On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,100 Israelis. The depths of Hamas’s sadism are almost too sickening to comprehend. Babies and children butchered. Parents murdered in front of their children. Families bound together and then burned alive. Others were tortured, and their bodies mutilated while both alive and dead.

Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to acknowledge the widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women that day.

Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them. “Believe women” and “Silence is violence” have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims.

Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation.

Israel’s critics have insisted that a lack of firsthand accounts from rape survivors or forensic evidence undercut Israel’s accusations—and have dismissed claims that systematic sexual violence occurred as “unsubstantiated.” Others have accused the Israeli government of “weaponizing” accusations of rape to justify Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.

News outlets that reported on the violence were fiercely attacked. For example, in late December, The New York Times published an investigation that thoroughly detailed the evidence of mass, systematic sexual violence. The story drew an immediate response from Hamas, in language echoing that used by Western activists. “We categorically deny such allegations,” Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, “and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Stridently anti-Israel independent journalists and activists immediately tried to pick apart the Times story, which culminated in late February with the publication of a more-than-6,000-word exposé by the left-wing outlet The Intercept that accused the Times of flawed reporting. The left-wing magazine The Nation accused the Times of “the biggest failure of journalism” since the paper’s reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War; the leftist YES! magazine claimed, “There is no evidence mass rape occurred.”  

Considering the vitriolic attacks against Israel since October 7, none of this should come as a surprise. The bloodied and dismembered bodies of dead Israelis had barely been collected before accusations of genocide were being levied by anti-Israel activists. Six months later, such denouncements are routine.

Across the United States and Western Europe, criticism of Israel’s actions quickly and predictably veered into rank anti-Semitism, with Jewish organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and individual Jews targeted by pro-Palestine activists because of Israel’s actions.

[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of American Jews is ending]

But rape denialism falls into its own separate and bewildering category. Why have so many of Israel’s critics—and pro-Palestine activists—chosen to fight on this hill?

Many insist, like the feminists who signed the open letter, that they are questioning claims used to justify a war they oppose. But there is also a disquieting sense that pro-Palestine activists believe they must defend Hamas. Accusations of systematic rape and sadistic sexual violence not only tarnish the terrorist group, but also undermine the notion that October 7 was legitimate “armed resistance” against Israeli occupation.

Instead of believing women, these activists have chosen to take the word of a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians and that has constantly denied that any sexual assaults occurred on October 7.

Six months into the war in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States are so fully invested in the cause of Palestinian liberation, for which Hamas claims to be fighting—and so steeped in their hatred of Israel—that they are casting aside the progressive ideals that they regularly invoke when castigating Israel. In doing so, they are exposing themselves as hypocrites whose ideology is not forged in a set of universal values but rather is situational and dependent on ethnicity or skin color.

Rape denialism also feeds the widely held belief among Israelis that non-Jews refuse to acknowledge the horrors of October 7—and that the world is hopelessly biased against them. At the same time, it excuses Hamas’s actions and perpetuates the notion that Palestinians have little agency or responsibility for the continuation of a 75-year-old conflict with no end in sight. It pushes both sides to retreat to their respective corners, unwilling to see the humanity in the other, and makes the long-term goal of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.

Orit Sulitzeanu is the director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an NGO that serves as a coordinating body for the country’s nine rape-crisis centers. As she tells every reporter who calls her, ARCCI does not work for or receive money from the Israeli government.  

In the days and weeks after October 7, ARCCI began getting “trickles of information” from doctors and therapists who were encountering survivors of sexual violence. “Everyone talks to us, and the community of therapists in Israel is small,” Sulitzeanu told me. The calls were intended not to alert ARCCI but rather to ask, “What do we do?”

As Sulitzeanu told me, Israel has virtually no experience with rape during wartime: “No one could imagine what happened, actually happened.” Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, told me that Israel was so unprepared for the onslaught of sexual-abuse cases on October 7 that during the intake process in Israeli hospitals, women who survived the Hamas massacre were not even asked if they had been sexually assaulted.  

Quickly, ARCCI began holding webinars to help therapists understand the special characteristics of sexual violence in wartime. And as time went on, Sulitzeanu and her staff noticed that the stories they were hearing were remarkably consistent.  

