Yale newspaper issues retraction after backlash over controversial editor's note on pro-Israel columns

Yale Daily News (YDN), the independent student newspaper and oldest college daily in the country, retracted editor's notes that targeted a pair of recent pro-Israel columns after a huge backlash. The editor's notes took issue with statements in both pieces that "Hamas raped women," calling them "unsubstantiated claims."

An Oct. 12 column by Yale student Sahar Tartak titled, "Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?" was hit with an editor's note without Tartak's initial knowledge, reading, "This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men." 

Another column published on Oct. 13, titled "Stop justifying terrorism," similarly accused the terror group of raping women during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and also had an editor's note added. 

"The News was wrong to publish the corrections," the newspaper later wrote on Tuesday. "By the time of the first correction on Oct. 25, there had been widely reported coverage from outlets such as Reuters publicly verifying that Hamas raped and beheaded Israelis." 

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There have been multiple reports that Hamas terrorists committed rape during their rampage. Israel released footage of one captured attacker who said they were given permission to rape the corpse of a girl, according to The Times of Israel. NBC News reported on "signs of rape" in videos of the attack presented to journalists last week. Military forensic teams in Israel also said they found signs of torture and rape among the victims, according to Reuters.

Additionally, Shani Louk, a German-Israeli citizen who was kidnapped by Hamas and paraded unconscious on the back of a truck, as seen in footage of the Oct. 7 massacre, was discovered dead and beheaded, according to Israeli government officials.

The Yale newspaper wrote that it "failed to ensure that the columnists’ statements were properly cited and attributed" during its editing process because "[a]t the time of the columns’ initial publication, those specific forms of violence during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack were not independently confirmed by the cited source."

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"These corrections erroneously created the impression that, as of late October, there still was not enough publicly available evidence for those horrific acts," the note continued. "The News therefore retracts those editor’s notes in their entirety and without qualification. The notes have been removed from the columns, and the original text has been restored."

The newspaper apologized to its readership for the editorial note, writing that it "was never the News’ intention to minimize the brutality of Hamas’ attack against Israel."

"We are sorry for any unintended consequences to our readership and will ensure that such erroneous and damaging material does not make it into our content, either as opinion or as news," the note concluded, condemning "[t]hreats of violence" that have been "leveled against the News, its editors and their families" this week. 

One of the columnists, Sahar Tartak, recently spoke out about the controversy, writing the initial censorship was a form of "modern-day Holocaust denial."

Tartak told Fox News Digital that the updated note from YDN was a "step forward" for Yale.

"It's a great step forward and an opportunity for the institution to look back on its insidious failure and improve, weeding out the roots of anti-Jewish hatred, Hamas-justification and denial," she wrote. 

Yalies4Palestine and YDN did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

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