A profound political and media crisis has erupted between Israel and The New York Times following publication of one of the most controversial and morally explosive pieces of journalism to emerge from the Gaza war.
The article, written by veteran columnist Nicholas Kristof and published under the headline “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” accuses Israeli prison guards, interrogators, soldiers, and settlers of carrying out widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees, including men, women, and children.
Israeli officials reacted with extraordinary fury. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly instructed advisers to prepare legal action against the newspaper, while Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar is said to have ordered legal officials to examine the harshest legal action available against both the Times and Kristof personally. Official Israeli state accounts and senior politicians denounced the article as “blood libel,” “Hamas propaganda,” and a grotesque inversion of reality.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry amplified social media statements accusing Kristof and the New York Times of attempting to “turn the victim into the perpetrator,” and Netanyahu himself declared that the article sought to create a “false symmetry” between Hamas and Israeli soldiers while spreading a “blood libel about rape” against Israel’s military.
The New York Times, for its part, has stood firmly behind the reporting. The paper has said the column underwent extensive editorial review and rigorous fact-checking, and has characterised the Israeli legal threat as part of a wider pattern of state pressure designed to undermine independent journalism on the conduct of the Gaza war. The Times has rejected accusations that the piece was fabricated, malicious, or insufficiently sourced, defending the importance of reporting alleged state-sponsored abuse regardless of the identity of the perpetrators.
Yet beneath the outrage lies a much deeper problem for Israel and its Western allies.
For the first time since the beginning of the Gaza war, one of the most powerful newspapers in the world has published a sustained mainstream account portraying Palestinians not as statistics, collateral damage, or abstract humanitarian victims, but as alleged victims of systematic sexual violence carried out by Israeli institutions themselves. In doing so, the New York Times has reopened one of the most politically sensitive and contested media battles of the entire conflict: the competing narratives surrounding sexual violence after October 7.
Kristof’s article is constructed around a moral challenge directed squarely at Western audiences.
“It’s a simple proposition,” he writes. “Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.”
The article immediately invokes the outrage that followed allegations of Hamas sexual violence during the October 7 attacks before contrasting that outrage with what Kristof describes as silence regarding widespread abuse of Palestinians by Israeli authorities.
Supporters of Israel made precisely that argument after October 7, with Israeli officials and Western politicians repeatedly insisting that the world had a moral obligation to condemn rape and sexual violence regardless of politics or ideology. Kristof’s article turns that same moral language back toward Israel itself, and that inversion is precisely why the reaction has been so explosive.
The Collapse of the October 7 Narrative Monopoly
In the aftermath of October 7, allegations of systematic sexual violence by Hamas fighters became central to Israel’s international messaging strategy and to Western political discourse, and few pieces of journalism shaped that narrative more powerfully than the New York Times’ own December 2023 investigation, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
The article rapidly became one of the most influential reports published during the opening phase of the war.
Senior members of the Biden administration cited the allegations while defending continued U.S. military support for Israel, while members of Congress repeatedly referenced the reporting during debates over ceasefire resolutions and weapons transfers.
The emotional and political impact of the article was immense. The report helped construct a dominant wartime narrative in which Hamas was framed not merely as a militant organization but as uniquely barbaric and sexually sadistic, thereby reinforcing arguments that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza represented a civilizational struggle against evil itself.
Over time, however, serious questions emerged surrounding parts of the reporting.
Critics challenged aspects of the sourcing, witness testimony, forensic evidence, editorial standards, and the qualifications of some reporters involved in producing the investigation. In March 2024, The Intercept published a major investigation examining internal tensions surrounding the article and arguing that portions of the reporting relied heavily on second-hand testimony, ZAKA volunteer accounts, and disputed evidence.
Several atrocity stories amplified during the immediate aftermath of October 7 later collapsed or became heavily disputed. One widely repeated claim alleged that a pregnant woman had been found with her fetus cut from her body, though ZAKA later acknowledged there was no evidence such an incident occurred. Another story involving a teenage girl allegedly raped because her clothing had been displaced was later challenged after investigators concluded the clothing may have shifted while Israeli personnel moved bodies during explosives checks.