The group put together a report combining the information it was receiving (mainly from eyewitnesses and first responders) with media reporting in Israel and around the world. “Hamas’s attack on October 7th included brutal sexual assaults carried out systematically and deliberately against Israeli civilians,” it concluded. “Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence.”

The report’s section titles tell the story in even more vivid and disturbing detail:

“Systematic Use of Brutal Violence to Commit Rape”

“Multiple Abusers/Gang Rape”

“Rape in the Presence of Family/Community Members”

“Sexual Offenses of Males”

“Execution During or After the Rape”

“Binding and Tying”

“Mutilation and Destruction of Genital Organs”

“Insertion of Weapons in Intimate Areas”

“Destruction and Mutilation of the Body”

The next month, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict reached similar conclusions, although without using the word systematic. After a two-and-a-half-week mission to Israel, the UN body concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks.”

The UN report does not ascribe responsibility to Hamas and relies on careful, qualified, legalistic language. But Halperin-Kaddari believes the UN report should be applauded. It is, she says, the “most accurate and comprehensive” accounting of the sexual violence that took place that day—and she praised it, in particular, for verifying accounts when possible but also debunking allegations that were not true.  

Halperin-Kaddari noted that investigators “found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.”

This systematic nature of the abuse is obvious from both reports. For example, ARCCI recounts the eyewitness testimony of one survivor who said that the Nova music festival was an “apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.” In addition, it notes that “several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape” as well as accounts from first responders of bodies unclothed and bleeding heavily from the pelvic area, and genital mutilation.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

The UN report draws a similar conclusion, finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape, gang rape, and the sexual abuse of female corpses occurred at the Nova festival.

At Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri, the UN found evidence that female victims had been undressed, bound, and killed (though the mission team “was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri”). In its investigation at Kibbutz Re’em, the UN said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred … including rape.” On Road 232, a key escape route from the music festival, the UN found “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred,” including “the rape of two women.” In addition, “along this road, several bodies were found with genital injuries, along with injuries to other body parts.”

At an Israel Defense Forces base overrun by Hamas terrorists, there were, according to media stories cited in the ARCCI report, dead soldiers shot in the genitals and as many as 10 female soldiers with clear evidence of sexual assault. The UN report is more circumspect on this issue, saying that reports of genital mutilation are “inconclusive.” But Halperin-Kaddari told me that she saw documentation showing that victims had had weapons fired into their sexual organs.

Both reports also agree that hostages released from Hamas’s captivity had been, in the words of the UN special representative, subjected to “sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” The UN report also concluded that violence may be “ongoing” against the approximately 100 hostages, including young women, still held in Gaza. In its response to the Times story, Hamas pointed to the treatment of Israeli hostages, whom they insisted were being well cared for: “If the Hamas resistance fighters held such ideas of sex violence, they would mistreat those who were in their captivity,” a Hamas representative wrote in a lengthy Telegram post at the time. Recently, however, The New York Times published a firsthand account of sexual assault and torture from an Israeli hostage released from Hamas captivity in November.

For Shelly Tal Meron, a member of the Israeli Knesset for the opposition Yesh Atid party, the indifference of once-former feminist allies to the sexual violence on October 7 has been acutely painful. “I sent letters to UN Women, as well as #MeToo and human-rights organizations,” she told me. The response was “complete silence. I was astonished.”

“Before the war,” she said, “I was a member of the Knesset’s women’s-rights movement. I would fight for gender equality and I would work with international organizations. Whenever [attacks on women] happened in other countries like Ukraine or Syria, I felt solidarity.” In the aftermath of October 7, she said, “I felt completely betrayed.”

What is most galling about the pushback on allegations of mass rape is that it is precisely the lack of firsthand accounts and forensic evidence—as well as the initial fog of war—that has opened the door to rape denialists. As Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate, told me, denialists are “capitalizing on the stigma and shame of sexual assault—and often frustrating lack of evidence in these situations.”

That, according to the feminist author Jill Filipovic, is hardly an unusual circumstance. “Sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen,” Filipovic wrote on her Substack last December. “The Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator.”

Complicating matters further is the particular emphasis in Jewish law on expeditious burial. Sulitzeanu told me that those at the army base who were preparing bodies for burial had “no capacity to keep the evidence from those killed.” The “first priority,” she said, “was to save living people. Second, to collect bodies. Third, identify them and prepare for burial.” Everything else, including proving that widespread rapes had taken place, was secondary.

