On April 28, 2026, The Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian shared a video on social media showing a car running over two Muslim women. Without hesitation, she amplified the claim that the driver was an “Israeli settler” and the victims were “Palestinian” women. She used the opportunity to declare all Israelis “savages.”

After it became clear that the driver was Palestinian, not Israeli, Kasparian doubled down. She insisted that the driver must be Israeli because Israelis commit “genocide, illegal land invasions and rape.” Only after the original poster acknowledged the driver was Palestinian did Kasparian concede the claim was false. And once she could no longer blame an Israeli, she began questioning whether the Palestinian driver had acted intentionally at all.

The episode was revealing not simply because of the false accusation, but because it exposed how quickly anti-Israel narratives are accepted, repeated, and defended even after the facts collapse.

Take Kasparian’s claim of “genocide.” The allegation has been repeated endlessly despite being thoroughly debunked. The Gazan population continues to grow substantially, and Gazans overwhelmingly support a continuation of the conflict against Israel. Whatever one thinks of Israel’s military campaign, the term “genocide” is plainly false.

Her accusation of “illegal land invasions” is no better. Claims circulated by figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene about Israelis seizing Palestinian towns like Bethlehem collapse under basic scrutiny. Jews are not even permitted to enter Palestinian-controlled areas like Bethlehem, let alone live there.

Then there is the accusation of systematic Israeli rape of Palestinians. The claim is rooted largely in a May 2025 report issued by the United Nations. That same UN system has repeatedly promoted claims about Israeli “settler violence” and mass starvation in Gaza that were revealed as false. The sexual violence report itself promised evidence of the “systematic use of sexual and gender-based violence” by Israelis against Palestinians. Yet despite the severity of the accusation, it struggled to produce actual proof.

The report classified incidents such as Israeli forces ordering Muslim women to remove their veils during security inspections as sexual assault. Many of its central allegations involved IDF soldiers forcing captured Hamas terrorists to strip before detention — a common security procedure intended to prevent concealed weapons or explosives. Claims of rape, molestation, and murder relied overwhelmingly on secondhand Palestinian testimony. Despite supposedly hundreds of incidents involving Israeli soldiers and Palestinian detainees, the UN Commission was unable to produce any photos, videos, or forensic evidence showing Israelis committing actual sexual assault against Palestinians.

One of the videos reviewed by the Commission, for example, allegedly showed two men — whom the Commission assumed were Israeli — desecrating the bodies of two Hamas terrorists involved in the October 7 massacre. The men reportedly kicked the corpses, punched them, and urinated on them, which the report categorized as sexual violence.

The report also condemned Israel for humiliating Hamas rapists. According to the Commission, Hamas prisoners who confessed to committing rape and other serious crimes on October 7th were placed in an “extremely vulnerable position” and were “completely subjugated.” After the IDF released videos of these confessions, the Commission argued that doing so violated “due process and fair trial guarantees.”

In other words, the UN appeared more disturbed by the humiliation of Palestinian rapists than by the atrocities they committed.

Meanwhile, the actual record of systematic sexual abuse within Palestinian society — including against both women and children — receives remarkably little international attention.

On April 26, 2026, the Daily Mail reported that children in the Gaza Strip are being sexually abused and exploited as a method of recruitment into Hamas. According to the report, some children attending mosques are assaulted by clerics or religious figures and then manipulated into silence through fear, shame, and blackmail, with the threat that the abuse would be exposed publicly if they refused to cooperate with the terrorist organization.

Another report from April 2026 documented Hamas’ sexual exploitation of Gazan women who turn to charity organizations for food or money.

Despite the gravity of such allegations, commentators like Ana Kasparian who routinely accuse Israel of sexual crimes have shown little interest in condemning or even discussing these reports.

More broadly, rape and gender-based violence in Palestinian society is overlooked, enabled, and even encouraged.

According to the U.S. State Department, neither the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria nor Hamas in Gaza effectively enforce rape laws. The PA has no specific law criminalizing sexual harassment, despite harassment being described as widespread in both Gaza and the West Bank. Women who report abuse or harassment are often blamed by Palestinian authorities for provoking the behavior.

Domestic violence enforcement is similarly weak. Palestinian NGOs have reported that women frequently avoid reporting abuse because they fear retaliation or believe authorities will do nothing. Roughly one in five Palestinian women reported physical abuse from their husbands, with women in Gaza facing significantly higher rates of spousal abuse than women in Judea and Samaria. Yet neither Hamas nor the PA faces sustained international pressure to address these problems transparently.

In fact, both Palestinian governments are notoriously opaque about crime and rape statistics. Searches for Palestinian crime data routinely yield pages focused not on crimes within Palestinian society, but on accusations against Israelis. International institutions and activists who obsessively document alleged Israeli abuses show far less interest in documenting violence, abuse, or systemic failures within Palestinian society itself.

And overshadowing all of this is the reality of October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led Gazans invaded Israel and committed acts of mass murder, torture, kidnapping, rape, and sexual violence against Israeli civilians — men and women alike, living and dead.

Yet despite all of this, Kasparian continues to blindly parrot Hamas narratives about the Gaza conflict. This suggests she is not really opposed to “genocide, illegal land invasions and rape.” She is opposed to Jews defending themselves after those very atrocities are committed against them.

Takeaway

The real scandal is not merely that Ana Kasparian spread a false accusation. It is that she did so reflexively, confidently, and with absolute certainty because the accusation targeted Jews. Even after the claim collapsed, she immediately pivoted to broader accusations of genocide and rape — false allegations that actually apply to Hamas and Palestinians.

Yet Palestinian abuses — including widespread repression, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and even the mass rape carried out on October 7 — are minimized, excused, or ignored altogether.

Kasparian’s reaction was a glimpse into an ideology that treats Jewish self-defense as uniquely illegitimate and views almost any accusation against Israel as inherently believable, no matter how untrue.

Sources

X, X, X, Israel Truth Network, Israel Truth Network, UNHRC, Israel Truth Network, Israel Truth Network, Daily Mail, Daily Mail, Ynet News, US State Department, Israel Truth Network, Piers Morgan Uncensored