The New York Times published a detailed accounting of rape against Palestinians. An unreliable Israeli nonprofit put out a report on sexual abuse against Israelis. And all hell broke loose.
By Preem Thakker and Minnah Arshad, reposted from Zeteo, May 14, 2026
Last Monday, New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof published a heavily sourced article detailing horrific sexual abuse Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Israeli guards, soldiers, settlers, and interrogators.
And, for some reason, many of the most powerful people in the U.S. are painting Kristof as the villain.
Kristof interviewed 14 men and women who say they’d been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or Israeli forces. He also spoke with family members, investigators, officials, human rights groups, and lawyers who have represented Palestinian detainees. It is important to note that Palestinians themselves, along with scores of human rights groups, have for years said much of what Kristof conveys in his piece.
And in a story focused on Palestinian pain, Kristof went to extraordinary lengths to present balance – even bookending the article with claims of sexual abuse carried out by Hamas (claims which have sometimes lacked the first-person testimonial and evidence that Kristof and other international bodies have cited in reporting on Israeli sexual abuse against Palestinians).
Still, the balance was not enough for many of his interlocutors.
Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer said it’s “almost as if the NYT is on Hamas’ payroll” (before re-posting his tweet without that phrase). The Israel Foreign Ministry said the piece was part of a “politically driven smear campaign by a biased paper designed to support efforts to blacklist Israel,” saying the “disgusting shameful piece must be removed immediately.” It announced on Thursday that Israel will sue the Times for defamation over the piece. Pro-Iran war conservative commentator Mark Levin called the piece “disgusting blood libel,” complaining that it’s “too bad countries and armies can’t sue for libel.”
Former President Joe Biden’s antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt amplified a post that compared the New York Times to the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer and seemed to support executing Kristof.
The Free Press, National Review, CNN’s Scott Jennings, and many more joined the chorus, unhesitatingly acting as rape denialists, and consequently, as cheerleaders of the state actors accused of it.
But what of the actual substance of the piece?
Outside of the testimony he gathered, Kristof included numerous citations detailing the extent of Israeli sexual abuse against Palestinians.
He cited Save the Children’s survey of kids who had been in Israeli detention, which found that more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. And the Committee to Protect Journalists, which found that 3% of journalists interviewed reported that they’d been raped. Some 29% said they faced other forms of sexual violence. One lawyer told Kristof that her organization has filed hundreds of complaints detailing horrific abuse against Palestinian detainees, and not a single case led to charges against the perpetrators. Another told him that the rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”
And yet – all of Kristof’s critics outright refuse to engage with any of those claims. Instead, they seek to discredit the entire story by focusing on one of its most shocking allegations: that Israeli authorities use dogs to rape Palestinians. They’ve fixated on what they see as an outrageous and implausible allegation.
Eli Lake of The Free Press, for example, attempted to argue it’s scientifically impossible.
Yet it has been done before: by the Nazis, Pinochet’s Chile, and a New Mexico serial killer. This isn’t even the first time such claims have been made by Palestinian detainees against Israel.
Not only are Kristof’s critics wrong about the possibility of such a crime, but they’re also being exposed as wrong about the possibility that Israel would commit such a crime.
After all, who could forget the rape of a Palestinian detainee by a gang of Israeli soldiers caught on camera? And the subsequent riots by Israelis, including politicians, to protest the arrest of the accused soldiers? And the subsequent freeing of those soldiers and the dropping of charges against them?
And his critics’ case is hurt all the more by Israeli soldiers openly gabbing on cable news about what their dogs do to Palestinians, and Israeli comedians joking with soldiers about what objects they use to rape Palestinians.
All the while, the New York Times has issued multiple statements standing by Kristof’s reporting.
In their zealous attempts to look past the rest of the rigor of Kristof’s work, and focus only on the most shocking allegations, his critics are falling flat.
The Other Report
One day after the New York Times released its damning story, CNN published a story based on a report that claimed to prove Hamas committed widespread sexual violence on and after Oct. 7, and went as far as to claim that the alleged rape, along with the killings, served as “indicators of a genocidal campaign.”
CNN cited a report by the so-called “Civil Commission,” a self-described independent, nonprofit organization in Israel that was founded after Oct. 7 to document Hamas’s war crimes and gender-based violence.
The commission’s new report, dubbed “Silenced No More,” claims that “sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7th attacks and their aftermath.”
But the “commission,” according to Israeli media, is more aptly a one-woman mission.
Ynet reported in 2024 that Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an Israeli attorney and self-described human rights expert, had solicited millions of dollars for her so-called commission. Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel were listed as providing “distinguished endorsements” for the report.
Elkayam-Levy has been widely discredited by Israeli media for previous fabrications.
“People have disassociated themselves from her because her research is inaccurate,” an Israeli government official told Ynet.
“They mention her starting a ‘civil commission’ to raise awareness. It bears mentioning that the name ‘civil commission’ is very bombastic. The commission is her. And she is the commission,” Channel 13’s Raviv Drucker said.
Elkayam-Levy disseminated the claim that Hamas militants had sliced the belly of a pregnant woman – an allegation later debunked by Israeli media.
