This morning, Israel’s Foreign Ministry threatened to sue the New York Times for its refusal to back down from Monday’s publication of charges of Israel’s use of sexual violence and rape against Palestinians detained by Israel. It posted: “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.” Meanwhile, various Zionist groupings—EndJewHatred, Stop Antizionism, Hineni and the Movement Against Antizionism—announced a protest for today outside the Times’ Eighth Avenue headquarters.
Kristof’s research was based upon 14 victims whom he interviewed who recounted brutal, dehumanizing acts committed upon their bodies by “soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.” In some cases, the victims were pressured to become informants. In cases of women, videos of their rape were shown to them, and they were told they would be published if they said anything. Kristof also vetted their accounts in discussions with neighbors and relatives of the victims.
Kristof said: “I became interested in reporting on sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners after Issa Amro, a nonviolent activist sometimes called ‘the Palestinian Gandhi,’ told me when I previously visited that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.” Underreporting also arises from the increased isolation of many detainees, as “more than 9,000 Palestinians were still being held as of this month,” and since 2023, many are “detained under ill-defined security grounds,” so they are “denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.”