There is also the distressing reality that so few of Hamas’s rape victims survived. Some were dispatched with a bullet to the head after they’d been assaulted.  

The handful of survivors of rape during the attacks on October 7 have, so far, been unwilling to speak publicly. ARCCI has been so adamant in safeguarding them that Sulitzeanu refused to confirm that her association had spoken with them or that their stories were included in the group’s report. The survivors refused multiple requests to meet with the UN mission team, which the UN report chalked up in part to “the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public.”

The latter fear is almost certainly a direct by-product of the response to the New York Times story—headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Buttressed by interviews with more than 150 “witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors,” as well as “video footage, photographs,” and “GPS data from mobile phones,” the story features allegations of sexual violence, including eyewitness accounts. It was the most authoritative investigation by a major American news outlet and should have dealt a major blow to the efforts at denialism and deflection.

But as soon as the Times article appeared, so, too, did the pushback. Much of it came from journalists with a long track record of animosity toward Israel, but it reached a crescendo in late February when The Intercept published its story.

What is most striking about the exhaustive Intercept article is the apparent dearth of original reporting. There is little indication that the authors made any serious effort to contact Israeli government officials, the leaders of Israeli NGOs, or—with three exceptions—even the specific individuals who are named in their story and whose credibility they malign. Instead, The Intercept focuses its inquiry on a freelance Israeli journalist who helped report the story, Anat Schwartz, scrutinizing her social-media activity and parsing a Hebrew-language podcast interview to attack her credibility and, by extension, the credibility of the story as a whole.

The Intercept also sought to chip away at the Times article by focusing on alleged inconsistencies—a process that is easier than it seems when it comes to reporting on sexual violence. After a terrorist attack that killed more than 1,100 Israelis over multiple locations, misinformation ran rampant. False stories, one infamously alleging that multiple babies had been beheaded and another claiming that babies had been strung up on a clothesline, proliferated. In cases of sexual violence, Halperin-Kadderi told me, “it’s not unusual for misinformation to spread,” and beyond trauma-related inaccuracies and memory failures, there could be a tendency “to exaggerate and amplify,” which she links to the high levels of trauma associated with sexual violence—both for survivors and for eyewitnesses. She also noted that exaggerated accounts of sexual violence can be “instrumentalized by leaders to portray their enemy in the darkest way possible.” Even Jeremy Scahill, one of the co-authors of the Intercept article, noted in an interview that inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts do “not necessarily mean that they didn’t witness something.”

[Read: Hamas’s genocidal intentions were never a secret]

But The Intercept, in its effort to undermine the credibility of witnesses to sexual violence on October 7, painted with a broad brush, creating an inaccurate picture. The flaws in its approach are perhaps best illustrated by the complicated case of Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist who served in the army unit responsible for preparing female bodies for burial and whose testimony Schwartz said helped convince her that there had been widespread sexual violence on October 7.

In the weeks after the attack, Mendes worked 12-hour shifts cleaning and preparing bodies for burial. In an emotional and graphic speech delivered at the United Nations on December 4, Mendes related what she and her team saw: women shot so many times in the head, sometimes after death, that their faces were practically obliterated; multiple women with gunshots in their vagina and breasts; faces permanently cast in distress and anguish.

In an interview in October, though, Mendes told the Daily Mail that “a baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded, and then the mother was beheaded.” That was not true. However, Mendes was neither the first person nor the only person to make this allegation. A video falsely claiming to show such an atrocity had made the rounds on social media in the days before the interview was published, and similar claims were promoted by a first responder.

Ryan Grim, another co-author of the Intercept article, told me that such “demonstrable fabrications” had “thoroughly discredited” Mendes, and the article notes that “she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape” (a point that Mendes has publicly acknowledged). The Intercept story questions why the Times would “rely on Mendes’s testimony,” and in an interview last month, Scahill suggested that Mendes is among the Times’ “premiere witnesses.” But in fact, Mendes is quoted a single time in “Screams Without Words,” relaying her account of having seen four women “with signs of sexual violence, including some with ‘a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.’” Mendes’s claims are backed up by a second witness, an army captain working at the same facility, who added the horrifying detail that “she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood.”