She was the recipient of the Israel Prize, the highest cultural honor in the country, on the basis of a “horrors report” that claimed to document sexual violence by Hamas. But Israel’s Channel 13 found that the report did not actually exist.
And she tried to pass off a photo of a Kurdish fighter taken in 2022 as a victim of Oct. 7 – and never acknowledged, let alone apologized, for it.
Critics of Kristof’s article who are touting the Civil Commission’s report point to its 282 pages as proof of its veracity. However, alongside the unreliability of its author, the report also includes testimonies from sources that have already been debunked.
Among them were three supposed witnesses, Shari Mendes, Raz Cohen, and Sapir, who were also cited in the Times’s infamous “Screams Without Words” article – a piece claiming Hamas committed systematic, widespread sexual violence on Oct. 7. That story’s accuracy has been questioned since. The Intercept reported in 2024 that the three sources’ testimonies were inconsistent, unverified, or disproven.
Mendes claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail after Oct. 7 that a “baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.” According to the independent research collective Oct 7 Fact Check, Mendes’s story was false. In another interview with Jewish Insider, she claimed without evidence to have seen broken pelvises “among grandmothers down to small children.”
The report also cited testimony from Rami Davidian, another “source” who has been discredited by Israeli media.
Nevertheless, several mainstream media outlets in the West rushed to launder the report’s claims. It was first published by CNN on Tuesday and picked up by several outlets, including the BBC, the Associated Press, and the New York Times.
The outlets largely failed to report on the accusations about the lead author or the debunked testimonies included in the report.
The articles also fail to note that there is still no independent investigation confirming that Hamas committed widespread sexual violence, partly because Israel has blocked human rights groups from accessing evidence.
In March 2024, the United Nations called on the Israeli government to grant “access to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian Territory… to carry-out fully-fledged investigations into all alleged violations” by Hamas. The Israeli government refuses to do so.
Several human rights groups have also sought to investigate rape and sexual violence allegations against Hamas fighters, but Israel has denied them access as well.
In a July 2024 report, Human Rights Watch said it had found evidence of sexual violence by Palestinian fighters, including forced nudity and posting images on social media. But the group said it was not able to gather verifiable evidence of rape on Oct. 7, adding that the Israeli government declined to provide requested information.
Amnesty International similarly found that it had not collected enough evidence to confirm rape, as opposed to sexual assault more broadly, was committed.
Despite it all, many of the same figures who rushed to criticize Kristof’s work, which featured testimony from primary and secondary sources, were more than comfortable touting the report on alleged sexual abuse against Israelis.
Gottheimer embraced the Civil Commission report. “These crimes were systematic acts of terror designed to inflict maximum pain and fear,” Gottheimer said, while peddling unproven claims of rape, decapitation, and children burned alive.
WTF @nytimes! Nick Kristof amplifies proven Hamas-affiliated sources and their propaganda, while the NYT continues to gloss over the systematic sexual violence, rape, and mutilation Hamas committed on October 7, now fully documented in the new Civil Commission report. We should…
— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) May 13, 2026
The new report detailing Hamas atrocities on October 7 is horrifying beyond words. Families were targeted in their homes, women raped, people decapitated, children terrorized and burned alive, and entire communities shattered in an act of pure evil.
These crimes were systematic…
— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) May 13, 2026
Florida Rep. Randy Fine – who previously said allegations of dogs being trained to rape Palestinians were “a bunch of garbage” – responded authoritatively to the Civil Commission report. “These demons will never be given a state,” Fine tweeted. “Never.”
Accusations and Confessions
Some of Kristof’s critics, including the Israel Foreign Ministry, have gone as far as to say Kristof’s article was an intentional misdirection, designed to draw attention away from the Civil Commission report. The suggestion seems to be the final attempt to discredit Kristof’s already cautious opus calling attention to Israeli war crimes in Palestine.
Kristof countered his detractors simply: Even if you don’t agree with him, “why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian ‘security’ prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?”
Ultimately, Kristof’s aim was inoffensive. “It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape,” he wrote at the start of his piece. And still, his critics couldn’t handle it.
They parade a massively discredited author in Elkayam-Levy, who has never apologized for the lies she’s been caught in, while they also seek to undermine and smear Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran foreign correspondent.
Pro-Israel actors like the so-called group “Honest Reporting,” and staff of the pro-war “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,” and The Free Press blog have assailed Kristof for citing anonymous testimony and lacking footage, or the apparent breadth that the Civil Commission had.
And yet Kristof’s piece had first and secondhand sources detailing horrific rape allegations. The victims themselves, and wider data that suggests an epidemic of sexual violence committed by Israeli soldiers and settlers who, per very recent events, do not face accountability for such crimes – even when they are caught on camera.
In cruelly poetic fashion – from the actual sexual abuse, to the documentation of it: Every accusation is a confession.
Preem Thakker Zeteo Political Correspondent & Columnist. Minnah Arshad is an independent journalist based in Michigan. She previously worked at USA Today, Crain’s Detroit Business and the Detroit Free Press. Minnah has been published in The Intercept, Zeteo, The Guardian and other independent outlets.
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