Israel is planning to sue The New York Times over a shocking report that Israeli prison officials are sexually torturing Palestinian prisoners.
Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof’s 3,500-word exposé graphically details mind-boggling cruelty, including genital mutilation and using dogs to rape prisoners.
Such a lawsuit won’t likely succeed in U.S. courts because the Constitution forbids it. Federal law generally forbids recognizing defamation judgments in foreign courts.
The exposé appeared one day before the Times reprised an official Israeli report that detailed Hamas’ rape and sexual torture of Israeli prisoners and hostages during and after the October 7, 2023 terror raid.
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Palestinians told Kristof about sexual violence against men, women, and children by myriad Israeli assailants: “soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”
Evidence does not show that leaders ordered the rapes, Kristof explained. But a UN report explained that sexual torture is “one of Israel’s ‘standard operating procedures’ and ‘a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.’” And the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has reported that “systematic sexual violence” is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
Kristof spoke to 14 victims.
A freelance journalist, Sami al-Sai, 46, told Kristof that Israeli guards raped him with a rubber baton and then a carrot. A sadistic woman guard, he told Kristof, “grabbed him by the penis and testicles and joked, ‘These are mine,’ and then squeezed until he screamed from pain.”
Noting that American tax money has made the U.S. government complicit in the sex crimes, Kristof also detailed a case from the Euro-Med report. It described the repeated rape of a 42-year-old woman, which Israeli soldiers photographed and said would be released if “she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.”
Yet abuse, Kristof reported, went beyond — way 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,” Kristof reported.
A farmer told Kristof that Israeli guards raped him three times with a metal baton. He invited the third assault by asking for a pen and paper to write a complaint.
Hellbound and Down 