Creator: Mark Lennihan | Credit: AP
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s foreign ministry announced plans to sue The New York Times for defamation over a column claiming that Israeli prison guards sexually abuse and assault Palestinian prisoners.
“Today I instructed my legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and [columnist] Nicholas Kristof,” Netanyahu wrote on the social platform X. “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,” News.Az reports, citing The Hill.
The prime minister added that “Israel will not be silent” under his leadership and that the truth “will prevail.”
The foreign ministry said in its own statement that the column showcased “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.”
Kristof’s column, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” published Monday, chronicles accounts from 14 Palestinian men and women, including freelance journalist Sami al-Sai, who said they were beaten by Israeli guards after they were detained, before they were sexually assaulted, in some cases repeatedly.
“There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes,” Kristof wrote. “But in recent years they 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.'”
He cites several humanitarian organizations in his column, including Save the Children’s 2025 survey that found more than half of the children detained by Israel reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence.
In a report, 17 out of 59 Palestinian journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists, another resource Kristof relied on, that they endured some form of sexual violence. Two of the 59 said they were raped.
“The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women,” Kristof wrote. “Israel welcomed a United Nations report documenting sexual assaults against Israeli women by Palestinians but rejected the report’s call to investigate Israeli assaults against Palestinians. Netanyahu has denounced ‘baseless accusations of sexual violence’ made against Israel.”
Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in a statement Wednesday, before the suit was announced, that the paper consulted with independent experts to fact-check the column. He emphasized the piece’s use of “news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys and, in one case, with U.N. testimony.”
“Nicholas Kristof’s deeply reported piece of opinion journalism starts with a proposition to readers: ‘Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape,'” Stadtlander said. “He draws 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.”
Stadtlander also defended Kristof after “The Young Turks” contributor David Shuster posted on X that the Times was considering retracting Kristof’s story. Both Stadtlander and Kristof replied that this was not accurate.
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