A federal judge takes apart Nicholas Kristof’s controversial accusations against Israel

May 19, 2026 • 9:45 am

If you’re getting weary of the endless but necessary attacks on Nicholas Kristof for his misleading and almost antisemitic column about Israel’s “policy” of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners, Roy K. Altman has written in the Free Press the definitive critique of Kristof’s column—that is, until investigations by Israel reveal more information.

Wikipedia identifies Altman as “a Venezuelan-American lawyer and jurist who serves as a United States district judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida” and also identifies him as Jewish.

You can read Altman’s column by clicking below—if you subscribe to the Free Press.

The “miscarriage of journalism” is, overall, the promulgation of “fake news” by Kristof: accusations that are improperly vetted (if at all), which come from questionable sources, and which are contradicted by existing Israeli policy and behavior. Altman’s thesis is that this kind of journalism subverts the “marketplace of opinions” that, it’s been said, is necessary for the American public to judge what is true. Excerpts from Altman and others are indented; prose that is flush left is mine:

. . . we entrust our fellow Americans with the power to make these choices because we believe that a virtuous people will be equipped to make the right choices—principally because we assume that our citizens will be prepared to discern truth from fiction. And we feel comfortable in that assumption because we’ve devised a system of laws—based on evidence, burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules—to help us assess the veracity of contested claims. In this way, the jury system isn’t simply a means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a way of training free citizens to make difficult decisions for themselves.

Today, this whole system is being undermined by the proliferation of false information—especially on the internet. But it’s one thing to have our geopolitical and ideological enemies—whether China, Russia, or the Muslim Brotherhood—pushing unverified claims about our closest allies into our cell phones. It’s another thing entirely for The New York Times, a supposed “paper of record,” and one of its Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to offer a story that—in its disregard of basic evidence-gathering norms, its unwillingness to investigate the opposing side’s position, and its inversion of common sense—violates the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.

In his explosive essay, Kristof accused Israel of using sexual violence against detained Palestinian prisoners as a kind of “standard operating procedure.” Kristof’s claim is thus not merely that a few rogue Israeli prison guards sometimes behave illegally—as happens in all Western democracies, including our own. It is, instead, that the Israeli government has implemented a systemic policy of deploying sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners on a massive scale.

Altman also faults the timing of the column, which came out the evening before the Civil Commission’s issued its 298-page report on sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, 2023. The Israeli Foreign Ministry says that the Commission offered this report to the paper but the paper wasn’t interested. The paper denies this, so for the time being we have a “he said/she said” situation. Regardless, Altman avers that the “psychological doctrine of primacy” argues that “a fact finder is often most persuaded by the story he hears first”, implying that Kristof, regardless of the deficiencies of his piece, should at least have held off publishing it until the Civil Commission’s report came out. We won’t go further into this issue, as Altman finds three major faults with the column:

On the merits, Kristof’s article violates three central precepts of our legal system: It disregards basic rules of evidence gathering; it refuses to investigate the opposing side’s views; and it ignores logic and common sense.

Within this list of three there are buried two other sub-lists, which makes the piece a bit confusing. But Altman’s claims and his accusations of Kristof are pretty clear. I’ll number the main claims as 1, 2, and 3, with sub-lists given letters as well as numbers.

1.) The column is unfair by making uncheckable claims.

Let’s start with fairness. One of the fundamental rules of our justice system is that a man should be permitted to confront his accuser. Whether in civil or criminal cases, we have for hundreds of years rejected the English Star Chamber’s technique of allowing anonymous witnesses to advance salacious claims in secret. This principle is so essential to any basic system of fairness that it appears repeatedly throughout our laws—from the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause and its guarantee of public trials to our hearsay rules, which preclude out-of-court statements the accused never had an opportunity to cross-examine. But Kristof’s article relies mostly on anonymous sources whose credibility—much less their political or ideological affiliations—cannot be tested and thus cannot be known.

Here we have four sub-points that expand on this claim:

Kristof justifies his reliance on anonymity by suggesting that his sources would face retribution, either from Israeli authorities or from their own communities, if they came forward. But there are at least four major problems with this excuse.

1a. There is no evidence of retribution against prisoners who claimed to be sexually assaulted, and some claims changed over time:

Kristof provides no evidence of any similar retribution against one of the men he spoke with who has publicly accused Israeli guards of sexual assault. For months now, Sami al-Sai has repeatedly and publicly claimed, including to major news outlets like NPR and the Times, that he was sexually assaulted while in Israeli detention. There are real problems with al-Sai’s claims. For one thing, soon after his detention, he filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing that he was wrongly detained and asking for his immediate release. In that petition, he complained about the quality of the food he was given and said that he was treated badly,but he notably never mentioned any of the sex allegations he’s now advancing.

. . . But the point here is that, far from suffering any retribution for complaining about his detention, al-Sai was later freed, and Kristof never suggests that he’s since been subject to any form of punishment.

1b. Israel has in place an often-used system for registering and adjudicating prisoner’s complains about mistreatment

Two,any cursory review of Israeli legal databases would reveal that Israeli prisons allow Palestinian prisoners to file complaints about the conditions of their confinement—and that these complaints do get filed. Indeed, since 2023, Israel has received 182 such complaints filed by Israel Prison Service detainees from the Gaza Strip. . . But the point is that Kristof offers not a single shred of evidence that any of the Palestinian prisoners who filed complaints has ever been subjected to retribution—much less that this speculation about retribution has ever been a feature of the Israeli prison system.

1c. Kristof’s insistence on anonymity makes his allegations uncheckable.

Kristof’s reliance on anonymity ensures that no one—most especially the Israelis—can ever prove him wrong. That’s because he not only tells us very little about the accusers, he tells us nothing about the offenses. No locations. No dates. No perpetrators. Israeli prisons, like many of our own, are often videotaped, and those recordings are reviewed not just by prison guards but by prison officials and lawyers. If Kristof had conducted anything resembling a fair analysis, we would have expected him to have asked to review some of this footage. But there’s no indication that he ever did. Nor can anyone else do so now because Kristof gave us no details to check against his claims.

1d. The accused has a right to the details of accusations, which gives them a chance to defend themselves. “The accused” here include onot just IDF soldiers and prison officials, but Israel itself, which is threatening to sue the paper.