Other sensational narratives, including the infamous “40 beheaded babies” story, became symbols of wartime disinformation despite frequently becoming merged in public consciousness with broader rape allegations linked to October 7.
At the same time, later United Nations investigations did conclude there were “reasonable grounds” to believe some sexual violence occurred during the attacks, but investigators also stressed that many of the most graphic allegations could not be independently verified and that no evidence had been found suggesting Palestinian armed groups received systematic orders to commit rape.
That distinction is critically important. While evidence strongly suggests some sexual violence likely occurred during October 7, many of the most emotionally powerful narratives amplified during the opening months of the war later proved exaggerated, disputed, or unsupported by forensic evidence.
Yet by the time those doubts emerged, the narrative had already shaped public consciousness across the West during a decisive period when Israel launched one of the deadliest military assaults in modern Middle Eastern history. Kristof’s article now turns the moral framework of that narrative back toward Israel itself.
“I Was Praying for Death”
What distinguishes Kristof’s article from many previous reports is not simply its subject matter, but the intensity and detail of the testimony it presents, together with the scale of the reporting on which it is built.
Kristof writes that he became interested in the subject after Issa Amro, a nonviolent Palestinian activist sometimes called the Palestinian Gandhi, told him during a previous visit that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and believed such abuse was common but rarely reported because of shame. From that starting point, his reporting expanded across the West Bank and into testimony from Gaza detainees, conducted over an extended period and corroborated where possible by family members, lawyers, social workers, and other witnesses.
The scale of Israeli detention since October 7 provides essential context for what Kristof describes. By one count, Israel has detained twenty thousand people in the West Bank alone since the Hamas-led attack, and more than nine thousand Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023 most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and from lawyers, creating precisely the conditions of opacity in which institutional abuse historically flourishes.
The reporting itself is anchored in conversations with fourteen men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces, supplemented by interviews with family members, investigators, officials, and others, and reinforced by data from independent surveys.
A survey commissioned by Save the Children of Palestinian children aged twelve to seventeen who had been held in Israeli detention found that more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence, with the organisation cautioning that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them. A separate survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists of fifty-nine Palestinian journalists released by Israeli authorities after the October 7 attacks found that three percent said they had been raped and twenty-nine percent reported enduring other forms of sexual violence.
Among the most graphic accounts in the article is that of Palestinian journalist Sami al-Sai, who described being raped with objects by Israeli prison guards while detained in 2024.
“They were trying to force it into my rectum,” al-Sai told him. “It was so painful.”
According to the testimony, guards laughed while assaulting him, while one female guard allegedly grabbed his genitals and joked:
“These are mine.”
Afterward, al-Sai said he was dumped onto a floor stained with blood, vomit, and broken teeth.
“I was praying for death,” he recalled.
Kristof also cites a Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report describing the case of a 42-year-old Palestinian woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photographs of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.
The article contains numerous similarly graphic accounts involving alleged baton rape, genital torture, forced nudity, threats of rape, and humiliating treatment carried out against Palestinian detainees.
Kristof recounts the testimony of a Palestinian woman arrested after October 7 who described repeated stripping, beatings, and sexual humiliation by male and female guards.
“I’d be stripped and beaten several times a day,” she said. “It was as if they were introducing me to everyone who worked there.”
Another detainee from Gaza described guards zip-tying his penis and testicles while beating his genitals until he urinated blood, and alleged that guards used dogs in acts of sexual torture while photographing and mocking prisoners.
“No one escaped sexual assaults,” the journalist told Kristof. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.”
Kristof’s reporting extends even to Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities. One boy told him that rape threats were routine.
“They’d say, ‘Do this, or we’ll put this stick up your butt.'”
A Different Evidentiary Landscape
What makes Kristof’s article particularly difficult for Israel to dismiss is that many of the allegations are not isolated claims emerging amid wartime confusion. Rather, they are supported by a large and growing body of documentation accumulated over many months by former detainees, Israeli human rights groups, Israeli lawyers, doctors, journalists, whistleblowers, UN investigators, international NGOs, and even internal Israeli investigations.
Kristof explicitly states there is “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes,” but he argues that Israeli authorities have created a system where abuse flourishes through dehumanisation, impunity, and institutional tolerance.