The Intercept story fails to mention any of this, and it provides no indication that its reporters attempted to speak with Mendes. (I reached out to Mendes, who declined to comment.) Instead, it criticizes the Times for quoting “witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials.”

The Intercept has applied useful scrutiny to some specific claims within the Times story. One of the accounts of apparent sexual assault relayed by the Times came from a paramedic in an Israeli commando unit who said he had discovered the bodies of two teenagers at Kibbutz Be’eri. A March 4 article in The Intercept concluded that two victims “specifically singled out by the New York Times … were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” and the Times has since updated its story to note that a video of the scene appears to contradict the paramedic’s account.

But that skepticism is not limited to individual witnesses or accounts. The Intercept concedes that “individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred” but is quick to add that “rape is not uncommon in war.” It raises doubts about the extent to which Hamas members were responsible for attacks, noting that “there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day.” (It is not usually the left that tries to blur the distinction between Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian civilians.) The central question, The Intercept contends, is whether the Times “presented solid evidence” to back the claim that, as the newspaper put it, “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” And it devotes more than 6,000 words to calling into doubt that it did.

Yet The Intercept made no mention of independent efforts to answer this question. There is no reference to the ARCCI report—published a week before The Intercept’s story—which relied on 26 separate media reports from the Israeli press, The Guardian, the BBC, The Times of London, and other outlets, as well as confidential sources, eyewitnesses, and interviews with first responders. Neither does it mention a November 2023 report by Physicians for Human Rights, which concluded that “widespread sexual and gender-based crimes” had taken place on October 7. (Asked for comment, Grim dismissed these reports as “derivative of Western news reports and based on the same sources.”)

The Times published a follow-up story on January 29, addressing many of the questions raised by critics of its article. Even in light of criticisms of the piece, the Times said in a recent statement that it continues to stand by its coverage “and the revelations of sexual violence and abuse following the attack by Hamas.”

The UN mission team similarly concluded that the existence of a few false allegations did not undermine the other evidence of sexual violence in “at least three locations” on October 7. Nor did it limit its inquiry to searching for inconsistencies, paying attention only to those claims it had some reason to doubt. Instead, the investigators took pains to carefully review the scenes, to talk to eyewitnesses and first responders, and to assess the evidence in its totality before presenting the conclusion that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred.”

Semafor’s Max Tani recently reported that The Intercept “is running out of cash,” and that Grim and Scahill had suggested that its board resign and turn operations over to them and the remaining staff. But the publication’s skeptical coverage of the war has apparently been a bright spot for its financial health. “The Intercept’s unapologetically hostile view of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military operation in Gaza has galvanized its readers and supporters,” Tani wrote, “who have responded by helping the publication set internal records for small-dollar donations.”

Grim refused to say whether he believes that Israeli women were raped on October 7 and, if so, whether any of these assaults were committed by Hamas members. (His two co-authors did not respond to any questions.) Instead, he said he had “addressed these questions repeatedly” and pointed to an interview in which he had said that “the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands war and violence.”  

Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.

The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.

But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.

The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as “part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.” “Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,” Elman said, and “this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.”

One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.

Natalia Melman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. “There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,” she told me, “to centering ‘white feminism’ or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.” By this logic, white feminism is inherently “problematic”—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they “see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to ‘white feminism.’”

Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led some pro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s “unhinged,” Petrzela said, “but in some ways totally predictable.”

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”

Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7  have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.

Frankly, none of these efforts to whitewash the carnage of October 7 makes much sense. You can acknowledge Hamas’s barbarism while still condemning Israel’s military response or criticizing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, many have done precisely that, including the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. You can raise questions about specific rape allegations—as the UN report did—while still accepting the overall weight of the evidence.

[Read: Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]

Instead, many on the left seem determined to justify what happened on October 7 as a legitimate act of Palestinian resistance. “The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,” one American professor recently wrote. But acknowledging Hamas’s atrocities doesn’t invalidate Palestinian demands for self-determination. You can still embrace Palestinian nationalism and, unlike Hamas, advocate for a two-state solution while also acknowledging that Hamas’s actions on October 7—including the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls—are simply not defensible. Leftists who genuinely support Palestinian statehood do that cause, and themselves, no favor by denying the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence.