Four, we should acknowledge that it’s always hard for victims of sexual assault to advance their claims publicly. But any system committed to basic fairness recognizes that the accuser’s preference for anonymity must bend to the accused’s right to confront the claims against him. And that’s not just because we want to allow the accused to test the reliability of the accuser’s claims. It’s also because we presume that the mere act of declaring something publicly itself evinces some degree of credibility.

Kristof fails to mention, for example, that Euro-Med, one of his principal sources, is an organization with known ties to Hamas and has made false claims about Israel before, including the blood libel that Israel harvests organs of prisoners.

On to the second major point:

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2.) Kristof failed to investigate “the opposing side’s position”, including systemic aspects of Israeli law that would make widespread abuse improbable. Again Altman breaks this down into a sublist of three items:

2a. Kristof doesn’t mention Israeli laws prohibiting sexual abuse of prisoners.

First, in advancing his claim that Israel permits or encourages sexual abuse of detainees as a matter of state policy, Kristof fails even to mention that sexual offenses are strictly prohibited under Israel’s penal code. Indeed, the Israeli legal system imposes enhanced penalties when sexual offenses, including by security personnel, are motivated by race, skin color, or national origin. And Israeli military forces are bound by a host of additional directives, which further protect prisoners from state-sponsored violence, including sexual violence.

Altman implies that Kristof was trying to hide this fact. Well, yes, probably, but shouldn’t we know that this conduct is against the law? What’s worse is that Kristof also fails to mention that similar Palestinian prisoners’ allegations of abuse have led to serious prison sentences for over a dozen Israeli abusers.

2b. Kristof fails to mention that there’s a special unit of Israeli police designed to investigate claims of prison misconduct.

Kristof likewise fails to disclose that there’s an elite unit in Israel’s police force, called Lahav 433, tasked with investigating misconduct by the Israeli Prison Service. Now, it’s entirely possible that Israel created this unit inside what’s known as the “Israeli FBI” and filled it with elite servicemembers who do nothing but sit in an office all day, twiddling their thumbs and happily allowing misconduct to go unchecked. The far more plausible inference, I submit, is that Israel didn’t create this elite investigative unit simply to do nothing. But the point is that we don’t know—and cannot know—the answers to any of these questions from Kristof’s “opinion” piece because he never bothered to mention this unit, never thought to interview its members, and never investigated the extent to which it actually enforces Israeli law.

Well, the existence of such a unit doesn’t prove that there wasn’t misconduct, but it does show that there were quite a few deterrents to misconduct.

2c. A quote from a former Prime Minister of Israel was presented, but a later clarification of that quote by the PM was ignored. Perhaps worse than the two omissions above is Kristof’s shoddy (indeed, slimy) treatment of a comment by a former Israeli Prime Minister. Here’s what Kristof said.

To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.

Of all people to ask! Olmert had been convicted of corruption and bribery as Israel’s finance minister and served 16 months of a 27-month prison sentence. Kristof doesn’t mention this, and Kristof might have added, post facto, this clarification by Olmert:

Olmert clarified, in a statement to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, that “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims.”

Surely this should have been an addendum to Kristof’s piece. It wasn’t, The NYT hasn’t responded directly to this clarification save to say that Olmert’s statement was tape-recorded and presented accurately “in context”. But when when Olmert later denied that he was not validating claims of sexual abuse, that was no deemed worthy of a mention or correction by the NYT.

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3.) The “dog rape” claims is pure blood libel, in line with previous anti-Israel claims. (And there’s no evidence for it. Indeed, many have deemed the “trained dog rape scenario” to be impossible (I’m not ruling it out with complete certainty, and it will surely need investigating. But I do find it stupid.)

Which brings us to Kristof’s final departure from our fundamental precepts: his lack of common sense. The most salacious claim in Kristof’s piece is the allegation that Israel is now systematically training dogs to rape Arab Muslim men. This claim used to live only on the fringes of the wildest internet conspiracy theories. In 2010, there was a spate of shark attacks in the Red Sea, situated between Israel and Egypt. For whatever reason, most (if not all) of these attacks occurred on the Egyptian side of the border. I happened to be in Israel that summer and heard an Egyptian minister wondering whether the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, was systematically training sharks to eat only Arab flesh. My father and I, hearing this over the radio in a cab, laughed at the absurdity of the claim.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is that wild and illogical conspiracy theories that used to reside only on the internet and in the anti-Israel Arab street now circulate in the mainstream media, brought there by irresponsible journalists who flout evidentiary standards, ignore basic notions of fairness, and disregard common sense and the truth. What kind of a society will we be if we don’t reverse this disturbing erosion in our ability to tell truth from falsehood?

Altman’s claims add up to a serious indictment of Kristof’s column, which, though presented as an op-ed piece, could easily have run as a news piece, but the paper was apparently too lazy to check its claims. To me, the most serious accusations are twofold: the failure of Kristof to document the accusations so they could be checked, even making the complainers anonymous; and also Kristof’s failure to mention the anti-Israel jostpru of some of the individuals and organizations (especially Euro-Med) making the claims. It is a one-sided column, even for Kristof, who in the past hasn’t done due diligence in checking claims.

The more I think about this, the more I think Kristof should be fired, as the op-ed is a serious lapse in standards, even for an op-ed. If op-ed editor James Bennet could be fired (as he was) for allowing Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that the military might be used to quell post-George Floyd riots, surely Kristof should also be forced to resign. After all, Cotton was just giving an opinion that didn’t rest on facts, while Kristof made many allegations that he didn’t bother to either qualify or investigate.

But of course Kristof is a golden boy for the NYT, and the his column buttresses the NYT’s well known stance against Israel. The NYT is standing behind his column (it has no public editor), and don’t expect it to fact-check his claims. That will be up to Israel.

More criticism of Kristof’s allegations about Israel

May 15, 2026 • 9:30 am

By now the whole world–at least the world that reads the news–knows about Nicholas Kristof’s long NYT op-ed column accusing Israel of systemic, institutional sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. For those who already hate Israel, his unsubstantiated allegations will serve only to reinforce their hatred and antisemitism. For those who are open-minded or sympathetic to Israel, well, they do have to admit that the allegations are unsubstantiated. But, as the saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Kristof is no dummy, and surely he knew that his claims would be snapped up by Israel haters and antisemites.

That is a good reason for Kristof to have verified all his sources and ensure that they had no history of bias (or at least the bias should have been made explicit)—something he did not do. This is in contrast to the Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, documenting Hamas’s sexual abuse during its invasion of Israel. The Commission has verification of all of its sources, including forensic evidence like photographs and bodies.

