Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of graphic violence.
An opinion piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has sparked a firestorm of controversy, after Kristof claimed that there is a “pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against [Palestinian] men, women, and even children.”
The article, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” drew on interviews Kristof said he conducted with 14 men and women who alleged they had been sexually assaulted by Israelis living in the West Bank or by Israeli security forces. Kristof started off the article with the line “It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.”
The piece was published just a day before a 300-page report by the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children. That report, titled “Silenced No More,” found that Hamas “systematically and deliberately” used rape and sexual torture against Israelis during the attacks and against some of the 251 hostages who were kidnapped and taken to Gaza. The report was compiled based on the testimony of over 400 witnesses, first responders, soldiers, former hostages, and experts, and on over 10,000 photos and videos taken during the attacks.
Kristof noted that “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes” and that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are.” Nevertheless, he argued that “in recent years they (Israeli leaders) have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s ‘standard operating procedures’ and ‘a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.'”
The New York Times columnist insisted that he was able to corroborate some of the stories in part by “talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers.” He didn’t specify if that meant he corroborated the incident itself or other details. Kristof rejected concerns that the 14 people he spoke to could have fabricated their accusations in order to defame Israel, noting that “none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak.”
Kristof also cited a survey by Save the Children, in which minors between the ages of 12 to 17 said they had witnessed or experienced sexual violence in Israeli detention; a UN report published last year, a report by Breaking the Silence (an organization run by former IDF soldiers), a report by B’Tselem (an Israeli human rights organization), and a survey of detained journalists by The Committee to Protect Journalists. He noted as well a case of alleged abuse at the Sde Teiman detention facility that was reported by Israeli media in July 2024.
Kristof argued that there are several reasons that the abuse his article alleges isn’t more widely reported. He wrote that some previously detained Palestinians told him that prisoners are warned to keep quiet. He also noted that Arab society discourages discussing the topic of sexual abuse, as it could harm the morale of prisoners’ families, and that acknowledging rape would harm the ability of victims to find spouses.
Kristof’s article sparked immediate controversy. The Israeli government responded furiously, with the Foreign Ministry accusing Kristof of promoting a blood libel. Media outlets around the world cited the opinion piece as evidence of widespread and systematic abuse conducted by Israel against Palestinians. Critics of the piece argued that the article was based on flawed sources, made impossible claims, and turned an, at most, isolated phenomenon into a claim of systematic abuse.
For example, the UN report Kristof was citing, published in March 2025, made broad claims accusing Israel of the systematic and specific targeting of women, partially based on the fact that some women were killed in the war and that hospitals were damaged in the fighting. Beyond the fact that by that standard, nearly all wars ever conducted would be deemed to have specifically targeted women, the report failed to note cases in which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists were documented using at least some hospitals as military bases.
Another factor cited in the UN report as evidence of sexual abuse was the carrying out of strip searches, a fairly standard security practice in war, certainly in dense, chaotic urban settings when fighting an enemy with a long history of suicide bombings.
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for The New York Times, responded to the controversy surrounding the piece on Thursday, stating that Kristof drew together “on-the-record accounts and cites several analyses documenting the practice of sexual violence and abuse conducted by various parts of Israel’s security forces and settlers.”
“The accounts of the 14 men and women he interviewed were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers,” Stadtlander added. “Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys and in one case, with U.N. testimony. Independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking.”
Despite the New York Times’s insistence on the quality of the sources cited, one of the organizations Kristof’s piece leans on most heavily raises serious concerns.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a central source in the article, has a long history of supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups, including a series of comments glorifying the October 7 attacks. Ramy Abdu, Euro-Med’s founder and current chairman, described the terrorists who conducted the attacks as “heroic knights who created for us pure glory.” He has also repeatedly referred to attacks on Israeli civilians as legitimate “resistance.”
Euro-Med has additionally consistently denied that Hamas committed any acts of sexual assault during or after the October 7 attacks, despite extensive accounts and evidence of sexual violence. The organization has a history of publishing over-the-top and demonstrably false claims, including claims that Israel harvests Palestinian organs and that Israel has used bombs that can “evaporate” people (the weapons in question, thermobaric weapons, don’t cause anything of the sort).
Additionally, the media watchdog Honest Reporting raised pointed questions about the credibility of two of Kristof’s named sources.
