What the media still misses about October 7 — and why it still matters

 For decades, the conflict had unspoken boundaries. October 7 shattered them. The media still refuses to see.

Without recognizing what changed, the present moment will remain illegible.

On October 7, 2023, the world awoke to a nightmare: gunmen in a pickup truck chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they sat atop Shani Louk’s battered body.

Was this still Hamas, or had Hamas become ISIS?

Then came the unmistakable answer: reports of rape, torture, executions, beheadings, and abductions amid the wholesale slaughter at the Nova music festival.

As the scale of the predations came into view, it became clear that mass rape was premeditated—part of a plan that included outfitting attackers with bodycams. This wasn’t brutality run amok; it was the announcement of a monstrous new doctrine.

October 7 marked the first time in the conflict between Israel and Hamas that sexual violence was used as a weapon of war. That fact was clearly newsworthy—it should have called the standard script into question. Yet nearly two years later, it still hasn’t been acknowledged by the mainstream media. Israelis know that Hamas shattered a boundary that had held for decades. But how many outside Israel even know that boundary existed?

This is essential context for understanding the ensuing war. It’s one thing to say, “The massacre included premeditated mass rape and sexualized torture.” It’s another to say, “The massacre included premeditated mass rape and sexualized torture in a conflict where sexual violence had long been off limits.” The second framing reveals that October 7 wasn’t just a brutal escalation—it was a civilizational rupture.

What if that had been the story?

Had that framing shaped early coverage, it might have cut through the reflexive calls for a symmetrical response. It might also have disrupted Hamas’s most effective tactic: turning suffering into leverage—counting on images of destruction to eclipse memories of the massacre—until Israel faced overwhelming pressure to halt its campaign with Hamas still standing.

Had the rupture remained front and center, it might have been harder for the world to forget why Israel was fighting in the first place when wartime images from Gaza began streaming in.

A line erased

A rare exception underscores how sharp the break was. In 2019, Ori Steinbacher, 19, was raped and murdered while hiking near Jerusalem. Her killer, Arafat Irfaiya of Hebron, confessed. He had Hamas ties and cited a “nationalistic motive,” yet the group neither took credit nor paid him the usual terrorist stipend.

That silence spoke volumes. For all its brutality, Hamas had observed a tacit prohibition on sexual violence. Without that restraint, Israel would never have given thousands of Gazans work permits following Hamas’s supposed moderation in 2021. And the creators of Fauda—Israel’s most hard-edged political thriller—would not have scripted a plot with a female captive if they’d regarded sexual violence as plausible.

Steinbacher’s murder was a singular breach—a grim exception to an unspoken code of restraint. Hamas’s silence affirmed that the code existed. But the breach itself suggested that the global norms sustaining it were already beginning to fray.

We can’t grasp the shock Israelis felt on October 7 without first recognizing the boundary that had been shattered. Nor can we ask what emboldened the attackers to cross that boundary. Part of the answer lies in the evolution of jihadist groups like the Islamic State. But part of it lies closer to home: the West had changed. Proof arrived on American campuses the next day.

No longer disqualifying

Ten years ago, we could not have imagined Hamas terrorists raping, mutilating, and burning families in their homes—breaking the seal that kept history’s worst nightmares locked in the past. It would have been harder still to imagine elite students and faculty celebrating these crimes as they unfolded. Their institutional forebears would have bristled at the suggestion—had anyone dared make it—that they were people who would openly thrill to reports of unbridled sadism. Perhaps even many Hamas officials would have angrily denied that their organization would sexually abuse female captives.

Nor could we have foreseen academic feminists issuing an open letter accusing Israel of “weaponizing” the charge of rape. Or journalism faculty, citing a disingenuous and easily debunked Intercept article (see also here and here), calling for an investigation into a long-overdue New York Times exposé on Hamas’s use of sexual violence. Or a centrist platform like The Hill’s Rising becoming a key node in the rape denial campaign.

On October 8, many were stunned to see the once-bright moral line around sexual violence dimmed in spaces where the phrases “gender-based violence” and “campus rape culture” were solemnly invoked. But Hamas had already taken note. Through networked intermediaries, its leadership sensed such crimes were no longer disqualifying—if the victims were labeled “oppressors.”

The campus eruption was long in the making—an autoimmune response to the West’s perceived evils, with Israel and Jews as their ultimate incarnations. What better way to repudiate Western civilization than to scorn its inviolable norms? Don’t glorify a massacre. Don’t dehumanize the victims, assault Jewish classmates, or block their access to campus. Once self-evident, now cast aside. In the “settler colonial” narrative of Palestinian victimhood, campus protesters found permission to trample those norms.

The permission ran both ways. Hostility toward the West—and a singular fixation on Israel—was cultivated not only in academia and media, but in government, NGOs, professional associations, and even late-night comedy. That animus gave Hamas license to shred the conflict’s unspoken rules. And Hamas needed that license: international opinion was central to its long-term strategy of isolating and destroying Israel.

At bottom, the tacit understanding was a pact between Hamas and its global media counterparts, who needed to frame its atrocities as the desperate acts of an underdog. The underdog might blow himself up in a teen dance club—even that somehow fit the morality tale. But there were still limits. The underdog could not be seen forcing a bloodied, bound 19-year-old, still in her pajamas, into a waiting jeep. That image would have broken the spell.

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