Israel’s campaign against NYT & human rights organisations – attempt to obscure torture & sexual violence in its prisons
Israel Prison Service officers prepare Palestinian prisoners for release as part of a hostage exchange deal at Ketziot Prison in the Negev, with signs of ill-treatment, 26 February 2025
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor writes on 15 May 2026:
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is following with grave concern the organised official Israeli campaign that culminated in statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar after The New York Times published an article by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, titled ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians’, which documented testimonies from 14 men and women who said they were subjected to rape, torture, and other forms of sexual violence in Israeli detention facilities.
Instead of calling for an independent and transparent investigation into these serious allegations, or allowing international investigators, forensic experts, UN observers, and the International Committee of the Red Cross access to detention facilities, the Israeli government responded by attacking the journalist, the newspaper, and the human rights organisations that documented or helped expose these violations. This reflects a clear attempt to shift attention away from the substance of the testimonies and evidence and toward discrediting their sources.
The crimes addressed in The New York Times article are not based solely on documentation from Euro-Med Monitor or from Kristof himself. Rather, they form part of a broader and cumulative documentation process involving independent UN, international, Israeli, and Palestinian bodies, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, independent UN rapporteurs and experts, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Israeli organisation B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, in addition to testimonies documented by professional bodies focused on protecting journalists and monitoring detainees’ conditions.
The Israeli government’s attempt to portray The New York Times piece as based primarily on Euro-Med Monitor’s documentation, or as an extension of it, is misleading and contradicts the stated facts and methodology of the investigation itself
The most dangerous aspect of the Israeli campaign is not only that it denies the facts, but that it seeks to engineer a misleading narrative by reducing a file documented by multiple sources to a single entity or individual, while targeting the credibility of Euro-Med Monitor, its chairman Ramy Abdu, and the journalist who published the investigation. This still does not address the testimonies, UN reports, and human rights documentation of repeated patterns of sexual violence in the Israeli detention system, including rape with instruments, sexual torture, genital assault, rape threats, forced nudity, humiliating strip searches, non-consensual filming in degrading positions, and other acts of sexual violence.
Attempts to cast doubt on the aforementioned bodies ignore their mandate and the nature of their work. These entities are not opinion platforms, but documentation, monitoring, and investigative bodies that have operated for years under clear international standards. Their findings are subject to professional oversight, including checks on the consistency of testimonies, the independence of sources, emerging patterns, medical and legal indicators, and risks faced by victims and witnesses.
The convergence of their findings on patterns of torture, ill treatment, and sexual and gender based violence inside the Israeli detention system cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere allegations or isolated accounts. They are serious indicators of a systematic policy, particularly given the warning by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, that torture has become a “state doctrine” in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.