Kristof’s Extraordinary Claims About Israeli Rape Require Extraordinary Evidence. The Times Doesn’t Have It
Columnist Nicholas Kristof published an explosive report in the New York Times on Monday about Israel’s alleged use of sexual violence against prisoners as “organized state policy.” The piece makes several grave claims about conditions in Israeli prisons, including about the alleged use of trained dogs to rape prisoners.
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But media watchdogs have now raised questions about the integrity of the sourcing in the reported opinion column, which relies predominantly on claims from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and several individuals with checkered backgrounds.
“There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes,” Kristof acknowledges. “But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report , one of Israel’s ‘standard operating procedures’ and ‘a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.’”
He goes on to cite a report from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor that concluded that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
But Euro-Med’s bias is obvious — it has “documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel,” according to HonestReporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog.
Those unfounded accusations include that Israel was stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians, that Israeli soldiers were executing patients in cold blood at al-Shifa Hospital, and, perhaps most notably, that Israeli forces have trained dogs to rape prisoners.
While Euro-Med first published the claim about dogs in 2024, the group issued a new report last month containing new detainee testimony making the same allegation, through the same unverified methodology, as Eli Kowaz writes in his own criticism of the Kristof piece.
And canine behavior expert Michael S. Gould tells National Review that the suggestion that dogs could be trained to rape prisoners is “absurd.”
“I’ve trained dogs to do a lot of things in my life. But no, that’s absurd,” said Gould, who began working with dogs in 1982 as one of the first members of the New York City Police Department’s Canine Unit and later went on to become a canine forensics expert and consultant. “It’s absurd for many reasons: the sexual instincts of dogs, their anatomy, the actual physical concept of it.”
“Could you train a dog to bite someone in their genitals? Of course you can,” he said, but added that dogs “don’t stand erect,” and don’t have the instincts or trainability to rape a person, never mind on command.
The Times did not respond when asked for comment on the apparent holes in Kristof’s reporting. The Times account on X did respond to a post suggesting that top editors are considering retracting the column, saying “there is no truth to this at all.”
Kristof “traveled to the region to report firsthand on the stories of Palestinians who suffered abuse, and his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by independent studies,” spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said in the statement posted on X.
Kristof, for his part, defended his reporting in a post on X, saying, “To those who say that canine rape is impossible, despite the many Palestinians who have described it, I’d note that at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs. Sigh.”
The dog rape claim first picked up steam after it was amplified by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim. The former academic and Zionist-turned-“whistleblower,” who has recently trafficked in anti-Israel conspiracy theories, left UCLA in 2020 after multiple sexual‑harassment allegations, including one involving a minor.
His claims were later picked up by the Electronic Intifada, Owen Jones, and Novara Media. But what the media outlets failed to mention is that Ben-Ephraim has himself acknowledged the dog rape claims were “not verified.”
Kristof, in his piece, further writes that, “Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”
But questions remain about the stories told by the few named sources in Kristof’s article.
Sami al-Sai, whom Kristof describes as a “freelance journalist,” says he was arrested because Israeli authorities hoped to pressure him into becoming an informant. “Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused” to become an informant, Kristof reports.
However, al-Sai had previously been jailed in 2016 for incitement, the same charge he faced under his 2024 arrest. The charge is a criminal offense related to the publishing of material intended to encourage, support, or provoke violence or terrorism.
And al-Sai’s social media offers blatant evidence of his celebration of terrorism.
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In a March 2023 Facebook post, al-Sai calls Amir Abu Khadija, the founder and leader of the Tulkarm Battalion, “our martyred prince.” The Tulkarm Battalion was behind several deadly attacks on Israeli forces and civilians between 2023 and 2024.
In December 2023, just two months before his arrest, al-Sai posted videos and photos celebrating armed fighters in Nur Shams camp. The video showed terrorists in tactical gear as they cheered captured Israeli military equipment. The next day, Israeli forces raided Nur Shams, killing five terrorists.
And on October 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas attack that started the Israel-Hamas War, al‑Sai posted about “the green flag” flying across the West Bank, “over the camps of the occupier and his tanks,” and “decorating the foreheads of the heroic fighters.”
HonestReporting also identified discrepancies in how several of the sources in Kristof’s piece, including al-Sai, have described their alleged abuse over time.
In early 2025, al-Sai gave Israel-based human rights group B’Tselem a detailed testimony about his detention, which lasted from February 2024 to June 2025, and said he had been pinned down by three guards who pushed “something hard” into his anus, and that the penetration was repeated six times. He said the guards poured a liquid on his backside and laughed, jeered, beat, and kicked him.
But in Kristof’s column, al-Sai says it was a rubber baton that was initially used to penetrate him, before recounting a guard shouting, “Give me the carrots.” He said the guards then used a carrot to penetrate him. He adds that someone says in Hebrew, “don’t take photos,” and that a female guard “grabs his penis and testicles,” saying, “these are mine,” then squeezes.
He says guards stopped to have a cigarette break while he lay bleeding, and that he later discovered “other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth” embedded in his skin, leaving him to conclude that “the spot where he had been raped had been used before.”
Kristof says it was another source, Issa Amro, who first sparked his interest in reporting on alleged sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners. He says Amro, “a nonviolent activist sometimes called ‘the Palestinian Gandhi,’” told him that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.
But Amro initially said in February 2024, according to the Washington Post, that he was threatened with sexual assault during a ten-hour detention on October 7, 2023 — not that he was actually assaulted.
However, Kristof’s column describes Amro as a victim of sexual assault.
“Allegations of sexual violence are serious,” HonestReporting said in response to Kristof’s report. “Real victims – Israeli and Palestinian – deserve rigorous reporting that checks facts and filters out propaganda.”
“When the [New York Times] builds explosive claims on compromised sources, shifting stories and ideological NGOs, it does the opposite: it erodes trust in journalism and makes it harder for genuine victims to be believed,” it adds.
Kristof, in his writing, notes that “Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel,” but he dismisses the concerns as “far-fetched, because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak.”
More far-fetched, apparently, than the idea of dogs being trained to rape prisoners.
Israel’s prison service told the Times it “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse.
And the Israeli Foreign Ministry called Kristof’s column “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,” the statement from the foreign ministry adds.
“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 statement concludes. “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.”
The ministry further accused the Times of purposefully timing the release of Kristof’s column to pull attention away from the findings of Israel’s Civil Commission to investigate Hamas’s systemic violence during, and since, the October 7 attack. The ministry said the commission approached the paper “months ago” about the planned release of the 300-page report, and that the Times “was not interested” in reporting it.
The report was released on Tuesday morning, one day after Kristof’s column was published. It found Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted, and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023, terror attack on southern Israel “to maximize pain and suffering.”
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