As most of Kristof’s critics have said, it is impossible to affirm that there was never any abuse of Palestinians by the IDF. But if you make an accusation that the abuse was both widespread and systemic, you’d better be able to back it up with evidence. Unfortunately, the NYT sees no need for that. relying on Kristof’s two Pulitzer Prizes and his claim that he interviewed witnesses brought forth by groups or people who can hardly be said to be unbiased. But yes, his claims should be investigated, but he would have to help the investigators by providing identities and documentation. I wouldn’t hold my breath until he does that.

In the meantime, it’s not hard to find criticisms online. I’ll just link to five new ones, showing an excerpt from each. I haven’t found people approving of Kristof’s claims, but then again I don’t read the kind of site that would do that. And those sites would have to independently try to verify Kristof’s claims, which nobody has done.

Amit Segal at It’s Noon in Israel: “Anatomy of a blood libel.“

In [Kristof’s] piece, published curiously as an op-ed rather than a news investigation, Kristof accuses the State of Israel, its prison system, the IDF, and the Shin Bet of systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners—primarily men, but also women. These are serious accusations, and it is certainly possible, if not inevitable, that abuse, even sexual, occurs within the prison system, as it does in almost every prison system worldwide. Whenever there is real evidence of such acts, it must be properly investigated and the guilty punished. However, for accusations to be taken seriously, they must be backed by actual evidence. In this regard, Kristof’s column is an absolute failure.

The column falls short of almost any journalistic standard, according to [Hebrew University professor Danny] Orbach. He points out that the reporter relies on only 14 unverified and uncorroborated testimonies, lacking details that would allow for investigation, verification, or refutation, to claim that systemic sexual abuse is widespread throughout the Israeli prison system. For comparison, in 2020, approximately 16,000 complaints of sexual assault and harassment by guards against prisoners were recorded in the United States, with only a tiny fraction proven to be based on real incidents. Of Kristof’s witnesses, only two identify themselves by name or provide details that could help locate the case. One of them, Sami al-Sai, is presented by Kristof as a “journalist.” In reality, he is a Hamas propagandist who cheered the mass murders of October 7—hardly a reliable source. At the very least, Kristof owed his readers a disclosure regarding who this man is. Prominent journalists have already pointed out that the two identified witnesses provided Kristof with “reheated noodles”—versions that changed and became “more sophisticated” over time, adding new gruesome details every time they spoke to a different reporter.

If it ended there, one could dismiss Kristof’s article as merely a negligent op-ed, but Orbach stresses that from here, things deteriorate. He explains that a large portion of the anonymous testimonies come from Euro-Med Monitor, which Kristof presents as a “human rights monitor.” In reality, this is a Hamas front organization whose chairman, Ramy Abdu, cheered October 7 and spread debunked lies and conspiracy theories—such as massacres at Shifa Hospital, organ harvesting, or the claim that humanitarian aid contained only burial shrouds—claims not taken seriously even by most anti-Israel journalists during the war. Unsurprisingly, Kristof mentions nothing to his readers about this organization’s reputation. Furthermore, another “source” Kristof cited in a video interview as a “man in the know” is actually an Israeli Hamas supporter and delusional conspiracist who was dismissed from the university where he worked due to sexual offenses. A “man in the know,” indeed.

The interviewees, of course, were not found or selected by chance. This raises the question: who was Kristof’s “fixer”? Reporters who do not know the language almost always rely on local fixers, and Kristof claims he found the interviewees through “human rights organizations,” which Orbach suggests points to a pre-planned direction by Euro-Med or its ilk. In the Palestinian arena, there is a documented pattern of witness coaching and bias, a phenomenon rarely caught but exposed during the “Jenin Massacre” libel that never was in 2002.

. . . . So, what do we have here? A “respected war correspondent,” winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, accusing a state of systematic rape based on 14 testimonies—12 of them anonymous, two public but highly problematic—with zero disclosure regarding the witnesses or the biases of the organizations providing the information. Unlike the Civil Commission’s report on October 7, Orbach emphasizes that Kristof made no real attempt to cross-reference the testimonies, used no forensic evidence, and did not attempt to interview Israelis who served in prisons or civilian doctors. The only senior Israeli he did interview, Ehud Olmert, apparently never said what was attributed to him.

This is not Kristof’s first time. In the early 2000s, Kristof championed a Cambodian anti-prostitution activist, calling her a “hero” in column after column. When it turned out she was a fraud who staged the scenes that brought her fame, Kristof admitted the mistake and the paper apologized. His current column shows that his tendency to believe anyone who seems “just” to him, without critical source analysis, remains intact. He has learned nothing, Orbach concludes.

Douglas Murray at The New York Post: “Why would the NY Times make such horrific claims about Israel. The reasons are several-fold.”

Nicholas Kristof raped my dog. At least that is what I have heard, from an anonymous source. A source who is intensely hostile to the New York Times columnist. And that’s good enough for me. Now I come to think of it, my pet pug has had a strange look on his face lately.

As it happens, the rumor that I have just attempted to spread is far less lurid and fanciful than the one that the New York Times chose to spread around the world this week.

In a piece which has already been widely debunked, Kristof claimed that Israeli prison guards routinely use rape as a method of torture on Palestinian prisoners. The piece portrayed Israeli prison guards and soldiers as rapists, sadists and akin to Nazi prison camp guards. Perhaps even worse.

. . . So here we get to the true question. Why would anyone make such a claim? And why would a purportedly serious newspaper publish it?

The reasons are several-fold. The first is that the New York Times story landed just a day before an anticipated report into Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7, 2023.

Many of us did not need further evidence of the crimes of that day. But the release of the commission of inquiry sets out in remorseless detail the “systematic, widespread” use of rape by Hamas on that day and the way in which sexual violence was “integral” to their attack.

It lays out the calculated way in which Hamas terrorists raped men and women on the day of the attack and raped Israeli hostages — men and women — while they were held in captivity in Gaza.

The findings include descriptions from footage, first-hand, eyewitness accounts and from mortuary photographs of the way in which Hamas members gang-raped women while killing them, and even raped their victims after killing them. It is impossible to think of crimes worse than those which Hamas committed on that day.

Unless you are Nicholas Kristof.

Because if you know that a report is coming out into Hamas’ use of sexual violence then it is clearly very important to invent a claim even more appalling than the real-life crimes of Hamas.

For the New York Times, it seems to have been crucial to throw a lie into the system in order to overwhelm or block any sympathy or understanding that might go in the direction of the Israelis.

