Nicholas Kristof’s Libel Against Israel

In recent months, activists have accused Israel of perpetrating sexual assault on a massive scale.

As Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times on May 11, 2026, the accusation increasingly being leveled at Israel is that the entire Israeli public has created a vast “pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women, and even children.” Kristof asserts that It’s now routine for Israelis to use rape and other forms of sexual assault: Israeli “soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and…prison guards” all routinely employ rape against Arabs as “standard operating procedure.”

Using rape as a tactic of war is a grave human rights violation: The Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court considers rape a crime against humanity. Rape is illegal in Israel. Is the surge in accusations of rape leveled against Israel a sign that something is very wrong in Israeli society? Or is it a cynical exploitation of human rights discourse to discredit Israel?

Euro-Med Monitor: Hamas’ Front in Europe

Kristof’s article leans heavily on a recent report by Euro-Med Monitor, a Swiss-based advocacy organization, to claim that “systemic sexual violence” is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy” by Israel.

Euro-Med’s report describes Israel as a deranged hellhole where, starting on October 7, 2023, innocent men, women, and children have been arrested en masse for no reason, held in “state-run torture camps,” then assaulted and tortured, all with the aid and complicity of mainstream Israeli doctors, soldiers, and judges. In its report, Euro-Med calls for states around the world to cut off trade with Israel, end all contact, and enact travel bans preventing people from visiting the Jewish state.

Left out of Kristof’s report is Euro-Med Monitor’s documented ties to Hamas. It was founded and is chaired by Ramy Abdu, who has been identified by Israeli intelligence as a Hamas operatives. A former chairman, Mazen Kahel, has also been identified as a Hamas employee.

Abdu called Hamas terrorists who raped and murdered Israelis “heroic knights who created for us pure glory.”

Ramy Abdu, who publicly denied that Hamas engaged in sexual assault and rape in its October 7, 2023 assault on Israel, has made no secret about his support for Hamas. On October 7, 2023, he posted on Twitter (now X) that Hamas’ assault was a justified reaction to Israeli “assaults” on Arab women. He called Hamas terrorists who raped and murdered Israelis “heroic knights who created for us pure glory,” promised to “remember their names well and teach the stories of their eternal heroism to…children and grandchildren.” Referring to the Israeli neighborhood of Ofakim, where Hamas terrorists murdered dozens of civilians, Abdu posted “The scenes of clashes in…Ofakim…are amazing. How did the youth of the resistance reach this level of craftsmanship and boldness? Amazing!”

Since Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Abdu has stepped up his attempts to shape public opinion in favor of Hamas. He’s worked with the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza and the Council for European Palestinian Relations, both groups with documented connections to Hamas. At Euro-Med, he is leading efforts to train young people in Gaza to edit Wikipedia entries related to Israel and Hamas. A seasoned journalist like Nicholas Kristof might well have asked whether Euro-Med’s newest report on sexual violence was part of this same push to forward Hamas’ narrative in the West.

Shifting the Overton Window

The most horrifying part of Kristof’s article is his description of the treatment that two former security prisoners, Sami al-Sai, and Issa Amro, told Kristof they’d endured in Israeli jails. (Kristof says he personally spoke with other former security prisoners, whom he does not name, and with people who were sexually assaulted by Israeli Jews outside of a prison setting.) Ill treatment by Israeli soldiers and civilians is always appalling and wrong and must be investigated. Yet Kristof’s own account of what he heard differs in important ways from Euro-Med’s narrative.

Euro-Med paints describes an orgy of violence that goes far beyond accusations leveled against Israel by even its harshest critics: It falsely accuses Israelis of training dogs to rape prisoners. It baselessly asserts that virtually every Israeli soldier engages in rape and sexual violence. It describes Israelis sexually assaulting young children. B’Tselem, the far-left Israeli NGO which criticizes Israel’s treatment of security prisoners, doesn’t describe anything like Euro-Med’s assertions in its publications. Even the UN Human Rights Council (made up of implacable foes of Israel such as Qatar, Iraq, South Africa, Pakistan, and Indonesia), whose only standing item on its yearly agenda is an anti-Israel resolution, hasn’t criticized Israel the way that Euro-Med’s report does. Yet it is Euro-Med’s new report that Nicolas Kristof chose to quote. Euro-Med’s extreme slanders are fueling the news cycle around the world, filling the internet with grotesque anti-Israel lies.

In the 1990s, American political scientist Joseph Overton described public discourse as a spectrum of options: at any given time, only a narrow part of the spectrum is considered reasonable. In order to be taken seriously, politicians and activists have to make sure their ideas fit inside the boundaries of acceptable sounding discourse.

Yet, Overton realized, by pushing against the bounds of acceptable-sounding discourse, one can eventually widen the window of what is considered normal or reasonable. This has been dubbed the Overton Window: ideas that sound extreme at first can eventually come to be seen as mainstream, at which point a new idea can begin to nudge open the Overton Window still further.

This is occurring today as activists level increasingly extreme accusations of sexual violence on the part of Israelis. It’s outrageous that Euro-Med’s extreme and sensationalist report is being cited in the New York Times. Elevating Euro-Med’s slanders does nothing to focus serious attention on the conditions in which security prisoners are held; its goal appears merely to demonize Israel, fomenting outrage and anger, rather than any constructive action.

Elevating Hamas narratives risks drowning out real information and does nothing to help the very people it purports to aid.