The article references two major institutional findings as the documentary backbone of its argument. A 49-page United Nations report concluded last year that Israel had “systematically” subjected Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership,” and described sexual violence as one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.”
A separate report by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concluded that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
The article additionally draws on findings by B’Tselem documenting “a grave pattern of sexual violence,” on testimony from Israeli human rights lawyers, on accounts from children detained by Israeli authorities, and on evidence involving the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility.
Unlike many of the disputed October 7 atrocity narratives, the allegations involving Israeli detention facilities reveal repeated patterns emerging independently across numerous testimonies over an extended period.
Sde Teiman and the Public Debate Over Rape
The most politically devastating aspect of the scandal revolves around Sde Teiman, the Israeli detention facility that has increasingly become synonymous with allegations of torture and sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners.
Multiple former detainees, journalists, lawyers, and Israeli whistleblowers have described beatings, rape with objects, attacks by dogs, forced nudity, genital torture, and prolonged humiliation inside the camp.
In July 2024, Israeli military police detained several reservists accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee so severely that he reportedly suffered catastrophic internal injuries, including a torn rectum and punctured lung. The case reportedly emerged after the detainee was transferred to hospital and surveillance footage from the prison was leaked publicly. The detainee, who afterward reportedly required a stoma bag to collect his waste, was eventually returned to Gaza, where an acquaintance said he spent months in a hospital recovering from his internal injuries.
The reaction inside Israel stunned many observers. Far-right activists and politicians rallied behind the accused soldiers rather than the alleged victim, and Israeli protesters stormed military facilities in support of the reservists.
The investigation that followed gradually unravelled. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March of this year, and the military last month approved their return to active duty.
Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the end of a “blood libel” in itself.
“The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies, not its heroic fighters,” he said.
The framing is striking, because the same phrase now being deployed against Kristof and the New York Times had already been used months earlier to describe an Israeli criminal case in which surveillance footage, hospital records of catastrophic anal injuries, and Israel’s own military investigators had judged there to be sufficient evidence to bring charges in the first place.
Sari Bashi, the Israeli American executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, described the collapse of the case in unambiguous terms.
“I would say that dropping the charges, that’s giving permission to rape,” she told Kristof.
Bashi went further, telling the columnist that her organisation had filed hundreds of complaints detailing horrific abuse against Palestinian detainees and that not a single one had ever resulted in charges being filed against prison staff.
“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” she said. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”
Impunity, she said, creates a “green light” for abusers.
Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told Kristof that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”
Most shocking of all was the public debate that followed inside the Knesset itself. During a televised parliamentary discussion, Likud lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked directly whether it was legitimate for Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian detainees using objects.
“Yes,” he replied. “If he is Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”
The significance of the exchange was extraordinary. Israeli politicians were no longer merely denying allegations of abuse. Some were publicly debating whether such acts were lawful, justified, or necessary.
The Celebrity of Meir Ben-Shitrit
One of the reservists associated with the Sde Teiman scandal, Meir Ben-Shitrit, later emerged publicly and became a celebrity figure within parts of Israel’s nationalist media ecosystem.
Ben-Shitrit appeared on Israel’s Channel 14 to applause and sympathy while presenting himself as the victim of political persecution rather than a suspect in an alleged prison rape case.
The symbolism was extraordinary: an accused participant in the alleged rape of a Palestinian detainee appearing on national television to admiration and applause while politicians and commentators defended the accused soldiers.
To critics of Israel, the episode demonstrated precisely the culture of impunity Kristof describes throughout his article. The issue was no longer simply whether isolated abuse occurred. The issue had become the normalisation and political defence of abuse itself.
Voices From Inside Israel
The most legally and politically consequential testimony in Kristof’s article comes not from Palestinians, but from inside the Israeli establishment itself.
The columnist writes that he called Ehud Olmert, who served as prime minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009, to try to make sense of what he had found. Olmert told him he did not know much about sexual violence against Palestinians, but was not surprised by the accounts Kristof had heard.
“Do I believe it happens?” Olmert asked. “Definitely.”
“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.
The statement is extraordinary by any historical standard. A former Israeli prime minister, speaking on the record to a New York Times columnist, has confirmed that he believed the sexual violence against Palestinians described in the article was occurring, and broadened the admission to acknowledge daily war crimes in the occupied territories. For any defamation strategy built on outright denial of the underlying claims, Olmert’s words present an almost insurmountable evidentiary problem.