The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good.

Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures.

As pro-Palestinian activists rightly demand that Israel come to grips with how its policies breed humiliation and desperation among Palestinians, so too must supporters of the Palestinian cause face the reality that rejectionism and terrorism have contributed to Israeli fears that peaceful coexistence is not possible.

When such activists surrender their ideals and dismiss the evidence that sexual violence took place on October 7, they feed the already overwhelming belief among Israelis and Diaspora Jews that those who advocate for the Palestinians and witheringly criticize Israel’s actions are simply not interested in their humanity.

Any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must start by recognizing not just the lived reality of Jews and Palestinians, but the abundant feelings of trauma and fear that have made reconciliation so difficult to achieve. Rape denialism pushes Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It isn’t just wrong; it doesn’t just diminish the trauma experienced by Israeli women on October 7—it makes the pursuit of peace and genuine reconciliation impossible.

Shares of Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation dropped more than 6% Tuesday following a report that the Department of Justice is preparing to sue the company for alleged antitrust violations.

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Cordelia Saunders remembers 2021, the year she and her husband, Nathan, found out that they’d likely been drinking tainted water for more than 30 years. A neighbor’s 20 peach trees had finally matured that summer, and perfect-looking peaches hung from their branches. Cordelia watched the fruit drop to the ground and rot: Her neighbor didn’t dare eat it.

The Saunderses’ home, in Fairfield, Maine, is in a quiet, secluded spot, 50 minutes from the drama of the rocky coast and an hour and 15 minutes from the best skiing around. It’s also sitting atop a plume of poison.

For decades, sewage sludge was spread on the corn fields surrounding their house, and on hundreds of other fields across the state. That sludge is suspected to have been tainted with PFAS, a group of man-made compounds that cause a litany of ailments, including kidney and prostate cancers, fertility loss, and developmental disorders. The Saunderses’ property is on one of the most contaminated roads in a state just waking up to the extent of an invisible crisis.

Onur Apul, an environmental engineer at the University of Maine and the head of its initiative to study PFAS solutions, told me that in his opinion, the United States has seen “nothing as overwhelming, and nothing as universal” as the PFAS crisis. Even the DDT crisis of the 1960s doesn’t compare, he said: DDT was used only as an insecticide and could be banned by banning that single use. PFAS are used in hundreds of products across industries and consumer sectors. Their nearly 15,000 variations can help make pans nonstick, hiking clothes and plumber’s tape waterproof, and dental floss slippery. They’re in performance fabrics on couches, waterproof mascara, tennis rackets, ski wax. Destroying them demands massive inputs of energy: Their fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable bond in organic chemistry.

“It’s a reality for everyone; it’s just a matter of whether they know about it,” Apul said. As soon as any place in the U.S. does look squarely at PFAS, it will find the chemicals lurking in the blood of its constituents—in one report, 97 percent of Americans registered some level—and perhaps also in their water supply or farm soils. And more will have to look: Yesterday the Biden administration issued the first national PFAS drinking-water standards and gave public drinking-water systems three years to start monitoring them. The EPA expects thousands of those systems to have PFAS levels above the new standards, and to take actions to address the contamination. Maine is one step ahead in facing PFAS head-on—but also one step ahead in understanding just how hard that is.

Cordelia and Nathan both remember the dump trucks rumbling up the road. They’d stop right across the street every year and disgorge a black slurry—fertilizer, the Saunderses assumed at the time, that posed no particular bother. Now they know that the state approved spreading 32,900 cubic yards of sewage sludge—or more than 2,000 dump-truck loads—within a quarter mile of their house, and that the sludge came in large part from a local paper company. Now they wonder about that slurry.

Maine has a long, proud history as a papermaking state and a long, tortured history with the industry’s toxic legacy, most notably from dioxin. In the 1960s, another group of compounds—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS—began to be used in the papermaking process. The chemicals were miracle workers: A small amount of PFAS could make paper plates and food containers both grease-proof and water-resistant.

