Netanyahu Says Israel Will Sue New York Times, Nick Kristof for 'Blood Libel' Rape Article: Times Takes More Heat for Relying on Widely Discredited Source

The pressure on the New York Times intensified Thursday after Israel announced it will sue the newspaper over opinion writer Nicholas Kristof's article alleging garish "sexual violence" by Israeli troops against Palestinian detainees. While a Times spokesman defended Kristof a second time, the Times newsroom, which is separate from the opinion section, has been silent as the integrity of Kristof's reporting comes under heavy fire.

"Today I instructed my legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof," Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on X. "They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel's valiant soldiers." Netanyahu made clear that "under my leadership, Israel will not be silent. We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law."

The Times's front office, meanwhile, is performing damage control on social media, where Kristof's sensational claims—especially his most lurid accusation that Israel uses specially trained dogs to rape male prisoners—are being dismantled in real time. A Times spokesman has already defended the piece in two separate statements—saying that "independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking." Media reporters, however, are questioning what type of internal review was conducted prior to Monday's publication and why the newsroom hasn't followed up with a news story on the sensational allegations, which have ballooned into a major story distracting from coverage of President Donald Trump's trip to Beijing.

Dylan Byers, a closely read media reporter with Puck, wondered in his latest newsletter "whether the paper even considered putting additional reporters on this Opinion piece and reframing it as a straight news story—and whether they've tasked reporters with fact-checking those claims now."

Status, another media newsletter, pointed out that the Times's "newsroom has yet to advance or incorporate any of the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner's reporting or touch on any of the allegations made in the piece, maintaining radio silence despite the continuing scrutiny. Kristof's bombshell report has also not appeared on any of The Times' podcasts, where the paper's biggest stories are typically showcased."

Kristof's reporting has, however, come under increasing assault from outside the Times's moat.

Journalist and legal expert Rachel O'Donoghue wrote in a detailed exposition for the Wall Street Journal that Kristof's core contention relied on a highly unreliable source, with a history of making provably false claims about Israel, that should not have made it past an experienced editor. She noted how that source—Euro-Med, the Hamas-linked NGO Kristof relied on to prove the fantastical claim that Israel trains dogs to rape prisoners—had previously maintained that canines had "surveillance cameras" strapped to their backs before being "let loose" on Palestinian prisoners.

Euro-Med, she added, "has a documented record of promoting wild allegations against Israel, including claims of organ harvesting of Palestinian detainees, mass executions in hospitals, and denials of well‑established Hamas activity at Gaza's Al‑Shifa hospital."

"This kind of reporting," O'Donoghue concluded about Kristof, "erodes trust in journalism and makes it harder for genuine victims of sexual violence to be believed."

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D., N.J.) wrote on X Wednesday afternoon that "Nick Kristof amplifies proven Hamas-affiliated sources and their propaganda, while the [Times] continues to gloss over the systematic sexual violence, rape, and mutilation Hamas committed on October 7, now fully documented in the new Civil Commission report."

The Netflix celebrity plastic surgeon Sheila Nazarian, meanwhile, claimed on X that "dogs cannot anatomically rape humans. As a physician, I thought I would just point that out. Why are antisemites such idiots?"

Kristof on Wednesday offered, reductio ad absurdum, links to studies he claimed offered scientific evidence that canines were cable of such bestial acts. But his critics dismissed the studies as inapplicable to the vile scenarios Kristof described.

Israel's defamation lawsuit could pierce the fog of what's going on inside the Times, should the lawsuit make it to the discovery stage when the publication would have to provide internal emails and texts and its editors would have to sit for depositions. Israel's foreign ministry described Kristof's column as "one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press," noting that, in a somewhat unusual move, the opinion piece "received the backing of the newspaper." Israel is likely referring to the Times's statement, from spokesman Charlie Stadtlander—whose remit covers both news and opinion—which defended Kristof's "deeply reported" piece.

While Israel faces significant hurdles pushing a libel lawsuit through the American courts, according to one legal expert who spoke to the Free Beacon, it is clear that both Kristof and the Times are facing significant reputational harm in the court of public opinion. It is just the latest controversy for the Times, whose reporting on the Gaza war is often subject to errors and corrections regarding newsroom coverage that blames Israel for atrocities that turn out to be either perpetrated or staged by jihadist groups.

Less than a month after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror spree, the Times relied on the terror group to erroneously claim that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital, ultimately issuing a lengthy correction when it turned out the explosion was probably caused by a misfired missile from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group. The Times, whose ancillary editorial staff can evince strong anti-Israel sentiment, went into meltdown—and issued a tortured "editor's note"—after a photo it published of a "starving," skeletal Palestinian child turned out to be highly misleading.

Rod Smolla, a veteran First Amendment lawyer who works as senior counsel at Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch, noted that an Israeli government lawsuit will likely be tossed from the American courts due to the well-established right for news organizations to aggressively criticize the government.

"I don't think that Israel itself could be a plaintiff, and the rationale for that is the notion that it's core to First Amendment values that you have a right to criticize the government as the government," Smolla told the Free Beacon. Kristof's piece also did not name specific Israelis as responsible for the purported sexual abuse, meaning it could be difficult to establish who exactly was libeled.

"If Netanyahu himself sued, he'd have to try to make the argument that this is essentially pointing the finger at him, as if he's condoning this, or encouraging this, or failing to act properly to restrain it," Smolla explained. "My instinct is that's a relatively weak claim." Most libel suits do not make it to the discovery phase of a trial, so Israel would likely find it difficult to unearth evidence that Kristof published his sensational piece with "actual malice."

But defamation lawsuits against the Times from public figures have proceeded far enough in the courts to cause significant embarrassment. Notably, when former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R.) sued the Times for erroneously linking her to a mass shooting, the suit made it to trial twice and the discovery phase revealed details about how the Times opinion section botched the story.

The Times is facing two major lawsuits from Trump and his administration. Trump is personally suing the Times over articles and a book, Lucky Loser, that portrayed him as a poor businessman. Trump filed his lawsuit in Florida, where defamation lawsuits against national media organizations fare far better than they do if filed in New York or Washington, D.C. It's not clear where Israel will file its suit.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last week also sued the Times for discriminating against a white male editor who applied unsuccessfully for a promotion.

The journalist and playwright Jonathan Leaf offered a more optimistic view of Israel's potential case. Leaf wrote that "while juries are notoriously unpredictable, The Times' problem is that a good lawyer representing Israel should be able persuasively to argue that the paper" engaged in "actual malice" and a "reckless disregard" for the truth, both the primary legal standards for a successful prosecution. "The wisest course for The Times," Leaf said, "might be to dismiss Kristof now and make a formal apology."

But even absent a formidable legal challenge, the Times remains pressed in the media sphere to explain how the Kristof exposé made it to publication. The Times, for its part, would only say that the sordid stories of systematic rape "were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in."

The political journalist Mark Halperin wrote in the Daily Mail this week that, amid mounting questions about the paper's coverage of Israel, the Times "dropped an incendiary news bomb via a columnist who was, seemingly, not held to the standards of a news reporter, on a sensitive topic, at a sensitive time." Kristof—who has a long record of inaccuracies going back 25 years—was permitted to print sensational claims that were based largely on a Hamas-tied advocacy group and a former Palestinian prisoner who has publicly celebrated terrorism.

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