Equally damaging is testimony gathered by the Israeli veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence from a former Israeli officer who had served in a prison infirmary.
“You see normal, pretty ordinary people reaching a point where they abuse people for their own amusement, not even for an interrogation or anything,” the officer said. “For fun, to have something to tell the guys or revenge.”
Taken together with the Knesset debate, the public celebrity treatment of Meir Ben-Shitrit, the documented findings of B’Tselem, the case files maintained by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and the on-the-record admissions of a former Israeli prime minister, the article presents a picture in which the question of whether systemic sexual abuse occurs has effectively been answered from inside Israel itself.
Beyond the Prisons: Settler Violence and Displacement
Kristof’s article does not confine its allegations to the formal prison system. It also documents allegations of sexual violence by Israeli settlers used as a tool of displacement in the occupied West Bank, with the Israel Defense Forces increasingly protecting settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers.
A new report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of international aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council, surveyed Palestinian farmers and found that more than seventy percent of households that had been displaced cited threats to women and children, particularly threats of sexual violence, as the decisive reason for leaving their land.
“Sexual violence,” said Allegra Pacheco of the coalition, “is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land.”
The pattern is illustrated by the testimony of Suhaib Abualkebash, a twenty-nine-year-old farmer from a remote Jordan Valley hamlet of Bedouin farmers, who described a gang of approximately twenty settlers rampaging through the homes of his family, beating adults and children alike, stealing jewellery and four hundred sheep, and cutting off his clothes with a hunting knife before tightly zip-tying his penis and yanking it.
“I was afraid they would cut off my penis,” Abualkebash told Kristof. “I thought this was the end for me.”
The article also notes that some Palestinian victims, despite the immense stigma surrounding sexual violence in conservative Arab society, are beginning to speak out publicly.
Mohammad Matar, a Palestinian official, told Kristof that settlers had stripped him, beaten him, and poked him with a stick in the buttocks while talking about raping him. During the attack, the assailants posted a photograph on social media of him blindfolded and stripped to his underpants.
“For six months I couldn’t speak about it, even to my family,” he said.
With time, Matar decided to speak out in an attempt to break the stigma surrounding the experience, and he now keeps a blown-up print of the settlers’ photograph of him on the wall of his office, an act of defiance that captures precisely the cultural shift Kristof’s reporting argues is now underway.
Abu Ghraib and the Logic of Dehumanisation
Kristof explicitly compares Israeli detention abuses to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal during the American occupation of Iraq.
“The blunt reality,” he writes, “is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.”
The article points toward rhetoric from Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has publicly referred to Palestinian detainees as “scum” and “Nazis” while boasting of worsening prison conditions, arguing that when such attitudes prevail at the highest levels of government, sexual abuse becomes one more tool to inflict pain and humiliation on those defined as enemies of the state.
Kristof also draws a more constructive historical parallel in support of his core argument that prosecution can curb such violence. In 1997, police officers in New York City raped a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with a stick so brutally that he required hospitalisation and surgeries. New Yorkers were outraged, Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Louima in the hospital, and the officers responsible were prosecuted in a landmark case that sent a powerful message throughout the police force that those who assault detainees may be punished.
The contrast with the Sde Teiman case, in which the charges were ultimately dropped and the accused reservists permitted to return to active duty, is the implicit moral spine of Kristof’s argument. The question, in his framing, is not whether such abuses can be curbed, because history demonstrates that they can be. The question is whether Israeli society and its Western allies are willing to do what is required to curb them.
For critics of Israel, the central issue is no longer whether abuse exists, because the evidence is now too extensive and too widespread. The real question is whether Israeli society and its Western allies are willing to confront what that evidence implies.
A Dangerous Lawsuit?
Israel’s threat to sue the New York Times may itself prove politically and legally dangerous.
Under American defamation law, particularly in cases involving powerful public actors and matters of immense public interest, plaintiffs face an extremely high evidentiary burden. Israeli officials would likely need not merely to denounce Kristof’s reporting, but to confront the underlying evidence supporting it.