Then, in the ’80s, the state encouraged spreading sewage sludge on fields as fertilizer, a seemingly smart use of an otherwise cumbersome by-product of living, hard to manage in a landfill. In principle, human manure can sub in for animal manure without much compromise. But in reality, sludge often contains a cocktail of chemical residues. “We concentrate them in sludge and then spread them over where we grow food. The initial idea is not great,” Apul told me. The Saunderses first found out that the sludge-spreading had contaminated their water after the state found high PFAS levels in milk from a dairy farm two miles away. Maine’s limit for six kinds of PFAS was 20 parts per trillion; state toxicologists found so much in the Saunderses’ well water that when Nathan worked out the average of all the tests taken in 2021, it came to 14,800 parts per trillion, he told me.

Nathan used to work as an engineer for Maine’s drinking-water-safety program, and he quickly pieced together the story of their street’s contamination and just how bad it was. After state researchers tested their blood, Nathan remembers, a doctor told him that his levels of one PFAS were so high, they had hit the maximum the test could reliably report—2,000 micrograms per liter. So far, he’s healthy, but he feels like he’s living on borrowed time. Diseases related to environmental exposures can take decades to emerge, and although studies show that PFAS may degrade health at a population level, why some individuals fall ill and others don’t isn’t always clear. Cordelia told me that the neighbor who wouldn’t eat the peaches is now on three medications for high cholesterol (which has been linked to PFAS), and that other neighbors have bladder or brain cancer.

Cordelia’s PFAS blood levels were lower than Nathan’s—but still high enough to make the Saunderses rethink the past decade of their life. In 2010, when she was an otherwise healthy and active 50-year-old, Cordelia went into kidney failure; Nathan donated the kidney that now keeps her body going. Back then, her doctor told her that her body’s failure to suppress an infection had likely caused her kidney crisis. And PFAS exposure is linked with lowered immune response.

Since PFAS were first detected on a dairy farm in 2016, Maine has been trying to uncover the extent of the contamination. The state’s environmental department kept records of the sludge-spreading, and those records show that, over more than two and a half decades, paper-product companies were directly responsible for spreading more than 500,000 cubic yards of waste, the Portland Press Herald has reported. More was routed through water-treatment facilities; the sludge spread near the Saunderses’ house came from the Kennebec Sanitary Treatment District, which got a sizable portion of its waste from the nearby paper-products manufacturer, now owned by Huhtamaki, a Finland-based company. Because we all ingest some amount of PFAS in our daily life, human wastewater can also have high levels of contamination.

Maine has been trying to stem the impacts of the contamination too. The Saunderses and their neighbors all got whole-house filters installed, and the PFAS levels in their water immediately became undetectable. The state has initiated relief funds for farmers whose land has been poisoned by compounds that have infiltrated the milk and grain they’ve sold to their customers and eaten themselves for years. No one really knows the extent of the health problems linked to PFAS in the state.

The state did ban products containing PFAS—it was the first to do so—but the ban won’t go into effect until 2030, which to Cordelia seems like a long time to wait. She feels in her body the price of contamination: The medication that protects her transplanted kidney is causing her to lose her hearing in one ear, and her bone density. At 64, she has real trouble walking a mile. “When things are out of your control, what are you going to do?” she told me. “We’re all going to die. I’m probably going to die sooner than I would have.” But she still has to clean the house and make dinner. She’s still alive to spend time with her sons and her seven grandchildren. She likes to focus on that.

Nathan is less equanimous about it. He’s suing the paper companies; the charges against some of the original defendants have been dismissed, but the case against Huhtamaki remains open. (The company did not respond to a request for comment on Nathan’s lawsuit, but in a statement to The Atlantic, it said it no longer intentionally adds PFAS to its manufacturing process, and noted that “several” paper mills in Maine have used PFAS in their products. “In Waterville, as in all locations, we comply with all applicable environmental and product safety laws and regulations. We will continue to be engaged to help with the state’s inquiry as needed,” the company wrote.)

Nathan’s is just one of hundreds of similar cases that legal experts expect to erupt from the new findings. Such cases might someday get people like him recompense, but they won’t make the PFAS go away.

