(JNS) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced on Thursday the initiation of a lawsuit against The New York Times for publishing “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel.”
On May 11, the Times published a story by Nicholas Kristof, an op-ed columnist, who cited Palestinians accusing Israel 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.”
“Today I instructed my legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof,” Netanyahu tweeted on Thursday. “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.”
“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 prime minister added.
Kristof did not fact check the sources or question their reliability. For instance, he quotes a report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based group that accuses Israel of employing “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based watchdog group, found that key members of Euro-Med are associated with Hamas. For example, Ramy Abdu, Euro-Med’s founder and chairman, appeared on a 2013 list published by Israel of Hamas’s “main operatives and institutions” in Europe.
Kristof also cited the Committee to Protect Journalists, which he describes as “a respected American organization.” In 2024, investigative journalist David Collier discovered that the group had regurgitated Hamas propaganda in a report accusing Israel of targeting journalists in Gaza.
Kristof appeared to take all the accusations at face value. “[O]ur American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit,” he wrote.
He also seemed to treat as a cover-up the Sde Teiman Affair, in which five IDF reservists serving in Force 100, a unit of the Military Police responsible for high-risk security prisoners, were indicted in 2025, over accusations of sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner.
The case was dropped and the reservists were reinstated.
Kristof did not mention an expert opinion of Professor Alon Pikarsky, director of general surgery at Jerusalem’s Hadassah-University Medical Center and a board-certified general surgeon specializing in colorectal surgery, who said the lack of damage to the terrorist’s anus suggested that he caused the wound himself, “as it is precisely the self-insertion of a foreign body, which can also cause a rupture in the rectum, that will not cause damage to the anus itself since the inserter (the patient) will ensure a gentle and non-traumatic insertion of the foreign body.”
“The medical records made available to me (hospitalization documents, as well as a computer screenshot dated July 8, 2024, by Dr. Muhammad Melhem), which do not indicate any wounding to the anus, support self-insertion and not insertion by any external party,” Pikarsky concluded.
Michal Cotler-Wunsh, CEO of the International Legal Forum, a group supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism, described Kristof’s column to JNS as “blood libelous.”
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