That could potentially open the door to extensive discovery involving prison records, military investigations, detainee medical reports, surveillance footage, internal communications, testimony from guards, reservists, interrogators, doctors, and former detainees, and evidence surrounding Sde Teiman itself.
Defamation lawsuits can sometimes produce the opposite effect intended by plaintiffs, transforming contested allegations into prolonged public evidentiary spectacles. In this case, critics argue that litigation could potentially expose even more disturbing information concerning Israeli detention practices than has already entered the public domain.
The risk is amplified by the broader international legal landscape in which any defamation case would inevitably take place. The International Court of Justice is currently hearing genocide-related proceedings against Israel brought by South Africa, while the International Criminal Court prosecutor has sought arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to the Gaza campaign. Both proceedings have become central battlegrounds in the diplomatic and legal struggle surrounding Gaza, and any material surfacing through American defamation discovery could potentially feed directly into international filings already underway in The Hague.
The danger for Israel is compounded by the fact that many allegations are no longer confined to anonymous testimony or activist claims. Some accusations are already supported by Israeli military investigations, leaked detention footage, testimony from Israeli lawyers and whistleblowers, UN findings, medical evidence, and public statements by Israeli politicians themselves.
The Sde Teiman scandal presents an especially difficult problem for any legal strategy built around outright denial, since Israeli politicians publicly debated not merely whether abuse occurred, but whether rape of Palestinian detainees was justified, and the public celebrity treatment afforded to Meir Ben-Shitrit further complicates any attempt to portray such allegations as unimaginable within Israeli society.
Most damaging of all for any future denial strategy is the on-the-record admission by former prime minister Ehud Olmert that he believed the abuse Kristof described was occurring and that war crimes were being committed daily in the occupied territories. It is difficult to imagine an Israeli legal team successfully arguing in an American court that allegations of state-sponsored sexual violence against Palestinians are inherently malicious or reckless when a former Israeli head of government has confirmed those allegations to the very newspaper now being sued.
For the New York Times, meanwhile, American constitutional law provides powerful protections. Under the landmark Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, public-interest journalism involving state actors receives broad First Amendment protection unless plaintiffs can prove “actual malice,” meaning the newspaper knowingly published falsehoods or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
Kristof’s article appears carefully constructed with that legal reality in mind. The piece repeatedly attributes allegations, references institutional reports, includes Israeli denials, and grounds itself in testimony gathered from multiple independent sources over time.
Some observers therefore believe litigation could become less a weapon against the New York Times and more a dangerous evidentiary arena in which even more details concerning Israeli prison abuses emerge publicly under judicial scrutiny. In that sense, Israel’s threat to sue may strike some analysts as a remarkably high-risk response that could unintentionally deepen global attention on precisely the allegations it seeks to suppress.
The End of Silence
At the conclusion of his article, Kristof turns Netanyahu’s own wartime rhetoric back toward Israel itself.
After October 7, Netanyahu demanded international condemnation of Hamas sexual violence and asked the world, “Where the hell are you?” Kristof now invokes that same phrase regarding alleged abuse of Palestinians inside Israeli detention facilities, observing that the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day, sustained by silence, indifference, and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s original question.
For supporters of Israel, that comparison is intolerable. For critics of Israel, it represents the collapse of a longstanding double standard that insulated Israeli institutions from the same moral scrutiny routinely directed at official enemies of the West.
Whether Israel ultimately proceeds with legal action against the New York Times remains uncertain. But the confrontation has already become something much larger than a dispute over one newspaper column.
It is now a battle over press freedom, wartime propaganda, evidentiary standards, narrative control, and the future limits of acceptable discourse surrounding Gaza and Palestine. Most of all, it is a battle over whether Palestinian suffering is finally becoming impossible for the Western mainstream to ignore.
Full Text: Nicholas Kristof’s “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians” (FOR REFERENCE)
Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators.
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist, reporting from the West Bank
May 11, 2026
It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.
Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu and many U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, condemned that sexual violence, and Netanyahu rightly called on “all civilized leaders” to “speak up.”
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.
There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. 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.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.
“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.
“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”
Al-Sai was blindfolded, he said, and heard someone say in Hebrew, which he understands, “Don’t take photos.” That suggested to him that someone had pulled out a camera. One of the guards was a woman who, he said, grabbed him by the penis and testicles and joked, “These are mine,” and then squeezed until he screamed from pain.