So far, other states have taken a different approach to PFAS. Virginia, for instance, kept permitting sludge-spreading even after environmentalists had loudly raised concerns about the chemicals’ impacts, though the state did begin requiring industries to test for PFAS in their waste stream last year. Alabama has reportedly rejected pleas by environmental groups to begin testing for the compounds. Because Maine is the first state to try to mitigate PFAS this thoroughly, it is also the first to confront PFAS’ particular bind: What do you do with a pollutant you can’t destroy? After Maine banned sludge-spreading in 2022, slurry began to pile up precariously at the state landfill. Casella Waste Systems, the landfill operator, first tried exporting it to Canadian provinces where no law addressed PFAS in land-spread fertilizers. The trucks went to Quebec, then New Brunswick, until pushback in both places stopped the toxic exports; now Casella Waste Systems says it is temporarily stabilizing its landfill by mixing sludge with dry waste. Overall, the sludge-management situation, per a state report, remains “very challenging and uncertain.”

In the state’s northern reaches, PFAS contamination came from a different source— Aqueous Film Forming Foam, which the U.S. Air Force once used to extinguish jet-fuel fires at Loring Air Force base and which relies on PFAS for its fire-suppressing power. Long after the base closed, the Mi’kmaq Nation acquired part of the land; the water was undrinkable, and the soil was so full of PFAS that state officials advised the tribe not to eat the deer that grazed there. It is effectively unusable land.

In 2019, the Mi’kmaq Nation partnered with the nonprofit Upland Grassroots to try to clean up the land using hemp. Hemp plants have thick stems that can grow more than 10 feet in a single season, theoretically the perfect plant body type for hoovering up and squirreling away lots of poisonous chemicals. The results of the first test run last year were disappointing: A maximum of 2 percent of the PFAS was removed from soil in the most successful area. Still, no better technology exists to do more than this, Sara Nason, an environmental chemist who provided scientific guidance for the project, told me. The plan is to continue planting hemp; it’s better than doing nothing, though the hemp will take decades to clean the soil, and no one knows exactly what to do with the chemical-loaded plants once they’re harvested.

Several labs across the country are trying to find a way to unmake these chemicals, using foam fractionation, soil washing, mineralization, electron-beam radiation. David Hanigan, an environmental engineer at the University of Nevada at Reno, is studying whether burning PFAS at ultrahigh temperatures can break the carbon-fluorine bond completely. He once thought that PFAS researchers were out of their minds to be testing such wildly expensive solutions, he told me. But he’s realized that PFAS are just that tough, and as a scientist, he thinks the original manufacturers of PFAS must have understood that. “It’s upsetting from an organic-chemistry standpoint,” he told me. Any chemist would have known that these compounds would persist in the environment, he said. Indeed, an investigation by The Intercept found that DuPont, among the original manufacturers of the compounds, did know, and for decades tried to obscure the harms the chemicals posed, something the UN Human Rights Council also contends. DuPont has consistently denied wrongdoing, and recently settled a lawsuit for $1.18 billion, helping create a fund for public water districts to address PFAS contamination. (In a statement to The Atlantic, a spokesperson for DuPont described the current company’s history of corporate reorganization, and wrote that “to implicate DuPont de Nemours in these past issues ignores this corporate evolution.”)

Hanigan does think this engineering problem of PFAS will be solved, eventually. “We can do it,” he said. But he wonders what else we might have been able to do with that amount of human effort. And until chemists and engineers can undo PFAS, more places will start to see that they’re caught in a cycle in which these compounds move from water to soil to bodies to water. A few states, such as Connecticut, have regulations against land-spreading sewage sludge; instead, they incinerate it, likely at temperatures below what’s needed to destroy PFAS’ strong bond. Most states have no such prohibition. Michigan, another state with a history of spreading sludge on farmland, has found PFAS in its beef. In Texas, farmers recently sued a waste-treatment giant alleging that it knew or should have known that its sludge had PFAS in it.

The federal government’s new rules, though, will force the country as a whole to measure, then confront, the scale of our PFAS problem. Like the Saunderses, people across the country are likely to soon discover that they’ve been drinking PFAS-contaminated water for years and begin wondering what it has cost them.

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic won the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards.

Below is a list of the stories that received recognition from the American Society of Magazine Editors:

Winner: Profile Writing

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic

By Tim Alberta

CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?

Winner: Columns and Essays

The Ones We Sent Away

Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Courtesy of Rona Senior.

By Jennifer Senior

For The Atlantic’s September 2023 issue, Senior wrote about her aunt Adele, who was institutionalized as a toddler because of an intellectual disability, and the life she could have lived.