Sami al-Sai, whose account opens the op-ed and who is described by Kristof simply as a “freelance journalist,” praised Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel just a day after they happened, and eulogized the leader of a West Bank terror cell as “our martyred prince.” Honest Reporting also noted that when al-Sai had spoken to B’Tselem about his alleged assault roughly a year before speaking to Kristof, he had not mentioned several of the most graphic details that appear in the op-ed, including the carrot and the female guard.
Issa Amro, another named source, had previously told the Washington Post that he had been threatened with sexual assault during his detention, a materially different account from what he told Kristof, which was that an assault had actually taken place. It’s not clear from Kristof’s article if Amro was referencing the same incident or making claims about a separate incident.
The dog rape claim
One of the claims that sparked particular controversy was an allegation that Israeli prison guards had trained dogs to rape prisoners.
One of the earliest sources of this allegation, besides Euro-Med, was Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an anti-Israel activist who served in the IDF and who has stated that he does not support the existence of Israel and recently welcomed what he called “a massive step towards the end of Israel.” A tweet by Ben-Ephraim on the subject was cited in Kristof’s article, alongside a claim by an anonymous source from Gaza.
In comments on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Ben-Ephraim acknowledged that he hadn’t been able to corroborate the claims of dogs being trained to rape prisoners, noting that one prison guard who had been willing to speak to him said they’d seen a dog used to threaten an unclothed prisoner by making it look like it was about to mount him, but that he hadn’t been able to corroborate any claims of penetration by the dogs. In a podcast just last month, Ben-Ephraim said explicitly that he could not confirm the claim of dogs being trained to rape at all, but had “heard enough of it that I believe it.” His dog rape claims spread rapidly across social media and some media outlets, often without the caveat he mentioned that he had no evidence that anything of the sort had ever happened.
On Piers Morgan Uncensored, Ben-Ephraim insisted that the main point of Kristof’s article was to compel the authorities to conduct serious investigations into allegations of abuse. He added that it’s important to note that in Palestinian society, the victims of sexual abuse suffer from a deep stigma of shame even beyond the stigma people in other places experience, with even their families’ social status harmed. Nevertheless, he argued, several individuals Kristof interviewed spoke with him on camera with their faces uncovered, revealing their identities despite the risk.
Since the article was published, several experts in dog training have argued that the claim that a dog was trained to rape humans can’t be true due to facts concerning the way dogs have intercourse.
Reuven Weinstein, a certified dog trainer, animal behavioral psychologist, and a former IDF dog trainer, explained that the claim mentioned in the op-ed that dogs were trained to rape prisoners “goes against science and nature.”
“Canine sexual behavior…can’t be trained on command,” Weinstein explained. Dogs mate when they’re calm and sexually cued, not when they’re stressed or aggressive, like they would be in a chaotic prison setting. In historical cases of dogs being used for sexual assault, humans had to essentially force the dog into position and move them around. The dog did not act according to any training; instead, it was used like an object. “Sexual violence via dogs is a real, documented thing. The specific claim that a dog can be TRAINED to rape is wholly implausible as it goes against all biological barriers,” Weinstein concluded.
Brandon McMillan, who has spent 25 years training animals, noted as well to The Free Press’s Eli Lake that he doubted that a dog could be trained to rape a human. He explained that “When a female is in heat, the pheromones released carry it to the male canine. That’s how they reproduce and the miracle happens. I don’t see how you would train a dog to do that. The dog has to get turned on, for lack of a better word.”
Former Israeli prime minister says his comments were misrepresented
Another point of controversy was raised when Kristof wrote that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who resigned from office after being indicted and then convicted on corruption charges, told him that he was “not surprised” by the accounts of sexual violence shared in the article. “Do I believe it happens? Definitely. There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” Olmert was cited as telling Kristof.
However, Olmert has insisted that Kristof misrepresented his comments in their conversation, stressing in a statement to The New York Times that “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims. I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”
Is there no abuse in Israeli prisons?
Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Lake that he thinks the allegations of sexual abuse at Sde Teiman were credible, but noted that because the victim and witness of the abuse were released back to Gaza, the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.
“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Conricus said. “So many terrorists infiltrated Israel on that day, there were too many to process, and reservists without the right training were called up to be prison guards.”
He stressed, however, that there was no evidence that such abuse was systemic in Israeli jails, contrary to what Kristof claimed.