The guards left him handcuffed on the ground, and he smelled cigarette smoke. “I realized it was their smoking break,” he said.
After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.
Al-Sai said that he had been asked to become an informant for Israeli intelligence, and he believes that the purpose of his arrest and imprisonment under the administrative detention system was to pressure him to agree. Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused.
I’ve had a career covering war, genocide and atrocities, including rape, sometimes in places where the scale of sexual violence is far greater than anything committed by either Hamas militants or Israeli guards or settlers. In the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia a few years ago, 100,000 women may have been raped. Mass rape is now unfolding in Sudan.
Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.
I became interested in reporting on sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners after Issa Amro, a nonviolent activist sometimes called the Palestinian Gandhi, told me when I previously visited that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.
By one count, Israel has detained 20,000 people in the West Bank alone since the Oct. 7 attacks, and more than 9,000 Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.
“Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.
It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.
I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.
Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a respected American organization, surveyed 59 Palestinian journalists who had been released by Israeli authorities after the Oct. 7 attacks. Three percent said they had been raped, and 29 percent said they had endured other forms of sexual violence.
We journalists ask a lot of our sources, and that’s rarely so true as for this article. You may have found this piece difficult to read, but it was 1,000 times more difficult for the sexual assault survivors to share their stories. I was asking them to discuss the most intimate and wrenching experiences imaginable, those that already gave them nightmares, and then in fact-checking we went through it all over again.
The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women. 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.
Israel’s Ministry of National Security declined to comment for this article. The prison service “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse, said a spokesman who declined to be named, adding that complaints are “examined by the competent authorities.” The spokesman declined to say whether any prison staff member had ever been fired or prosecuted for sexual assaults.
The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various kinds of abuse beyond rape. Many reported that they often had their genitals yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.
One reason these abuses don’t receive more attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.
Conservative social norms also inhibit discussion: Two victims told me that a prisoner who acknowledges being raped would harm the ability of his sisters and daughters to find husbands.
One farmer initially agreed to let me use his name in this article. Released early this year after months in administrative detention — with no charges filed — he related what he said happened one day last year: A half-dozen guards immobilized him by holding his arms and legs while pulling down his pants and underwear and inserting a metal baton into his anus. The rapists were laughing and cheering, he said.
Several hours later, he said, he fainted and was taken to the prison clinic. After he woke up, he said, he was raped once more, again with the metal baton.
“I was bleeding,” he recalled. “I broke down completely. I was crying.”
After being returned to his cell, he said, he asked a guard for pen and paper to write a complaint about the assaults. The request was denied. And that evening, a group of guards came to the cell.
“Who is the one who wants to file a complaint?” one guard jeered, he said, and another guard pointed him out. “The beating started immediately,” he recalled. And then they raped him with the baton for a third time that day, he said.
He recalled one saying, “Now you have even more to put in your complaint.”
A few days after I interviewed him, the farmer called to say that he didn’t want his name used after all. He had just been visited by Shin Bet and warned not to cause trouble, and he also feared that his family would react badly to the attention.
“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”
Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”
Bashi said her organization has filed hundreds of complaints detailing horrific abuse against Palestinian detainees — and not in a single case did these lead to charges filed. Impunity, she said, creates a “green light” for abusers.
One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military approved the soldiers’ return to duty.
Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the end of a “blood libel.” “The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies — not its heroic fighters,” he said.
Bashi described the outcome this way: “I would say that dropping the charges — that’s giving permission to rape.”
That prisoner, who afterward reportedly required a stoma bag to collect his waste, was returned to Gaza, and an acquaintance of his said that he spent months in a hospital recovering from his internal injuries. The acquaintance said that the former prisoner declined to be interviewed.
Prosecutions and public attention can curb such violence. In 1997, police officers in New York City raped a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with a stick so brutally that he required hospitalization and surgeries. New Yorkers were outraged, Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Louima in the hospital, and police officers were prosecuted in a landmark case. That sent a powerful message throughout the police force: Those who assault detainees may be punished. And that’s the message that must be sent throughout the Israeli security forces.
