Photo by Stéphan Valentin
The New York Times attempted to ‘balance’ Nicholas Kristof’s documentation of the systematic rape of Palestinians by Israeli forces with yet another unverified rape ‘investigation’ claiming that Hamas had weaponized sexual violence on October 7. It was written by the paper’s pro-Israel Jerusalem-based reporter, Isabel Kershner.
Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Op-ed piece titled The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians, published on May 11, was based on documentation and grueling victim testimonies of rapes that Palestinians have experienced at the hands of Israeli security forces. Brutal and sadistic acts of sexual torture are described in a piece that triggered enormous attention even though human rights organizations have been documenting these same crimes for years now.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented Israel’s sexual torture of Palestinian men, women and children calling the “Israeli prison system a network of torture camps.” Save the Children reported in July 2024 that Palestinian children in Israeli detention were facing “disease, increasing starvation, [and] abuse including sexual violence.” A Palestinian women’s rights organization warned that their documented 75 cases of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women amounted to about 1% of what was actually happening in Israeli detention. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s extensive report published on April 13, 2026, emphasized that the sexual torture was so bad it amounted to “another genocide behind walls.” They identified its purpose as a “systematic destruction of the body and identity.” The report emphasized the scope of “criminal responsibility,” by the collusion of state institutions that were creating impunity.
In a discussion about Kristof’s piece, Francesca Albanese, who has also documented brutal Israeli torture sites, told Al Jazeera’s UpFront that she had given a long interview about sexual torture to the New York Times as early as February 2024, but nothing came of it. Albanese went on to say she didn’t understand why the Times piece should have been “more important” than the extensive documentation of human rights monitors. But when Kristof finally acknowledged that Palestinians were being tortured and raped by trained dogs, (corroborated by a soldier) in Israeli prisons, it made headlines in the US and sent shock waves through Israel’s hasbara apparatus.
The agenda setting New York Times is a “paper of record,” with a journalism staff of 3000, about 7 percent of all journalists working in the US. The paper has also been a reliable source of pro-Israel messaging for years, especially after October 7, so when a well-respected human rights journalist wrote such an op-ed in its pages it was a public relations disaster for Israel and its propaganda machine went into high gear to counter the bad press. Zionists and genocide supporters protested in front of the Times building. Netanyahu was so outraged that he threatened to bring a defamation lawsuit against the paper. The Israel Foreign Ministry called the piece “blood liable” and accused Nicholas Kristof of writing “an endless stream of baseless lies and propaganda” that turned the “victims into the accused.”
It should come then, as no surprise that the paper attempted to “balance” Kristof’s essay by publishing a piece the very next day, on May 12, about another “two-year investigation” by Israel, that “concluded” that sexual violence by Hamas was widespread on October 7. Isabel Kirshner’s piece attempted to breathe new life into the thoroughly discredited and 
debunked original Times’ front-page ‘investigation’ titled Screams Without Words. Screams was first published on December 28, 2023, just as the South African legal case against Israel’s genocide was being presented to the International Court of Justice, and it served as a significant denial and justification for Israel’s genocidal violence at the time. Screams without Words can be described accurately (and has been) with the same words used by Israel’s Foreign Ministry to falsely describe Kristof’s piece; “an endless stream of baseless lies and propaganda.”
The timing of the now infamous rape story of 2023, along with its extravagant claims to evidence not found in the front-page article, had much to do with why, almost immediately, the piece drew critical attention from media analysts, independent investigative reporters, and human rights organizations. Withering criticisms of the story included an essay in Medium, calling it “crappy journalism,” saying it offered a “lesson on selection, slanting, and charged language, and why using words in these ways constitutes a poor substitute for solid evidence and reasoning.” An Egyptian feminist non-governmental organization (NGO) Speak Up, called the article a “disgraceful investigation,” and shamed the Times for claiming to provide readers with definitive evidence, while actually offering no evidence at all. Independent US investigators such as Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, The Intercept, Mondoweiss and others, roundly debunked the fictionesque inventions continued within it. Sixty journalism professors wrote to the New York Times calling on the paper to commission an independent review of the article. It was “troubling to professors of journalism to see such a shoddy article be published without a retraction or an investigation,” Professor Deepa Kumartold Democracy Now!
