Israel instructs lawyers to pursue defamation suit against New York Times over Kristof column

Israel said Thursday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had instructed officials to initiate a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times over a Nicholas Kristof opinion column alleging sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces, though it was not immediately clear where or whether a complaint had been filed.

Mr. Kristof’s column, published Monday under the headline “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” alleged “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.” The piece was based on accounts from 14 male and female Palestinian victims.

Among the most explosive claims was that Israeli prison guards had used trained dogs to sexually assault Palestinian detainees. Mr. Kristof recounted the account of a source identified as a “Gaza journalist” who said he “was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the piece “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the state of Israel in the modern press,” saying Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Sa’ar had “instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.”

Mr. Netanyahu followed with his own statement on 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,” he wrote. “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.”

The New York Times stood by the column. Spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said Mr. Kristof “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.”

The accounts of the 14 men and women he interviewed were corroborated with other witnesses wherever possible, and with people the victims confided in, including family members and lawyers, Mr. Stadtlander said.

“Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys, and in one case, with U.N. testimony,” the spokesman added. The Times also denied a claim circulating on X that editors were already discussing a retraction over “issues with source credibility and lack of evidence,” calling the assertion “no truth to this at all.” 

Critics focused heavily on Mr. Kristof’s reliance on the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO that served as a primary source for the piece. The Israeli Foreign Ministry noted that the group’s founder has documented ties to senior Hamas leaders, raising questions about its conclusion that Israel uses “systematic sexual violence” as part of “an organized state policy.” Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter pointed to photographs from 2011 showing the NGO’s leaders posing alongside senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh.

The pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting also challenged the column’s sourcing, noting that the most explosive accounts came from unnamed sources and that the stories of those named had grown “steadily more lurid over time, with dramatic new details added years later.” It noted that one named source, Sami al-Sai, had praised the Hamas onslaught on social media one day after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. It also noted that Mr. al-Sai had spoken to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about his alleged assault without mentioning several graphic details he later provided to Kristof, including being sodomized with a carrot and discovering “other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth” in his skin. 

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose comments Kristof cited near the end of the column, accused the columnist of misrepresenting his words so that they appeared to validate the piece’s allegations. Mr. Kristof had quoted Mr. Olmert saying, “Do I believe it happens? Definitely… There are war crimes committed every day in the territories” — a remark Mr. Olmert said was taken out of context. 

Israel’s Foreign Ministry also alleged that the Times deliberately published Mr. Kristof’s column ahead of an independent Israeli report finding that Hamas had systematically used sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attacks, and claimed the Times had been approached with that report “months ago.” The Times said it “never passed” on the Israeli commission report and “wasn’t told about its completion or the timing of its release,” adding that the commission’s work “had no bearing on Nicholas Kristof’s opinion column or its publication timing.”

Not all critics came from pro-Israel quarters. Palestinian writer and advocate Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote that while he had “no doubt that incidents of sexual abuse have occurred in Israeli prisons,” he criticized the sourcing used in Mr. Kristof’s piece. Israeli policy analyst Eli Kowaz argued that Mr. Kristof had foregrounded the most sensational allegations while neglecting more documented claims, including a recent report by Israel’s own Public Defender’s Office documenting systematic violence from prison guards. “The documented case — the one that required no advocacy org, no anonymous source, no unverifiable claim — will be largely beside the point,” Mr. Kowaz wrote. “That is what this kind of journalism costs.” 

Pro-Israel groups, including EndJewHatred, Stop Antizionism and Hineni, announced a protest outside the Times’ Manhattan headquarters Thursday. 

The legal path forward is uncertain on multiple fronts. Under the federal SPEECH Act, U.S. courts generally will not enforce a foreign defamation judgment unless the foreign proceedings afforded speech protections equivalent to the First Amendment, or unless the Times would also have lost under U.S. defamation law. A further threshold question is who, precisely, was defamed: Israeli law does not treat a broad claim of defamation against an entire public or group the same way it treats defamation against a named person or legal entity, meaning a suit framed simply as defamation of “Israel” or “the State of Israel” could face an early legal obstacle. If the suit were brought in a U.S. court, it would also face broad constitutional protections that American media enjoy, particularly when challenged by government authorities.