The New York Times has leveled claims of antisemitism against a number of people in the past year. Sometimes accurately, sometimes not. But none of the worst things that Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes have ever said even comes close to the lie the New York Times has printed in its own pages. A paper that claims to be opposed to conspiracy theories has just mainstreamed the most disgusting conspiracy theory imaginable.

And just consider the effects of this.

The effect is to portray the soldiers and prison guards of the Jewish state as uniquely evil, uniquely disgusting and uniquely inhuman.

What wouldn´t someone do to express their disgust at such people? If Jews are the sort of people who can even turn dogs into rapists why shouldn’t a mob assemble outside the synagogues of New York? Why wouldn’t masked “activists” demonstrate their outrage by hounding Jewish children on the streets of this city? After all, the people they are going up against are uniquely evil. Right?

Matti Friedman and Dan Senor at the Free Press (a conversation): “How the ‘New York Times’ Laundered a Conspiracy.”

DS: You spent years inside the Associated Press bureau in Jerusalem. You know how sources are used, how the editorial decision-making works, and what the checks are on a reporter. Walk me through how a piece like this gets through.

MF: I was a correspondent for the AP from 2006 to 2011, and one thing that often isn’t clear to readers is the role NGOs play in creating the reporting readers actually see. The press corps is much weaker than it used to be—smaller staff, less experienced reporters, poor pay—and the demands of the 24-hour news cycle are much greater.

Into the vacuum created by that change come political NGOs, who have a lot of money and an interest in swaying coverage in their direction. When I was at the AP, I saw this happen. Big NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as smaller ones operating around this conflict, were mostly funded by European governments and progressive foundations. They became, essentially, the source of information for reporters. Human Rights Watch, for example, would come out with a report, and the AP would write it up as news.

When I read Kristof’s article, I saw this machinery right away. Kristof was handed a package by NGOs. He mentions Euro-Med [Human Rights Monitor], which has proven ties to Hamas and has openly claimed that Israel is using weapons to “vaporize” Palestinians and that Israel is harvesting organs. Relying on Euro-Med is a bit of a stretch even for the world of the mainstream press. Kristof also mentions an anti-Israel activist named Sari Bashi, who is based in Ramallah. So local activists handed him the story, introduced him to his sources, and fed him the inflammatory, unverifiable material.

Senor also says this:

When you read the piece, you have to use your own compass to decide which charges could plausibly be true and which charges come from the world of conspiratorial, anti-Israel fantasy. I think there is a plausible reason for concern about sexual assaults of prisoners. I don’t think we can dismiss every account of sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees.

. . . we have to be able to look at our prison system and our military and say we want our institutions to observe the highest standard, and we’re clearly failing. Terrible things are happening, as they are in the carceral systems in New York, or in Iraq. I wish Israel could say that we’re better than everyone else. I’m not sure that we can say that. We need to be able to address our own moral issues without participating in this kind of deranged discourse.

Yuki Zeman at Quillette: “Nicholas Kristof and the pornography of accusation.”

. . . Allegations involving sexual violation by animals do not enter political discourse as neutral facts. They belong to an old repertoire of dehumanising horror. They turn the accused into something beyond cruel: a corrupter of species, a handler of filth, a director of bestial desecration, and a violator of the most basic taboos around moral and sexual hygiene. Is the claim true, false, exaggerated, mistranslated, or planted? Kristof does not know nearly enough to employ the claim in the way that he does. He treats it as a detail within a larger moral picture. A responsible and competent editor would have stopped reading right there and demanded to know what, exactly, has been established.

. . .None of this excuses abuse. The Sde Teiman case, involving alleged abuse of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli reservists, deserved investigation so that truth could be separated from rumour and accusation. Where Israeli guards, soldiers, interrogators, or settlers have committed acts of sexual violence, they should be exposed, investigated, tried, and punished. Any attempt by Israeli politicians or mobs to shield abusers deserves condemnation. A society at war must still guard its own standards.

But it must also guard the truth. Taking rape and abuse seriously does not require us to accept propaganda dressed up as sexual horror. Nor does it require us to pretend that anonymous testimony, activist reports, and humanitarian vocabulary automatically produce truth. The harder task is to investigate abuse without surrendering judgment. A serious press should be able to do this. It should also be able to honour Israeli victims without handing their suffering to those who spent months demeaning it.

A columnist like Nicholas Kristof may even believe he is writing in defence of Palestinian victims. But when his essay relies on the same information ecology that sought to excuse, minimise, and invert the atrocities of 7 October, it risks becoming something else: a mouthpiece for those who defended the events of that day, or who needed its victims to disappear beneath a more useful accusation. This is what divides moral inquiry from propaganda.

Sherwin Pomerantz at the Times of Israel: “Nicholas Kristof’s illogical overreaching anti-Israel rant in the NYT.“

there does appear to be some level of sexual violence that goes on in Israeli prisons and, similar to the rest of the world, often the perpetrators are not held accountable. The fact that this goes on in prisons worldwide does not, of course, make it acceptable practice and Israel has taken a strong policy position against such activity.

But Kristof often relies on sources that themselves have been found to be unreliable. In a series of posts on X, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting challenged Kristof’s journalism, noting that the most explosive accounts in his op-ed came from unnamed sources, while the stories of those named had grown “steadily more lurid over time, with dramatic new details added years later.”

For example, one of Kristof’s sources, Sami al-Sai, had taken to social media on October 8, 2023, to praise the Hamas onslaught one day after it occurred, and eulogized the leader of a West Bank terror cell as “our martyred prince.”

HonestReporting also noted that, about a year ago, Sai spoke to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about his alleged assault, and did not mention several specific, graphic details that he provided to Kristof, including being sodomized with a carrot, having his genitals grabbed by a female guard, and discovering “other people’s vomit, blood, and broken teeth” in his skin.

It also pointed out that Issa Amro, who told Kristof in 2024 that he had been assaulted on the day of the Hamas attack, had earlier told The Washington Post that he had been “threatened with sexual assault” on that day, not that he had been assaulted.

None of this, of course, excuses illegal activity of prison guards or, here in Israel, members of the IDF. Nor does it give a pass to a government that drops the charges against the accused, as it did in the Sde Teman case, simply because of community pressure.

This kind of activity is certainly not in keeping with the values of a county such as ours, which promises in its Declaration of Independence: The State of Israel “will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the charter of the United Nations.”

. . . Finally, Kristof engages in illogical overreach when he states: “Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.”