Winner: Reviews and Criticism

“The Death of the Sex Scene,” “Porn Set Women Up From the Start,” and “Madonna Forever”

Starz

By Sophie Gilbert

A collection of probing essays exploring womanhood in pop culture.

Finalist:  Feature Writing

Jenisha From Kentucky

Didier Viodé

By Jenisha Watts

When Watts moved to New York to pursue journalism, she hid her past. For The Atlantic’s October 2023 cover story, she wrote about her tumultuous childhood in Kentucky, and the freedom that writing offered her.

Finalist: Single-Topic Issue:

To Reconstruct the Nation

Jon Key

The Atlantic’s December 2023 issue was led by Vann R. Newkirk II and included pieces from Lonnie G. Bunch III, Drew Gilpin Faust, Eric Foner, Adam Harris, Peniel E. Joseph, Vann R. Newkirk II, and Jordan Virtue on America’s most radical experiment. Plus: a new play by Anna Deavere Smith, David W. Blight annotates Frederick Douglass, and more.

Winner: Best Print Illustration

Jenisha From Kentucky

Didier Viodé

Illustration by Didier Viodé

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious category in the annual honors from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

The Atlantic also won reporting awards for “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” by staff writer Tim Alberta; “The Ones We Sent Away,” the September cover by staff writer Jennifer Senior; and cultural reviews and criticism by staff writer Sophie Gilbert. It also was a finalist for “Jenisha From Kentucky,” the October cover story by senior editor Jenisha Watts; and “To Reconstruct the Nation,” a special issue in December that reexamined Reconstruction and the enduring consequences of its failure.

Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg said: “Once again, our team has shown themselves to be the best in the business. It is deeply gratifying to receive this recognition again.”

More on the winners and finalists follows:

Staff writer Tim Alberta won in Profile Writing for “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” an in-depth profile of CNN’s former CEO Chris Licht. Alberta had been meeting with Licht throughout the course of his tenure, and for this story spoke with nearly 100 CNN staffers. The report was explosive and dominated news cycles.

In Reviews and Criticism, staff writer Sophie Gilbert won for three articles: “The Death of the Sex Scene,” “Porn Set Women Up From the Start,” and “Madonna Forever.” Gilbert was also a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, and is the author of the recent Atlantic Edition title On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice, which is a timely, probing essay collection of her writings exploring womanhood in pop culture.

Staff writer Jennifer Senior won in the Columns & Essays category for “The Ones We Sent Away,” which was the cover of the September 2023 issue. Senior unraveled the story of her aunt Adele, who was born in 1951 with various intellectual disabilities and was sent away to an institution when she was younger than 2 years old. Senior then explored the ways in which the improved care and facilities in the latter part of Adele’s life helped restore her humanity and identity––defying the expectations that were placed on her as a child.

Staff writer Jenisha Watts was a finalist for Feature Writing. In “Jenisha From Kentucky,” which was the cover of the October 2023 issue, Jenisha wrote with remarkable candor about growing up in a crack house, and how she survived it. Watts writes that she was always a “collector of words,” and found solace and escape in her deep love of books; she eventually found her way to the literary and journalistic world of New York, where she tried to hide her past. It is, as Goldberg said in an editor’s note, “one of the most heartbreaking, insightful, and emotionally resonant stories in recent memory.”

Nominated for Single-Topic Issue was “To Reconstruct the Nation,” from December 2023. The centerpiece of the issue, which was led by senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, was a new feature-length play by the actor, playwright, and Atlantic contributing writer Anna Deavere Smith, which appears along with essays by writers, historians, and scholars including Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie G. Bunch III, Jordan Virtue, Peniel E. Joseph, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Eric Foner.

For the second straight year, The Atlantic earned the honor for Best Print Illustration, this year for the October cover portrait of Jenisha Watts by Didier Viodé.

In the past year, The Atlantic’s journalistic excellence has driven growth across the company, including the recent announcement that the company surpassed 1 million subscriptions and is profitable. Last month, it published “The Great American Novels,” an ambitious project collecting the most consequential novels of the past 100 years. The April cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” by Franklin Foer, looks at how the rise of anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end an era of unprecedented safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans.

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