Jewish groups to protest NYT over column alleging Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians

US Jewish groups announced a protest outside The New York Times headquarters in New York on Thursday, organized in response to a controversial opinion column published earlier this week that alleged widespread sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinian detainees.

The Thursday protest is organized by the groups EndJewHatred, Stop Antizionism, Hineni, and the Movement Against Antizionism, all of which emerged in the aftermath of the Gaza war and the rise of anti-Jewish discrimination in the US.

This comes alongside an order from Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Sa'ar to initiate a libel lawsuit against the New York Times for publishing what they say is one of the most horrific and distorted lies ever against the State of Israel.

The column, written by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, included accounts from 14 Palestinian men and women describing alleged sexual abuse by Israeli soldiers, prison guards, Shin Bet interrogators, and settlers. It also alleged that Israeli forces trained combat dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners on command.

Israel's Foreign Ministry called the piece "one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press," accusing Kristof of turning "the victim into the accused" and claiming the column was "part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN Secretary-General's blacklist." The ministry also accused the Times of deliberately timing the column to undermine an Israeli NGO report on Hamas's sexual violence during the October 7 attack, released the following day. 

The New York Times categorically rejected that claim, saying it "never passed on the Civil Commission report and wasn't told about its completion or the timing of its release." The Times also defended the reporting, releasing a statement on social media saying Kristof's accounts were "corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible" and that details were "extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human rights groups, surveys, and in one case, with UN testimony."

However, Israeli officials and media watchdogs challenged the credibility of Kristof's sources. Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter highlighted the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a key source in the column, whose leaders have photographed ties to senior Hamas officials, including Ismail Haniyeh and Osama Hamdan. NGO Monitor additionally raised concerns about other organizations cited in the column, including Save the Children and the Committee to Protect Journalists, over what it described as problematic records on accuracy and associations with designated terrorist groups.

As previously stated, the op-ed's publication coincided with the release of a 300-page report by the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes, an Israeli NGO established to document the October 7 atrocities. Based on 430 formal and informal interviews, more than 10,000 photographs, and over 1,800 hours of video material, the report detailed 13 forms of sexual violence committed by Hamas during the attack and against hostages held in Gaza. These included rape, gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, forced nudity, executions linked to sexual violence, postmortem sexual abuse, and assaults carried out in the presence of family members. "The scale, coordination, and repetition of the conduct demonstrate a widespread and systematic attack against civilians in which sexual violence was deliberately used as a method of terror," the report said.