Time for the Times to Retract the Israeli-Rape Column

By Rachel O’Donoghue

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

How long will it be before the New York Times issues some kind of correction or retraction of Nicholas Kristof’s column that alleges that Israel systematically sexually abuses Palestinians, including with trained “rape dogs”?

 

When the Gray Lady splashed the photograph of a supposedly “starving” child on its front page to accuse Israel of orchestrating a “famine” in Gaza — a child who was later revealed to be suffering from a preexisting medical condition, whereas his healthy sibling was conveniently cropped out of the photo — it took five days for a quiet editors’ note to appear online. That episode was embarrassing. This one is worse.

 

The backlash to Kristof’s column has been louder and could be more sustained. Perhaps that is because this is one anti-Israel editorial debacle too many. Or perhaps because, unlike the famine photo, which could be blamed on a freelancer in Gaza, the hodgepodge of sensational claims, dubious sourcing, and evolving witness accounts in Kristof’s piece feels less like a mistake and more like malice. In fact, the Israeli government announced its intention to bring a defamation lawsuit against the Times.

 

In a 1,500-word exercise in what the paper calls “opinion journalism,” an oxymoronic term deployed by spokesman Charlie Stadtlander in one of several defenses of the piece that the Times has released, Kristof alleges that Israeli security forces and civilians have systematically sexually abused Palestinian detainees. Not content with alleged human perpetrators, he adds a grotesque flourish: an absurd claim that Israeli authorities have trained dogs to rape prisoners.

 

The claim is as lurid as it is implausible. Veterinarians and animal-behavior experts have pointed out the obvious: training a dog to carry out sexual assault on command is practically and biologically impossible. Yet Kristof doubled down on social media, insisting that articles in some medical journals concede that dogs can rape humans. They do not. The material he cited describes cases of human-initiated bestiality and does not involve animals that have been trained to assault humans. The “rape dogs” exist only in the imaginations of Kristof and his sources.

 

And those sources are, to put it mildly, questionable. Chief among them is the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which is cited repeatedly throughout Kristof’s column. The organization’s respectable-sounding name conceals a multitude of sins. Euro-Med has a history of promoting inflammatory and unfounded allegations against Israel, including claims of organ-harvesting and “mass field executions” in Gaza. It has also been shown to have ties to Hamas, with its founder and chairman, Ramy Abdu, being subject to an anti‑terror seizure order.

 

A cursory reading of the June 2024 Euro-Med report from which the allegation of rape by dogs originates should have raised immediate red flags for any journalist. One interviewee claims that he was strapped to an electric chair and shocked so severely that he woke up to find his “foot had exploded.” Such fantastical assertions might have prompted a careful reporter to reconsider whether the report is reliable at all. Kristof appears not to have done so.

 

He writes that he interviewed 14 Palestinians who are alleging sexual abuse. Only a few are named. Among them is Sami al-Sai, introduced simply as a “freelance journalist.” Al-Sai recounts a horrific experience of rape in Israeli detention, claiming that he was anally assaulted with a rubber baton and even a carrot, after which he was returned to a cell where he found himself lying on “other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth.” It is a shocking story. It is also not the same story al-Sai has told previously.

 

In testimony to B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO, in July 2025, al-Sai described a different sequence of events. According to that account, the alleged assault occurs weeks into his detention. He says he was examined by a doctor who accused him of affiliation with Hamas, then was beaten by prison officers who pushed “something hard” into him and poured liquid on his body. The vivid, cinematic details featured in the Times, such as the carrot and the vomit-covered cell, are absent. In the earlier account, al-Sai does not specify what object was used in his alleged rape.

 

Nor is this the first time al-Sai has alleged torture, only to change his claims later. In 2017, after he was arrested by Palestinian intelligence in Tulkarem on charges of incitement on social media, his mother emerged from a prison visit claiming that he had been brutally tortured — beaten, hung from door frames and windows, and injected with unknown drugs four times a day. The Palestinian Public Prosecution and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate flatly denied those allegations. The syndicate said that when its representatives met al-Sai, he told them that reports of torture were only a “false rumor,” a statement he later retracted, saying he had been afraid to speak openly while under an apparent threat.

 

This history of dramatic, contested claims of torture makes Kristof’s uncritical treatment of al-Sai even more troubling. In the Times column, he presents al-Sai’s assertion that Israel detained him in 2024 to recruit him as an informant, a proposal that al-Sai heroically rebuffed because of his commitment to “journalistic professionalism.” What Kristof does not tell readers is that Israel actually arrested him for incitement of the very type exposed by media watchdog HonestReporting, where I work, which revealed that al-Sai had used social media to praise Palestinian terrorist organizations, including Hamas, and the October 7 massacre.

 

He is not the only source whose account appears to have evolved. Issa Amro, an activist who Kristof claims is sometimes referred to as the “Palestinian Gandhi,” told him in July 2024 that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers. Yet in an interview with the Washington Post just months earlier, about the same arrest, Amro said he had been “threatened” with sexual assault, not subjected to it.

 

Even Kristof’s attempt to anchor his shocking piece with a respectable Israeli voice has unraveled. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appears in Kristof’s column immediately after a particularly graphic allegation made by a Palestinian official, in a way that suggests that Olmert is lending weight to what precedes it. Within hours of publication, Olmert issued a statement clarifying that he had been misrepresented. He told the Free Press that he “did not validate these claims” and had “no knowledge supporting them,” adding that the placement of his quote “misrepresents my views.”

 

That is not a minor editorial dispute. It is a fundamental failure of journalistic integrity.

 

Which brings us back to the original question: How long can the New York Times pretend that this will simply blow over? This is about not just one columnist or column. It is about standards. Sensational claims that collapse under scrutiny do not merely damage the Times’ credibility. They trivialize real instances of sexual violence and undermine the credibility of real victims.

 

The longer the paper avoids confronting what went wrong, the more that damage compounds. At some point, even the New York Times will have to decide whether it can continue hiding behind “opinion journalism.”