video that documented the attack.” Here it is, linked below, so you can see for yourselves that Or and Barnea are making claims that the footage simply does not support.

There is no video documenting the alleged attack—whether it happened or not. Instead, we are presented with the same stale formula we have seen for decades: Palestinians walk through their village, recount stories of alleged atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers or civilians, and their allies in the media and on the political left promptly repeat those claims as established fact, even though they remain unverified allegations.

According to the Khumsa interviewee, his hands and feet were zip-tied, not just his genitalia, and he was then dragged around the village by the restraints “like an animal.” Does that grotesque scene even sound technically plausible? Not to me.

Indeed, perhaps recognizing how weak and uncorroborated the testimony was, the CNN reporter supplemented the segment with the now-discredited Channel 12 report by Guy Peleg alleging rape at Sde Teiman, presenting it as evidence that Israel had adopted a new tactic against Palestinians—sexual assault.

And once again, as in so many previous episodes generated by the poison machine, the Israeli police did not ignore the allegations. They announced the arrest of seven suspects in connection with the alleged pogrom and sexual abuse in Khumsa.

Yet quietly, with little public attention, they released all of them after failing to find a single piece of evidence supporting the story told by the CNN interviewee.

And so, by the time the story appeared in a Shavuot holiday edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, an unverified allegation had become an established fact.

Like the Sde Teiman allegation before it, the purpose of this story is clear: to create moral symmetry between the sexual crimes committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and the alleged sexual crimes supposedly committed by Israeli soldiers and settlers against Palestinians—thereby blunting the impact of the October 7 atrocities, which were extensively documented in horrifying detail.

Let us summarize the standard operating procedure of the poison machine:

A Palestinian makes a serious allegation against Israeli soldiers or civilians → despite the absence of evidence, the media and the political left present the allegation as fact → Israel’s reputation is damaged internationally → the police investigate → no evidence is found → the suspects are released.

The cycle repeats itself, time and time again.