Israel Threatens Lawsuit After NYT Reveals Horrific Sexual Abuse Against Palestinian Detainees

Palestinian detainees are pictured blindfolded in Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison camp | Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Israeli regime announced today that it is preparing a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, instructed government officials to begin building a case against the paper for what they describe as “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel.” The lie in question is a column from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof. His column covered the systematic abuse of Palestinian detainees held by Israel, and has been supported by a wave of reports from former detainees who have been held by Israel. It is immediately worth noting that Israel does not allow independent reviews of the conditions the detainees are held in, not even when those detainees outline horrific abuses suffered in the prisons.

On Monday, Kristof published “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians” in the NYT opinion section. The piece is based on fourteen testimonies from Palestinians who survived Israeli detention. They describe rape with batons, with metal rods, with carrots, with fire-extinguisher nozzles emptied inside men until they lost consciousness. They describe a female guard squeezing a detainee’s testicles until he screamed. One of the most horrific elements of the story, and the one that has grabbed public attention: detainees describe being held down, stripped naked, blindfolded and handcuffed, while soldiers encouraged dogs to mount them and other soldiers stood by and took photographs. Kristof cites corroborating reporting from the United Nations, B’Tselem, Save the Children, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Save the Children found that more than half of surveyed Palestinian children detained by Israel said they witnessed or experienced sexual violence.

The Israeli regime’s response has been to claim, repeatedly, that the testimonies originate from “Hamas-linked groups.” It has produced no evidence for this claim. We have requested evidence and received no response at the time of writing. Its most prominent public response to Kristof’s column was an AI-generated cartoon, posted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, depicting a New York Times reporter taking dictation by phone from a masked Hamas fighter. We are not the only ones who have requested evidence of their claims, with journalists and the public alike demanding Israel explain this claim. An AI image is not sufficient. It does not address the claims at all.

The Israeli Foreign Affairs office released an AI image, when the public demanded evidence

In January 2026 — four months before Kristof’s column — the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, headquartered in Jerusalem, released a 17-page report titled “Living Hell: Sexual violence, starvation and systematic abuse.” The report, based on 21 testimonies from Palestinians released under the October 2025 prisoner exchange, found that Israeli prisons function as “a network of torture camps.” It identified, by name and place of death, 84 Palestinians who died in Israeli custody since October 2023, including one minor; Israel has refused to release 80 of those bodies to their families, forcing us to question why it is withholding them, and how that reasoning may link to the reports being denied by the Israeli government today. It documented sexual violence ranging “from threats of sexual assault, through forced stripping, to actual sexual assaults,” including “beatings to the genitals that caused severe injuries, setting dogs on prisoners, and forced anal penetration with various objects.” Its executive director, Yuli Novak, was unequivocal: “The Israeli regime has turned its prisons into a network of torture camps for Palestinians, as part of a coordinated onslaught on Palestinian society intended to destroy their existence as a collective.” B’Tselem went further, identifying the source of the policy directly. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees the Israel Prison Service, “brags in TV puff pieces and on social media about the inhuman treatment of Palestinians in these facilities.”

These findings are not new and they are not isolated. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights collected accounts of rape by a trained dog at Sde Teiman in 2024. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor began publishing detainee testimonies about the use of dogs the same year. A UN Special Committee explicitly recorded “intimidation through the use of dogs by Israeli security forces.”

In March 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, chaired by Navi Pillay, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, published a report titled “More than a human can bear.” The Commission concluded that Israel is “increasingly and systematically employing sexual and gender-based violence as a deliberate strategy to destabilise Palestinian society, assert control, persecute its people, and contribute to their destruction.” It found that forced stripping, threats of rape, and sexual assault now comprise part of the Israeli Security Forces’ “standard operating procedures” against Palestinians, and that rape and violence to the genitals are “committed either under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement by Israel’s top civilian and military leadership.” Pillay’s framing was direct: “There is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them.”

It is clear at this point that the question is not whether the regime tortures and rapes Palestinian detainees. The question is what the regime does when one of those rapes is documented. The answer comes from Sde Teiman, and it is the horrific fact that the Israeli regime will not punish the rapists, no matter the proof. However, that regime will punish those who helped prove the rapes had happened.

