NBC reporter Astha Rajvanshi uncritically promotes the Dinah Project's "Quest for Justice" report — reliant on unverified IDF/ZAKA claims debunked by UN's Pramila Patten — while erasing Israel's systematic gender-based violence in Palestine and perpetuating consent for genocide.
Astha Rajvanshi, an NBC News Digital reporter based in London, has contributed to Western media's pattern of atrocity propaganda by platforming the repeatedly deunked Israeli claims of Hamas "sexual violence as a weapon of war."
JOURNALISM
Astha Rajvanshi, an NBC News Digital reporter based in London, has contributed to Western media's pattern of atrocity propaganda by platforming the repeatedly deunked Israeli claims of Hamas "sexual violence as a weapon of war" without speaking on the broader genocide in Palestine or Israel's own documented and well verified use of sexual torture against Palestinians.
Her July 2025 article, "New Israeli report says Hamas used sexual violence as a 'weapon of war' in Oct. 7 attack," headlines the Dinah Project's "A Quest for Justice" as authoritative, citing "eyewitness testimony from at least 17 incidents" and "forensic evidence" — yet omits that the report relies solely on Israeli sources like IDF briefings and ZAKA volunteers, whose graphic claims (e.g., beheaded babies) were debunked early in the war.
This echoes the "mass rape" narrative pushed by Israel to justify its assault on Gaza, which has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — conservative estimates stalled at 40,000-78,000 due to journalist assassinations (over 200 killed) and aid blockades.
Rajvanshi's piece inverts victimhood by amplifying Netanyahu's dismissal of a counter-UN report on Israel's "systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence" in Gaza — including attacks on hospitals causing disproportionate harm to women and children — as an "anti-Israel circus."
This selective outrage dehumanizes Palestinians, framing them as inherent threats while erasing Israel's apartheid documented over 57 years, from West Bank settlements to Gaza's open-air prison. By correcting only a minor detail (changing "rape" to "attempted rape" for a Nova festival survivor) without addressing the report's evidentiary voids, Rajvanshi exemplifies how journalists weaponize unverified hasbara to shield colonial violence.
Her broader NBC work reinforces this: Articles on Gaza focus on Israeli hostages or ceasefires with minimal Palestinian voices, humanizing Jewish suffering while qualifying Palestinian tolls as "Hamas-run" figures — despite their reliability affirmed by the UN and WHO.
In a January 2025 piece on released Israeli soldiers, Rajvanshi details Naama Levy's trauma sympathetically but omits the 2,000+ Palestinian detainees exchanged, many held without charge under apartheid laws.
This imbalance aligns with open letters from over 1,500 U.S. journalists accusing outlets like NBC of "dehumanizing rhetoric" that justifies ethnic cleansing, invoking Islamophobic tropes, and undermining Arab/Muslim perspectives.
Through such reporting, she normalizes settler-colonial subjugation, erasing Nakba legacies and enabling Gaza's famine as "defensive," as Palestinian feminists and global voices decry the selective feminism that silences occupied women's screams.
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🔒Amplified Zionist Lies:
This individual has used their voice and platform to echo and amplify egregious Zionist lies but also perpetuate the subjugation, torture, brutalisation and murder inflicted by the Israeli-occupation of Palestinian and its attempts to erase Palestinian identity, culture, heritage and statehood. [1] [2] [3] [4]
These egregious and dangerous lies MAY include but are not limited to: [5]
Spreading misinformation and hateful propaganda against Palestinians is a deplorable act of dehumanization that directly enables human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and violence against the Palestinian people. [35] [36] [37] [38]
By employing such malicious tactics to deny Palestinian realities and whitewash war crimes, home demolitions and the systematic deprivation of human rights under military occupation, this individual has provided racist cover for 75+ years of subjugation. [39] [[40]] (https://www.un.org/unispal/document/human-rights-situation-in-opt-unohchr-23feb-2024/)
This misinformation doesn't just distort the truth, it actively endangers Palestinian lives and inflames hatred, justifies atrocities like the active genocide and obstructs any path to justice through the wilful erasure of the Palestinian lived experience. [41] [42] [43]
For more information about amplified Zionist lies, please visit:
Weaponizing the Mass Sexual Violence Hoax:
The systematic weaponization of the insidious mass rape hoax enabled by Israeli military intelligence and uncritically amplified by western media represents an egregious and systematic effort to not only slander the Palestinian resistance based on heinous misinformation but seemingly manufacture a pseudojustification for Israel's exterminatory oppression of Palestinians in Gaza that has rightly been condemned as a genocide by human rights groups.
The reality that claims of widespread, systematic rape by Hamas and other Palestinian groups on October 7th were fabricated by Israeli officials and their supporters has been extensively documented by reputable journalists, human rights groups and even the United Nations itself.
As UN Special Representative Pramila Patten admitted, her team "did not find anything like" the horrific fabrications of "objects like knives inserted in the genitalia" that were widely circulated, labeling them "inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations by some non-professionals." Her report stated bluntly: "In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified."
In fact, the mass rape hoax weaponized by Israel is characterized by distorted witness accounts, lack of photographic/video proof, contradictory claims that unraveled under scrutiny, and the reliance on discredited sources with ties to Israeli military intelligence.
The unraveling of this insidious hoax is only further exemplified by The New York Times itself being forced to debunk one of the most horrific allegations from its own prior reporting. Video evidence revealed that claims of two Israeli teenagers being sexually assaulted were completely false, showing "the bodies of three female victims fully clothed and with no apparent signs of sexual violence."
This harrowing hoax has been laid bare by comprehensive reports from organizations like Mondoweiss, The Grayzone, and even the UN special representative on sexual violence Pramila Patten — all of whom have debunked sensational stories, highlighted the lack of any credible evidence and exposed how this propaganda was weaponized to drum up support for Israel's relentless assault on Gaza.
For more detailed reporting, please read:
Quotes:
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