At the height of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, the New York Times published a news article the paper would come to regret. There had been an explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on October 17, 2023. Hundreds of innocents were reported dead and injured. The courtyard of the civilian hospital was pictured, a chaotic scene, shrouded in a smoky haze. The cause of the blast was a suspected Israeli airstrike, or so said the paper's source, Hamas.
Hours later the truth emerged. It was not an Israeli missile that hit the hospital, but an errant rocket launched by a Palestinian terror group, Islamic Jihad. The Times issued a correction: 'Early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.' 'Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received,' the statement continued, 'Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified.'
Perhaps, the New York Times has yet to learn such temperance. On Monday, the Times, under the byline of veteran columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, published a seemingly damning indictment of Israel, its government and its citizens. The opinion piece titled 'The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,' alleged mass sexual atrocities committed against Palestinians by Israeli, as Kristof phrases it, 'soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.' He describes horrifying details of alleged rapes and torture, some involving metal batons, carrots, and even trained dogs; suggests widespread and systematic assaults on Palestinian civilians; and laments that 'American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.' Kristof also draws an equivalence between these allegations and widely documented, corroborated reports of Hamas rapes of men, women and children during and after the October 7, 2023 attacks.
These are, to say the least, incredible charges. Except, as numerous objective observers have raised, Kristof's piece also comes with a startling number of caveats not typically included in reporting of this magnitude. 'There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes,' Kristof writes. 'It's impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are.' '[In certain cases] it was not possible [to corroborate the victims' stories], perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones,' Kristof observes, noting cultural norms can impede reportorial clarity. He does cite fourteen sources as victims, family members, lawyers, 'a nonviolent activist [Issa Amro] sometimes called 'the Palestinian Gandhi,'' and local human rights groups and aid workers. One alleged victim, according to Kristof, refused to allow his name to be used after claiming he was threatened by Shin Bet, Israel's equivalent to the FBI. But again, there's no evidence provided to support the man's story.
The piece has sparked understandable outrage and pushback from those who consider it irresponsible, journalistically suspect, toxically biased and manifestly implausible. The New York Times, which has, in recent years, fought dozens of accusations of publishing anti-Israel propaganda, slanting coverage in favor of Palestinian cohorts and whitewashing stories about Hamas and other terrorist groups, has now dropped an incendiary news bomb via a columnist who was, seemingly, not held to the standards of a news reporter, on a sensitive topic, at a sensitive time.
The platform X has been flooded with demands for Kristof and the Times to counter myriad charges of blatant propaganda. Haviv Rettig Gur, senior analyst for The Times of Israel, offered a lengthy and insightful post: 'My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards…I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of. And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim – maybe possible, but how exactly? – and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another. Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred – and there is no doubt – was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's op-ed?'
Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger, who identifies the detail about the trained rape dogs as 'the handiwork of Ramy Abdu,' an alleged Hamas operative, reviled the 'utter depravity from Nick for parroting such cartoonishly evil Hamas propaganda that would make Goebbels blush.' Additionally, in 2011, Abdu and the leadership of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which is cited as an authority throughout the column, posed for pictures with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Democratic strategist Mark Penn tweeted, in part, 'NY Times Does it again. In the 1930s, they won a Pulitzer for romanticized reporting of Joseph Stalin that failed to uncover the deliberate starving of millions in the Ukraine… No award in sight yet but give it time.'
Maybe the sharpest criticism of the Kristof piece came from Israel. The Israeli Foreign Ministry claimed on Tuesday that it offered to release to The New York a deeply-reported and corroborated investigation of 'Hamas militants and their allies [who] raped, assaulted and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023 terror attack on southern Israel 'to maximize pain and suffering… systematic, widespread, and integral to' the assault.' Coincidentally or not, CNN published that 'landmark report' on Tuesday. The Times had apparently declined to run it themselves.
I do not know if the claims in this Kristof column are true, though I can say they have not been adequately corroborated. Is this yet another instance where Times editors 'should have taken more care' and 'been more explicit about what information could be verified'? Time will tell. In what is, to me, the most telling admission in the Kristof column, he writes towards the end, 'Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched….' Indeed, that seems to have been the case, Mr Kristof, but one of the great duties of a journalist is to be a skeptic. During this time of war across the globe, of profound human suffering in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan, of AI fabrications, of TikTok misinformation, of frivolous blogs and vlogs and mindless partisan allegiances, there can be no room for negligence and imbalance, especially from the revered Grey Lady. The world is on the brink and respectable journalism is more essential than ever.