Truth be told, the $3.8 billion of annual US military aid to Israel is used to purchase armaments from US defense manufacturers and, of course, has nothing to do with the prison system or its faults. A weapon used by an IDF soldier in Gaza cannot be linked to prison abuses. Actually, it is the weapons used against us on October 7^th and afterwards, paid for by the Iranians and Qataris, that are more logically linked to the alleged abuses in Kristof’s piece.

The commonality of these stories is that they admit the possibility of sexual abuse of prisoners, but argue that, given the fact that interrogations are recorded and photographed, and Israel’s history of prosecuting those who violate its law, the likelihood of widespread and systemic abuse known to the authorities is low. The articles argue that Kristof’s sources are biased and that some of their stories have changed over the years. And they say that the dog-rape story is not credible.

What should happen now? Well, Israel should conduct an investigation of the allegations. And so should the NYT, making Kristof reveal his sources and check them itself. The former will happen; the latter won’t.

If anybody else had done this rather than Kristof, they would be fired by the NYT. Remember that editorial-page editor James Bennet was forced to resign in 2020 after a social-media outcry following the publication of an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton. Cotton’s argument, that U.S. troops might be used to quell riots following the death of George Floyd, was at least worthy of discussion, but the editor who approved it became the victim of “progressive” ire.

Kristof won’t be fired, though his careless accusations were far worse than the argument made by Cotton. But at least some of the shine is off Kristof’s Pulitzers, and the sentient world now knows him to be a crappy journalist, willing to tar an entire country on the basis of unverified claims.

Nicholas Kristof claims widespread sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israelis, including rape by trained dogs

May 13, 2026 • 9:45 am

A new Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, released Tuesday [The organization is Israeli, but some of the “principal contributors” were not], includes a 298-page pdf called “Silenced no more: the untold atrocities of October 7 and against hostages in captivity.” It includes description after description of horrific sexual violence enacted against the attendees at the Nova Festival, as well as on Israelis living near the border, and is hard to read. (You can see the Daily Mail summary here). The Civil Commission is an independent Israeli investigative body, and investigated reports of assaults over a period two years

Nearly simultaneously with the report’s release—some say this is no coincidence—Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed for the NYT called “The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians“, with the subtitle, “Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators”. (His article is archived here.) It is very long (it took up eight pages of 10-point type in Word when I printed it out) but is filed under “op-ed” rather than “news” or “news analysis”, though it is more a news piece than anything else. Kristof very briefly mentions his own views, but if his data were sound, I think the Times should have run some of his allegations as a separate news piece, for those allegations are startling.

But that’s no reason to dismiss Kristof’s claims. The sources need to be checked and verified, and any allegations that turn out to be true should be punished by Israel, as they have been before. (Of course Hamas doesn’t punish sexual brutality against Israelis, but in fact encourages it.)

Kristof says that Israel has been guilty of systematic sexual abuse against Palestinian men, women, and children, abuse that was known to but ignored by both Israeli and American officials. He also mentions a Euro-Med report on the same subject, which is linked in the comments below.

The question, then, is are Kristof’s allegations true? The Israelis at least had and photographed the bodies of victims for corroboration, but Kristof bases his evidence on hearsay, and he sought out the victims by asking around (something he later ignores when drawing conclusions). And there is no shortage of criticisms of his report, which I’ll link to below; many question the accuracy of the sources and/or accuse Kristof of being credulous. But first, read Kristof’s allegations. A summary:

. . . . 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.”

. . . It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Some examples of abuse (Kristof himself found 14). :

The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various kinds of abuse 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.

One reason these abuses don’t receive more attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.

. . . Most of the rape and other sexual violence has been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90 percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.

For the next few days, she said, she was repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she said.

. . . “Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

If those photos still exist, they can be used as evidence.Some of the most shocking claims involve dog rape:

. . . .Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”

Kristof has defended his allegations of dog rape on X, but the articles he cites appear to be examples of bestiality involving people using dogs for sexual satisfaction. Here are some screenshots:

And according to Kristof, Palestinian children were not spared, either:

Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.

One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”

There are claims that the sexual violence was systematic:

“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”

Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”

Why Kristof finds the allegations credible:

Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched, because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.

Note, though, that he said earlier, “I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves.” Thus they didn’t really seek him out to tell their stories, but were volunteered by organizations or individuals who knew of allegations. These claims can’t both be true.

Sexual violence is especially horrible as humans, especially women, have evolved to choose with whom they mate, and forcible rape is a form of not only traumatizing physical violence, but also an odious abrogation of mate choice. And of course for men, who are embarrassed to admit they were sodomized, it can be equally humiliating. The abrogation of choice in this manner is to me one way of understanding why sexual violence is considered more horrific than other types of physical violence.

At the end, Kristof gives his take, but it’s short compared to his recounting of the incidents:

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?

Although I’ve been generally sympathetic to Israel (as opposed to Hamas), I can’t simply dismiss Kristof’s report as made up. Any Israeli committing sexual violence on others needs to be punished to the full extent of the law. I expect Israel will investigate Kristof’s claims, though that will be hard as many sources are anonymous or unwilling to go public.

In contrast, other news venues have sharply criticized Kristof’s report: Here are some links, though I can’t quote from all the articles:

The Israeli government responds in theTimes of Israel c

The Free Press

The National Review

The Hollywood Reporter (by Hen Mazzig)

A video by Haviv Rettig Gur

NGO Monitor

The Jerusalem Post

aish

And

the NYT stands by its report/

I’ll quote two: Eli Lake in the Free Press and the National Review article. First, though, a tweet sent me by Maarten Boudry.

To address the stories from Chile and maybe others about “dog rape:” the “Gaza journalist” cited and trusted by Kristof made a highly specific claim of mounting and anal penetration only by verbal command. That has never been before documented. (Crazy that I have to write this). pic.twitter.com/mkEppIY0sh

— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) May 13, 2026

If rape by trained dogs isn’t credible, what does that say about Kristof’s other claims? Did he not investigate the biology of his dog-rapist claims? There’s more below in Eli Lake’s piece:

And now quotes from Lake’s Free Press piece:

But Kristof engineered his piece to lend the scandalous claims more credibility than they deserve. He purported to have shared the abuse allegations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and sought his reaction. “Do I believe it happens? Definitely,” Kristof recorded Olmert as saying. “There are war crimes committed every day in the territories.”