If the Trump administration insisted on a resumption of Red Cross visits to prisoners, if the U.S. ambassador visited rape survivors with cameras in tow, if we conditioned arms transfers on an end to sexual assault, we could send a moral and practical message that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter the identity of the victim. For starters, the ambassador could ensure that those Palestinians who dared to speak for this article are not brutalized again for their courage.
How does this kind of violence happen? Decades of covering conflict have taught me that a combination of dehumanization and impunity can propel people into a Hobbesian state of nature. I’ve encountered this drift toward savagery in killing fields from Congo to Sudan to Myanmar, and I think it also roughly explains how American soldiers came to sexually abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, called detainees “scum” and “Nazis” and boasted of making prison conditions harsher for Palestinians. When such attitudes prevail, sexual abuse can become one more tool to inflict pain and humiliation on Palestinians.
Ben-Gvir declined, through a spokeswoman, to comment on sexual assaults by security services.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, documented “a grave pattern of sexual violence” toward Palestinians. It cited the account of a Gaza prisoner, Tamer Qarmut, who said he had been raped with a stick. Torture, B’Tselem said, “has become an accepted norm.”
A former Israeli officer in a prison infirmary described in testimony to the Israeli group Breaking the Silence what that kind of acceptance means in practice: “You see normal, pretty ordinary people reaching a point where they abuse people for their own amusement, not even for an interrogation or anything. For fun, to have something to tell the guys or revenge.”
Most of the rape and other sexual violence has been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90 percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.
For the next few days, she said, she was repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she said.
“They had their hands all over my body,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t know if they raped me,” she said, because she sometimes lost consciousness from the beatings.
The aim of the abuse was twofold, she thinks: to crush her spirit and also to let Israeli men molest a naked Palestinian woman with impunity.
“I’d be stripped and beaten several times a day,” she said. “It was as if they were introducing me to everyone who worked there. At the beginning of each shift, they would bring the guys to strip me.”
When she was about to be released from prison, she said, she was called into a room with six officials and given a stern warning never to give interviews.
“They threatened that if I spoke up, they would rape me, kill me and kill my father,” she said. Not surprisingly, she declined to be named in this article.
Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.
“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down and 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.
“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
So why was he willing to speak?
“There are moments when remembering feels unbearable,” he said. “My heart felt it might stop while talking to you about it just now. But I remember there are people still in there. So I speak up.”
Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.
One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this, or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”
The other boys told very similar stories of sexual violence as part of beatings and noted that the threats of rape were directed not only at them but also at their mothers and siblings.
Israeli settlers are not an official arm of the state in the same way that the prison system is, but the Israel Defense Forces increasingly protect settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers and use sexual violence to drive Palestinians to flee. “Sexualized violence is used to pressure communities” to leave their land, according to a new report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of international aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council.
The consortium surveyed Palestinian farmers and found that more than 70 percent of households that had been displaced reported that threats to women and children, particularly of sexual violence, were the decisive reason for leaving. “Sexual violence,” said Allegra Pacheco of the coalition, “is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land.”
In a remote Jordan Valley hamlet of Bedouin farmers, I met a 29-year-old farmer, Suhaib Abualkebash, who recounted how a gang of about 20 settlers rampaged through the homes of his family, beating adults and children alike and stealing jewelry and 400 sheep — and also cut off his clothes with a hunting knife and then tightly zip-tied his penis and yanked.
“I was afraid they would cut off my penis,” Abualkebash told me. “I thought this was the end for me.”
Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.
“For six months I couldn’t speak about it, even to my family,” said Mohammad Matar, a Palestinian official who told me that settlers stripped him, beat him and poked him with a stick in the buttocks while talking about raping him. During the attack, the assailants posted a photograph on social media of him blindfolded and stripped to his underpants.
With time, Matar decided to speak out to try to break the stigma. He now keeps a blown-up print of the settlers’ photo of him on the wall of his office.
To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.
“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”
“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.
So we return to the point I noted at the beginning of this column: Supporters of Israel were right in 2023 that whatever our views about the Middle East, we should be able to repudiate rape.
“Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu asked the international community then, demanding that it condemn sexual violence committed by what the Israeli government has called the “Hamas rapist regime.”
Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well — in particular at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s “systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.”
Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?