The paper’s 2026 version of the Hamas rape story was penned by one of the Times’ most reliably pro-Israeli reporters, Isabel Kershner, and this new ‘investigation’ once again takes seriously, discredited Israeli sources that Kershner claims to be independent and reliable. At the center of the piece is Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a key Israeli source after October 7. Elkayam-Levy and her organization were central to Western media coverage after October 7, when she repeatedly presented the rape allegations against Hamas. However, as Mint Press News reported, Israeli media later reported that “Elkayam-Levy and her commission had misled donors, exaggerated evidence collection efforts, and spread misinformation related to October 7 claims. The controversy surfaced shortly after she received the prestigious Israel Prize.” In Kersner’s new piece, extravagant claims are made about the thorough nature of the investigation, describing all the visual evidence now assembled. But Kershner isn’t allowed to publish the evidence. She writes; “The commission’s archive is closed to the public because of the graphic nature of much of the material, it said, and to protect the privacy of victims and their families.” The Times is asking its readers to trust the Israelis, Isabel Kershner, and the paper itself with its abysmal track record on this topic. Kershner does not mention the fact that early last year, Israel blocked a UN probe into possible Hamas sexual crimes of October 7, because according to Hareetz, they wanted to avoid an inquiry into the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Isabell Kershner at the New York Times
Kershner has been providing positive reporting for Israeli Security Force for years now. With Kirshner, polishing the image of the IDF is a family affair. The Jerusalem-based correspondent whose husband worked with the Israeli military complex says on her Times’ profile page, that says she “strives to be accurate, honest and fair.” Yet she failed to mention that her husband Hirsh Goodman, was working as a senior research associate at a national security think-tank, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). INSS’s website boasted about the group’s “strong association with the political and military establishment.” Goodman’s job, at least in part, entailed “shaping a positive image of Israel in the media.” An examination of articles that Kershner wrote or contributed to from 2009 to 2012 by FAIR revealed that she overwhelmingly relied “on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.” The Times has not disclosed Kershner’s connections to INSS.
Reporting on INSS, Haaretz cited published papers that backed the “Dahiyah Doctrine,,” an Israeli military doctrine that called for disproportionate force to be used on civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon during operations against Hamas and Hezbollah. Since Ovtober 7, this doctrine has been extensively followed. Writing for FAIR, Alex Kane reported that the Dahiyah Doctrine was applied in 2008–09 during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and goes on to explain that “Goodman’s job within that context was spin.” Because disproportionate violence resulting in many civilian casualties could lead to charges of war crimes, Goodman understood that “Israel must devise a strategy to impact positively on international and Arab public opinion and overall disseminate its message more effectively.” INSS messaging was certainly disseminated effectively in the New York Times, “From 2009–12, Kershner wrote or contributed to 17 articles that quoted officials from the INSS, far more than other comparable think tanks.
Though Kershner never used her husband as a direct source, as a Society for Professional Journalism (SPJ) ethics expert Kevin Smith, told FAIR, this is basic ethics 101, these relationships are not healthy for unbiased news coverage. “You cannot expect trust or to maintain credibility from the public when, before they read a word of your copy, you have engaged in an act of deception by not disclosing your potential conflicts.”
In her post-October 7 coverage, Kershner’s hand in promoting the Israeli military can be easily detected in her writing. In an article from January 2024, well into Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, Kersner wrote; “Israeli Women Fight on Front Line in Gaza, a First.” Kershner continued, “After a long struggle for acceptance, Israel’s female combat soldiers are pushing new boundaries after rushing into battle on Oct. 7.” We learn that a woman now “commands a company of 83 soldiers, nearly half of them men. It is one of several mixed-gender units fighting in Gaza, where female combat soldiers and officers are serving on the front line for the first time since the war surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948.” There are also two all-women tank crews on the ground in Gaza. Kershner calls women’s new role in the military, a progressive victory over “ultraconservative rabbis and religiously observant soldiers” by “feminists, secularists and critics of the country’s traditionally macho culture.”
Even as she writes the story, she seems to acknowledge that it serves a PR role for the military, by bolstering the new positive image of the IDF. She asserts that women “combat soldiers have become symbols of progress and equality, appearing on magazine covers and featured in television news profiles.”
Writing from a feminist peace perspective, Joyce Chediac notes that Palestinian women’s groups have called the genocide a feminist issue and are urging all those who value women’s rights to support a ceasefire. As Kershner lauded women in Israel’s army, Joyce Chediac questioned their role in the violence:
Are the two tanks operated by women among those involved in the storming of Al-Khair hospital in Khan Yunis, arresting their staff, and preventing ambulances from rescuing the wounded? Are the women in combat for the first time among the snipers shooting Palestinians dead as they search for food or water for their families? Are they guarding the bulldozers now flattening huge swarths of Khan Yunis, forcing pregnant women to give birth in freezing tents because their homes were destroyed and they are blocked from hospitals?
Chediac concludes that, “equal gender opportunity to commit genocide is a cruel and obscene mockery of women’s rights.” Providing cover for Israel’s military does not advance the rights of women, it sets them back. The concept that female military power is progressive has helped sugarcoat the genocidal violence and atrocities carried out by the Israeli military.
Testimony gathered by B’Tselem in 2024, confirms that female soldiers have been involved in mistreating detained prisoners in Israel’s system of torture camps. A 39-year-old mother of five from Gaza City told B’Tselem, “On December 31st we were taken out of the cage and dragged to a bus, like animals. The bus started driving and the whole way, the female soldiers guarding us wouldn’t let us lift our heads. They swore at us, hit us on our hands, and took pictures of us. After some time, the bus stopped. We were taken off of it… A female soldier grabbed us by the head and ordered us to kiss the Israeli flag. Another female soldier bashed my head against the side of the bus.”