Yet Olmert later said that Kristof misrepresented their conversation. In a statement sent to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, Olmert said: “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims. I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”

The story of trained rape dogs does not hold up. Let’s start with what is known about the biology of male dogs. Their penises are small and thin. They become erect only when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat. Brandon McMillan, the three-time Emmy-winning host of CBS’s Lucky Dog, who has spent 25 years training animals, told me he had never heard of a dog who was trained to rape a human being and doubted this was possible.

“When a female is in heat, the pheromones released carry it to the male canine,” McMillan said. “That’s how they reproduce and the miracle happens. I don’t see how you would train a dog to do that. The dog has to get turned on, for lack of a better word.”

Kristof claimed on X on Tuesday that “at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs.” He did not provide links to those studies. There is one historical claim of a dog trained to rape prisoners. A German shepherd named Volodia was allegedly trained to rape female prisoners during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile at the Venda Sexy torture facility. This was reported by a Chilean truth-and-reconciliation commission based on the testimony of victims. These reports, however, do not account for how Volodia became erect in the absence of female dogs in heat.

Lake alleges that some of Kristof’s sources are connected to Hamas, but he does mention the credible story I mentioned above about the sexual abuse of a Palestinian prisoner. Unfortunately, the victim returned to Gaza and the IDF dropped the charges.

Another problem with the report is that Kristof cites the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which amplified the dog rape claims in April. The Switzerland-based organization purports to be a neutral human rights group, but it has a history of spreading libel against Israel, such as a November 2023 report that raised “concerns” that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was harvesting the organs of Palestinian corpses.

In 2013, Israel designated Euro-Med’s founder and current chairman Ramy Abdu as a Hamas operative in Europe. On the day after the October 7 massacre, Abdu posted on X: “In this battle, Palestine offered the elite of its youth and men on the path of freedom and dignity. Succeeding generations will remember you, and history will immortalize you as knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud. Preserve their names well, and teach the tales of their immortal valor to your children and grandchildren.”

. . .Was Kristof’s “journalist source” an example of a militant using a press affiliation as cover to advance his side in an information war?

To be sure, Kristof does include interviews with named victims who claim to have experienced sexual torture, which has been documented in Israel and many prisons throughout the world. Israel was rocked last year by the scandal of an alleged sexual torture at a detention facility known as Sde Teiman. Grainy and inconclusive video emerged in 2024 that appeared to show guards abusing a Palestinian prisoner.

Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me that he thinks the allegations that guards sexually abused a prisoner at Sde Teiman were credible. The problem, according to Conricus, is that the victim and witness to this abuse was allowed to return to Gaza, after which the IDF dropped the charges against the guards.

. . .“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Conricus said. “So many terrorists infiltrated Israel on that day, there were too many to process, and reservists without the right training were called up to be prison guards.”

Conricus, however, said there was no evidence that sexual abuse was a systemic practice in Israeli jails as Euro-Med and Kristof claim. “There is no comparison to be made between terrorists who invaded a country, who raped, killed, and mutilated people, and the heavy-handed treatment by some Israeli guards against Palestinian terrorists who have been caught,” he said.

That is a vital distinction. Israel faces an enemy that filmed its atrocities on October 7 and celebrated the barbarism as an act of resistance. Now that same enemy is trying to persuade the world that Israel is no different than Hamas. Woe to any journalist credulous enough to believe them.

Finally, from the National Review‘s article by Brittany Bernstein: “Kristof’s extraordinary claims about Israeli rape require extraordinary evidence. The Times doesn’t have it.”

But media watchdogs have now raised questions about the integrity of the sourcing in the reported opinion column, which relies predominantly on claims from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and several individuals with checkered backgrounds.

.. . . Euro-Med’s bias is obvious — it has “documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel,” according to HonestReporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog.

. . .Those unfounded accusations include that Israel was stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians, that Israeli soldiers were executing patients in cold blood at al-Shifa Hospital, and, perhaps most notably, that Israeli forces have trained dogs to rape prisoners.

While Euro-Med first published the claim about dogs in 2024, the group issued a new report last month containing new detainee testimony making the same allegation, through the same unverified methodology, as Eli Kowaz writes in his own criticism of the Kristof piece.

And canine behavior expert Michael S. Gould tells National Review that the suggestion that dogs could be trained to rape prisoners is “absurd.”

“I’ve trained dogs to do a lot of things in my life. But no, that’s absurd,” said Gould, who began working with dogs in 1982 as one of the first members of the New York City Police Department’s Canine Unit and later went on to become a canine forensics expert and consultant. “It’s absurd for many reasons: the sexual instincts of dogs, their anatomy, the actual physical concept of it.”

. . .Kristof, in his piece, further writes that, “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.”

But questions remain about the stories told by the few named sources in Kristof’s article.

Sami al-Sai, whom Kristof describes as a “freelance journalist,” says he was arrested because Israeli authorities hoped to pressure him into becoming an informant. “Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused” to become an informant, Kristof reports.

However, al-Sai had previously been jailed in 2016 for incitement, the same charge he faced under his 2024 arrest. The charge is a criminal offense related to the publishing of material intended to encourage, support, or provoke violence or terrorism.

And al-Sai’s social media offers blatant evidence of his celebration of terrorism [Examples are given.]

. . .Kristof says it was another source, Issa Amro, who first sparked his interest in reporting on alleged sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners. He says Amro, “a nonviolent activist sometimes called ‘the Palestinian Gandhi,’” told him that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.

But Amro initially said in February 2024, according to the Washington Post, that he was threatened with sexual assault during a ten-hour detention on October 7, 2023 — not that he was actually assaulted.

However, Kristof’s column describes Amro as a victim of sexual assault.

And the Israeli response (so far) as given in Bernstein’s article:

. . .Israel’s prison service told the Times it “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse.

And the Israeli Foreign Ministry called Kristof’s column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”

“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused,” the statement from the foreign ministry adds.

“Israel – whose citizens were the victims of the most horrific sexual crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, and whose hostages were later subjected to further sexual abuse – is portrayed as the guilty party,” the statement concludes. “This publication is no coincidence. It is part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN Secretary-General’s blacklist.”

The ministry further accused the Times of purposefully timing the release of Kristof’s column to pull attention away from the findings of Israel’s Civil Commission to investigate Hamas’s systemic violence during, and since, the October 7 attack. The ministry said the commission approached the paper “months ago” about the planned release of the 300-page report, and that the Times “was not interested” in reporting it.

