Israel commits sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners, says Nicholas Kristof

Some people believe that Israel can do no wrong. Some people believe that Israel can do nothing right. Naturally the truth lies between these extremes. It’s absurd when defenders of Israel claim that any criticism of this Jewish nation is antisemitic.

I detest how Israel has treated Palestinians. I’m abhorred by the tens of thousands of innocent women and children killed by Israel in Gaza. I can’t stand Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who engages in Trumpian lies and deceit.

And after reading opinion writer Nicholas Kristof’s highly disturbing column in the New York Times, “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” I’m outraged by how Israelis have committed sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners.

Support for Israel has decreased markedly among the American public. For good reason. Israel used to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Imperfect, sure, but at least trying to steer an upstanding moral course. Those days are long gone. Israel now is running on the fumes of hatred and anger, uncaring how much misery and destruction it inflicts on innocent people.

I urge you to read Kristof’s column. It is disturbing reading. However, the truth often is painful. We owe it to the victims of Israeli sexual violence to not look away from those horrors. Here’s how the piece begins and ends.

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.

…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?