Balancing legitimate reporting that includes reliable witness testimony confirmed by multiple human rights investigations over a period of years cannot be not done by publishing unverified allegations from discredited sources. Alan MacLeod noted a recuring media pattern here that applies to the New York Times’ reporting on Israel; “whenever scrutiny intensifies around Israeli abuses against Palestinians, major Western outlets redirect attention toward unverified claims against Hamas to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
Balancing Kristof’s rare acknowledgment of Israeli war crimes with reporting by a pro-Israel, biased journalist citing discredited sources repeating unverifiable allegations was a shameful, and failed, attempt to appease the state of Israeli as it expands its crimes of war and occupation into Lebanon for a Greater Isreal. The Times would do better to simply report the truth and stop catering to hasbara and the false narratives that facilitate Israel’s on-going genocidal violence.
Material from this piece was drawn from Chapter 4, “A Compromised Media Landscape,” and from Chapter 8, “The New York Times Rape Story: War Propaganda and Trauma Porn,” in The Complect Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, by Robin Andersen
Blood Libels and Sexual Violence: Israel, Palestinian Prisoners and The New York Times
Photograph Source: Ori~ – Public Domain
When the establishment journalism of Nicholas Kristof of that most establishment of papers, The New York Times, draws the ire of a foreign regime, and an unnaturally allied foreign regime at that, a pulse might be detected in the moribund state that is the Fourth Estate. In his piece alleging a campaign of sexual violence against Palestinians by Israel’s security apparatus, he shines some blistering light on practices long suspected and discussed. It begins a proposition that, “Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemn rape.”
With that solemn theme declared, Kristof begins by remarking on the “brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct.7, 2023.” Members of the US administration and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had rightly condemned them. “And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me 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.”
Brandishing his credentials as veteran war reporter, he makes it clear that, when writing about sexual violence, he knows what he’s talking about. Interest in the fate of Palestinian prisoners – especially in that way – was piqued during a visit to the activist and professor of non-violence Issa Amro. Amro had himself been sexually assaulted and suspected this to be a common practice “but underreported because of shame.” Interest then shifts to the conditions of incarceration, with something in the order of 9,000 Palestinians being held as of May. “Many have not been charged but were detained on ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.”
Kristof then makes use of material gathered in 14 conversations with men and women who claim to have been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers and the security forces, supplemented by the accounts of family members, investigators, officials and other sources. Reports are cited – Euro-Med, Save the Children, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the United Nations. The views of Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who heads the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel are documented: “Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized.” While he had seen no evidence such acts had been executed in accordance with a plan or program, “the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”
Kristof restates that point, finding “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” But what had germinated in recent years was “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’.”
And, as if we ever needed evidence to demonstrate that Israel’s prison system has become a foul stew of corruption, brutality and malice towards its Palestinian inmates, we only need witness the gloating joy of Israel’s Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who makes a ghoulish habit of posting videos glorying over their misfortune and suffering. (Sexual violence doesn’t tend to make the cut, but threats of execution do.) The fact that he thought such treatment appropriate for the activists of the Global Sumud Flotilla (his posted video sufficiently demonstrates this point) showed a consistent ecumenicism on cruelty: All who dare go against Israel’s interests or dare provide sympathy to the enemy (all Palestinians are, in Ben-Gvir-lese, the enemy) deserve what they get. For such a figure to boisterously thrive, the soil had to have been appropriately manured.
Reaction to the article in Israel was biliously swift and full of rage. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, worked himself up sufficiently to claim that Israel’s soldiers had been “defamed” by Kristof; a “blood libel about rape” had been perpetrated by an attempt to “create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers.”
In a media post, Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs announced what steps would be taken. “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.”
Kristof’s critics have decided to layer the blood libel allegation with sinister suggestions that writing about Israeli sexual abuses against Palestinian prisoners and detainees should not take place because it seasons pre-existing antisemitic sentiments. Avoid the talk about plans, programs and systems gone to the bad: patterns suggest conspiracy, and conspiracy suggests hidden forces in clandestine boardrooms plotting predation and cruelty. Thus, we have David Frum rumbling in The Atlantic about the increasingly violent attacks on Jews in the broader Western world as attributable to “anti-Jewish sentiment that draws on the deepest foundations of anti-Jewish myth.” Presumably, Palestinian victims of rape have added their share to that myth.
To its credit, the paper has held the line. Spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander confirmed that the accounts of the 14 men and women interviewed for the article had been “corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers. Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys in one case, with UN testimony.” Independent experts were also called upon through the reporting and verification phase. In a separate statement, the paper noted that the legal threat was “part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative. Any such legal claim would be without merit.”
Lawyers in Israel specialising in defamation law speculate about the chances of such an action credibly taking place let alone credibly succeeding. Liat Bergman Ravid of the firm Klein & Co is of the view that such a civil claim had “a low likelihood of success” seeing as the country’s Defamation Law barred collectives from bringing civil actions to court. The Attorney General might, however “file an indictment against the person who made the statement, but this is a rare event, bordering on non-existent.” Rare or non-existent, Idan Seger of Simchony, Klein, Sananes & Co was open to the suggestion. Were the case to groan into court, the paper “would face a far more stringent burden of proof in Israel than under the US standard, as a mere lack of malice is insufficient to avoid liability.” Absolute truth would have to be proved. That would be most telling on the Israeli authorities, were that allowed to happen.
.png)