The report was released on Tuesday morning, one day after Kristof’s column was published. It found Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted, and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023, terror attack on southern Israel “to maximize pain and suffering.”

I don’t know if the timed publication of Kristof’s “J’accuse” column and the Civil Commission report were coincidental or planned, and I don’t much care. What happened are claims about reality, and should be verified, as far as they can, with evidence. And witnesses should be credible and not have given contradictory statements. These are early days, and no doubt Kristof’s allegations will be investigated. For now, just read the allegations and the responses, and weigh in below if you have any thoughts.

In which my Senator tries to explain to me why he voted against providing military aid to Israel

May 7, 2026 • 9:40 am

About two weeks ago I wrote to both of my Senators, Democrats Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth (Durbin is not seeking re-election this year), criticizing their votes for a bill blocking the sale of U.S. weapons and other aid to Israel, and asking why they have voted this way.

The bill, S. J. Resolution 32, was introduced by Bernie Sanders, and stipulated that the Senate would block military aid (comprising both military bulldozers and 1,000-pound bombs) to Israel. The bill was rejected by the Senate by a vote of 40-59, largely along party lines, with all Democrats (save seven: Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Chris Coons of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York) voting to block aid. Note that the U.S. was selling the materiel to Israel, not giving it to them.

Both Senator Duckworth and Senator Durbin voted “yea” on the bill, meaning they favored blocking the aid to Israel. As I have consistently voted for both Senators in the past, I wanted them to know that I did not favor their votes, and I asked them to explain their positions. I haven’t yet heard from Duckworth, but here is Durbin’s response.

May 6, 2026 Dr. Jerry Allen Coyne ADDRESS REDACTED Dear Jerry: Thank you for contacting me about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. I appreciate hearing from you. On October 7, 2023, Hamas committed a horrific terrorist attack on Israel, killing more than 1,000 Israelis and taking more than 200 hostages. Since the attack and the ensuing war, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, 70 percent of which were women and children. On April 3, 2025, the Senate considered whether to discharge two joint resolutions of disapproval from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These joint resolutions of disapproval, introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, would have blocked the sale of billions of dollars of certain offensive weapons to Israel. I voted for both of these measures on the Senate Floor, but they both failed by a vote of 15-82 and 15-83, respectively. On May 20, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs on President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request. In this hearing, I pressed Secretary of State Rubio on why the Trump Administration has failed to join our allies in calling for the immediate delivery of aid to the civilians of Gaza. On July 25, 2025, I joined many of my Senate Democratic colleagues in issuing a joint resolution urging the Trump Administration to call on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire agreement and support a surge in humanitarian assistance. Following the joint statement, on July 28, 2025, I delivered a speech on the Senate Floor denouncing the actions of Hamas and calling on Prime Minister Netanyahu to take a measured approach and to release critical aid to those starving in Gaza. The humanitarian conditions in Gaza are appalling, unconscionable, and cruel. Representatives from Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire deal on October 9, 2025, marking the beginning of the end of the war in Gaza. The agreement includes provisions that significantly increase humanitarian aid to Gaza, with a goal of 600 truckloads of aid carrying food, water, and medical supplies entering Gaza daily. However, the ceasefire agreement remains extremely fragile amid mutual accusations of violations and humanitarian challenges. The deal will require sustained attention and vigilance from President Trump and our allies in order to make the agreement a reality. It will take a long time to heal from the pain and suffering that has occurred since the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, but this ceasefire agreement offers the best chance at a hopeful future where both people, Palestinians and Israelis, can live in peace. I will continue to support funding for humanitarian efforts in Gaza and around the world through the Congressional appropriations process and work to hold the administration accountable when they fail to uphold the law and award funds appropriated by Congress. Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch.


	Sincerely, Richard J. Durbin United States Senator
RJD/je

There’s not much of an explicit explanation save the disputed claim that there is not enough humanitarian assistance going to Gaza. Note Durbin’s words that “The humanitarian conditions in Gaza are appalling, unconscionable, and cruel.” “Cruel” implies deliberate malfeasance by Israel, supporting a “genocide” accusation. Durbin does not add that Hamas is partly responsible for reducing aid, although some sources argue that the reduction of needed aid is also due to “underfunding, crossing delays, operational restrictions, and general post-war chaos” (from Grok). To the extent that these factors delay needed aid, they must be ameliorated, and to the extent that Israel is responsible for restrictions of needed aid, they must do better.

As far as the 70% women and children killed, this figured has been retracted by Hamas (see below). It’s also misleading, as “children” are defined in this tally as humans under 18, and of course plenty of Hamas fighters are under 18. Overall, the proportion of women killed, according to the figure given below (from Hamas) varies from 30% to 50%, depending on age, but of fighting-age people (13-55), 72% of the fatalities are male. This is certainly not out of line for urban warfare.

John Spencer, who teaches urban warfare at West Point, has said the following:

Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.

Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.

The IDF has coordinated millions of vaccine doses, supplied fuel for hospitals and infrastructure, and facilitated the flow of food and medicine through the UN, aid groups, and private partners. The U.S.–Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation alone has delivered more than 82 million meals—one to two million a day—while weakening Hamas’s control over aid. This is not genocide. It is responsible and historic mid-war humanitarian policy.

Maarten Boudry, in a critique of the “genocide” allegations called “They don’t believe it either”, takes issue with the 70% figure and cites sources for the data below, namely Hamas (neither Boudry nor Spencer are Jewish). Booudry:

Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians and include many natural deaths, casualties are predominantly male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted). The source of the plot below is here.

A line graph titled "GAZA DEATHS BY SEX & AGE HAMAS LIST /2025" showing the number of deaths on the y-axis from 0 to 1000 and age of fatality on the x-axis from 0 to 85. Two lines represent males (blue) and females (red), with males peaking higher, particularly between ages 13-55. A yellow highlight notes "72% of fatalities aged 13-55 are male." A watermark reads "Charlie Aizenberg55."

What to make of all this? It seems that Democrats like Durbin are not up on the statistics, and are making statements that they cannot support. To the extent that they call out Israel for not providing enough humanitarian aid for Gaza, well, that claim needs to be examined, as well as the proposition that it is Israel’s complete responsibility to repair the damage of the war. But the 70% figure bandied about seems to be flatly wrong.

And I wish Durbin had been more straightforward in his answer, letting me know under what conditions he would have voted for aid to Israel. But of coursse he’s a politician. And some other Democrat will be running for Senator this fall (the field is crowded).