Journalist Haviv Rettig Gur argued in The Free Press that the many false claims in Kristof’s piece shouldn’t lead readers to dismiss the underlying issue of abuse entirely.
“The Israeli Prison Service has a reputation for incompetence,” he wrote, and the mistreatment of prisoners by Israeli guards was “almost certain, as in any prison system anywhere in the world,” particularly after October 7 flooded the system with thousands of new detainees alongside undertrained reservist guards who had witnessed Hamas’s massacre. He estimated the real abuse figure at “many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence.”
Yet he asked readers to consider why, given that abuse undeniably occurred, there was “so much obvious propaganda in Kristof’s op-ed.” Rettig Gur argued that an attempt was being made to build a “paper trail” designed to spark international outrage before anyone could seriously scrutinize the evidence, comparing it to the starvation-in-Gaza campaign, which generated enormous condemnation before quietly dissolving.
“Then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized—while billions of ordinary people around the world who don’t follow these things too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation,” he noted.
“Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see,” he added. “Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money.”
Rettig Gur was sharply critical of Israeli leadership for its indifference to the breakdown in discipline among security forces, arguing that “neither National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir nor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems interested in fixing it.”
He concluded that Israelis were caught in “a strange sort of vise” — between “a vast propaganda machine that seeks to remove us” and “our own venal, self-absorbed political class who insist in its political posturing on seemingly confirming our enemies’ claims out of sheer, bald egomania.”
“So what do Israelis do now?” he asked. “We see it, we acknowledge it’s happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown. And we soldier on.”
Journalist Dahlia Scheindlin argued that efforts by both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel communities to discredit competing reports on sexual violence “both rely on the dangerous notion that these instances are uniquely evil.”
Pointing to cases of sexual assault in conflicts around the world that were similarly dismissed, she stressed that “the perverse comfort of the false belief that Israeli or Palestinian sexual violence is the worst ever betrays every victim around the world. Claiming uniqueness means that our suffering ranks higher – and counts more – than everyone else’s.”
She added that the claims that only Israel would be targeted by such claims or that only Jewish or Palestinian victims would be disbelieved are false as well, pointing to several examples of extensive reports from conflicts around the world that were dismissed over the years. She noted that victims often keep silent for many reasons, including fears of facing shame and loathing from themselves or their families and disbelief and denial from everyone.
“On a personal note, as a Jew and as an Israeli: We cannot have it both ways. Jews deserve the same as all other human beings – protection, human rights, national rights. And precisely because we are human beings like all others, we – like everyone – have the capacity for evil. It is my responsibility to believe, expose and seek to end it,” she concluded.
‘Blood libel’
Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the New York Times article “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”
“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused. Israel – whose citizens were the victims of the most horrific sexual crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, and whose hostages were later subjected to further sexual abuse – is portrayed as the guilty party,” the Ministry added. “This publication is no coincidence. It is part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN Secretary-General’s blacklist. Israel will fight these lies with the truth – and the truth will prevail.”
The Foreign Ministry additionally accused the New York Times of “deliberately” timing the publication of Kristof’s piece to undermine the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children report published the day after. The Ministry added that the Times had been notified about the report months ago, but had said it was not interested in covering it. The Ministry argued that the article was “attempting to create false equivalence and belittle documented crimes.”
The New York Times denied that it had ever been offered the Civil Commission report or declined to cover it, adding that it also wasn’t told about its completion or the timing of its release. “Once the report was made public, we covered its findings. The commission’s work also had no bearing on Nicholas Kristof’s opinion column or its publication timing,” the Times said.
The Foreign Ministry additionally said that Israeli officials had contacted the New York Times and provided an official statement by the Israel Prison Service, which the Times replied it did not need to include, as a fragment of a comment from an anonymous spokesperson had already been included.
The official statement in question read: “The allegations being raised are false and completely unfounded. The Prison Service is a security organization that operates in accordance with the law and under strict oversight by numerous official inspectors. All prisoners are held in accordance with the law, with full respect for their basic rights and under the supervision of a professional and skilled prison staff.”
Amid the rising controversy surrounding the piece, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced on Thursday that they had directed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times because of the claims made in Kristof’s article.
“They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers,” Netanyahu said. “Under my leadership, Israel will not be silent. We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.”
The New York Times dismissed the threat of a lawsuit, accusing Netanyahu and Sa’ar of using “a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative.” The Times insisted that “Any such legal claim would be without merit.”