On 5 July 2024, five Israeli reservists from Force 100, the unit assigned to guard detainees at Sde Teiman, gang-raped a Palestinian prisoner with a sharp object. He was hospitalised with a perforated rectum, a punctured lung, fractured ribs, and an internal tear. The military’s own doctor, Yoel Donchin, told Haaretz the man’s condition was so severe he initially assumed it was the work of a rival armed group. But the assault was captured on CCTV, a video that the Israeli government never wanted to be seen by the public.

A screenshot of a leaked video showing the gang rape of a Palestinian detainee in Israel’s Sde Teiman

Nine soldiers were detained. Five were indicted, and not for rape, sexual abuse, or indeed any charge that outlined the horrors they had forced on the detainee. The charge was simply “severe abuse.” When the arrests were announced, members of the Israeli far-right cabinet physically stormed the military bases holding the suspects. Ben-Gvir called the rapists “our best heroes.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called them “heroic warriors.” Netanyahu said the state must “pursue its enemies, not its heroic fighters.”

On 12 March of this year, twenty months after the assault that the world had seen on video, with the country’s most senior military lawyer having staked her career on the prosecution, the military advocate general dropped the case. The stated reasons: “procedural difficulties” in evidence transfer, and the inconvenient fact that the victim had been returned to Gaza and could not be brought back to testify against his rapists. The only person formally punished in the entire affair is Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the former military advocate general, forced from her job and arrested for authorising the leak of the video that documented it. Smotrich has publicly called for her prosecution while the rapists walked.

This is Israel’s apartheid justice system, this is what it has always done, and what it will continue to do. The UN Human Rights Office reports that of more than 1,500 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces between 2017 and September 2025, Israeli authorities opened 112 investigations. They secured one conviction. The advocacy group Action on Armed Violence reviewed 52 publicly known IDF self-investigations into alleged Gaza and West Bank violations; 88% stalled, vanished, or closed without findings of wrongdoing. One conviction in thousands of crimes, that sounds like a failure, but it is not. In a country where Israeli police solve 65% of murders in Jewish communities but just 15% of murders in Palestinian communities, we cannot ignore the pattern clearly on display.

One question runs through all of this. If the testimonies are false, why are there no independent observers to disprove them? The International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody since October 2023. Family visits have been entirely suspended. Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, formally requested access to investigate in January 2025; she was refused. The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry has been denied cooperation. Lawyers visiting clients face systematic obstruction. Autopsies on the bodies of the dead are routinely blocked. Kristof made the point himself in response to his critics: "Why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian 'security' prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?" In the case of Palestine, and only in the case of Palestine, the media will air the voices of those who disagree with prisoners having access to their lawyers, and the Red Cross observing the conditions of prisoners.

The instinct under such accusations is to point to the evidence, to the UN reports, to Euro-Med, to PCHR, to B’Tselem, to the regime’s own military advocate general now sacked for leaking the proof. The regime knows this, and rather than capitulate in any way, it consistently aims to attack the credibility of the UN, NGOs and journalists. It is preparing the lawsuit as an extension of this tactic, and we do not have a media sphere confident enough to confront the Israeli tactics that force silence.

Within forty-eight hours of Kristof’s publication, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who had told Kristof on the record that he was not surprised by the testimonies and that he believed they happen, issued a statement complaining that his quote was “misrepresented.” He did not deny saying it. He clarified that he had no first-hand knowledge, which was exactly what Kristof had reported. The retraction could very well have been a ploy to avoid litigation from the Israeli regime, although we have no first-hand knowledge of whether or not that is the case.

The regime is not preparing a lawsuit against the New York Times to disprove its reporting. It cannot. The reporting is supported by the UN, by every major rights monitor of the conflict including the Israeli ones, by the regime’s own indictment of its own reservists, and by leaked footage filmed inside the regime’s own facilities. The regime is preparing a lawsuit to make the next newspaper think twice. It is the same logic as the storming of the Sde Teiman base, the cabinet ministers calling rapists heroes, the firing of the lawyer who refused to bury the tape. Punish the documenters, decorate the perpetrators, call any accurate description of what happens inside the cages a “blood libel.”

The UN’s title for its 2025 report was “More than a human can bear.” It described a pattern of conduct ordered or encouraged by the top of the Israeli state. The regime’s response, then and now, has been to call the documentation itself the crime. It is past time for journalists to stand their ground and inform Israel that its crimes must be documented, regardless of its threats.

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