Heard on NPR this morning

April 26, 2026 • 9:30 am

I think this was news commentary, but I didn’t hear the whole show: just a snippet on my car radio. At any rate, one commenter said this:

“Joe Biden is probably the last Democratic President for generations who will be in favor of Israel.”

One could say that the Democrats are taking a position of neutrality, favoring neither Israel or its opponents (e.g., Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas), but I doubt that is the case. The Democratic Party is being taken over by so-called “progressives,” and they are opposed to Israel in general—not just “Zionism” (which means Israel’s existence as a state), and not just Netanyahu. This, according to a poll of Palestinians taken in the West Bank and Gaza two years ago, is who the Democrats are and will be favoring:

According to the poll, only seven percent of Gazans blamed Hamas for their suffering. Seventy-one percent of all Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7 — up 14 points among Gazans and down 11 points among West Bank Palestinians compared to three months ago. Fifty-nine percent of all Palestinians thought Hamas should rule Gaza, and 70 percent were satisfied with the role Hamas has played during the war.

Before October 7, Fatah would have defeated Hamas in a head-to-head vote of all Palestinians 26 to 22 percent. If elections were held today, Fatah would lose to Hamas 17 to 34 percent. Eighty-one percent of respondents were dissatisfied with Abbas, up from 76 percent before the war. Sixty-two percent did not view the recent resignation of former PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh as a sign of reform. And 65 percent of Palestinians think the PA is a burden on the Palestinian people. Among likely voters, 56 percent supported Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences for his role in the murder of Jews during the Second Intifada. Thirty-two percent supported Qatar-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and 11 percent supported Abbas.

Only 5 percent of Palestinians think Hamas’s massacre on October 7 constitutes a war crime.

The poll was taken by a Palestinian organization, “the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.” And we have this breakdown of Democratic support (almost nil) from The Arab Center:

On April 15, 2026, the United States Senate considered two resolutions to block nearly $450 million of arms sales to Israel over concerns about human rights violations and the US-Israel war on Iran. With pro-Israel Republicans controlling the Senate, the defeat of these resolutions, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), was predictable. Indeed, the first resolution, to stop a $295 million sale of bulldozers that Israel has used in the past to destroy civilian homes, lost in a 59-40 vote; the second, to halt a $151 million sale of 12,000 1,000-pound bombs, failed 63-36. The surprise was that more than three-quarters of the 47-member Democratic caucus voted to halt at least one of the sales—an unprecedented number.

Jews were reliably Democratic before the war, and Democrats were reliable friends of Israel. Brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, those days are gone. Democrats are not only ignoring Hamas’s war crimes and avowed desire to destroy Israel, but also favoring an oppressive, misogynistic, and truly genocidal regime against the only democratic state in the Middle East. And no, I don’t think it’s just animus against Netanyahu or “Zionism” that’s motivating this change. I think that Democratic opposition to Israel would be nearly as strong if Israel had some other Prime Minister. And it’s not “Zionism” they oppose, either, for that’s just the new euphemism for “Judaism”, for Zionism is just the recognition of the validity of the state of Israel as a refuge for Jews. (Do these people oppose the many explicitly Muslim states as examples of “Islamism”? If so, I haven’t heard about it.)

Israel (and Jews) are now seen as oppressors in the “oppressor-victim” narrative that’s behind wokeness. And the “oppression” by Israel involves the Two Big Lies: Israel is “genocidal” and “an apartheid state.” (For a refutation of the “genocide” canard go here, and of the “apartheid” canard go here). We are seeing the Democratic Party becoming more antisemitic and anti-Enlightenment. For Democrats like me, this is depressing. I’m not a one-issue candidate but I’m still Jewish, and how am I to vote for someone who is anti-Israel?

U.S. and Israel attack Iran, Trump vowing regime change; Iran fires missiles at Israel and U.S. Mideast bases

February 28, 2026 • 5:30 am

Well, what seemed likely has now happened; here are the headlines in today’s NYT (click headlines to read live feed, article archived here):

Trump’s 8-minute statement, calling for the “elimination of major threats from the Iranian regime”, which endangers the United States troops, our overseas bases, and our “allies throughout the world” (that of course largely means Israel). He asserts that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon” and says that, despite negotiations, Iran refused to abandon its nuclear program. He vows to “obliterate” their nuclear program, “annihilate their navy”, and assure that its proxies can no longer endanger the world.

Importantly, he tells the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand”, asking them, when the attack is finished, to “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations. ”

Do listen to it:

A summary of the ongoing news:

The United States and Israel on Saturday launched a major attack on Iran, with President Trump vowing to devastate the country’s military, eliminate its nuclear program and bring about a change in its government.

Large explosions shook the Iranian capital, Tehran, where people reported seeing smoke rising from the district that includes the presidential palace. Witnesses described chaos in the streets as Iranians rushed to seek shelter, find loved ones or flee the city.

The American-led attack appeared to herald a much broader regional crisis. Iranian news media reported that Iran had targeted at least four U.S. military bases across the Persian Gulf — including in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which said they had come under attack.

Iran also fired multiple waves of ballistic missiles at Israel, prompting booms in the skies as Israeli air defenses sought to repel them. Air-raid sirens sounded across the country, sending Israelis running to fortified shelters.

Mr. Trump vowed that the “massive and ongoing” campaign would target not just Iran’s nuclear program, which was the focus of a U.S. attack last June. Instead, Mr. Trump said the United States would “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy,” arguing that Iran had refused to reach a deal with the United States that would have averted war.

He then called on Iranians to overthrow their government when the U.S. military assault came to an end. “It will be yours to take,” he said. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Iran’s government vowed “crushing retaliation” against Israel and the United States and said it would not “surrender to their despicable demands.” Internet access in Iran plummeted amid the attack, making communication difficult.

And from the Times of Israel (click for free read):

From the ToI:

After long weeks of escalating regional tensions and burgeoning threats of conflict, Israel and the US launched a major joint strike on Iran on Saturday, with waves of attacks on sites across the Islamic Republic.

Strikes targeted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian, an Israeli official said. Other top regime and military commanders were also targeted, according to the official. The results of the strikes were not yet clear.

Targets in the campaign also included Iran’s military, symbols of government and intelligence targets, according to an official briefed on the operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic information on the attack.

Several senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and political officials were killed in the strikes, an Iranian source close to the establishment told Reuters.

US President Donald Trump announced that the US had begun “major combat operations in Iran,” calling the campaign “a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”

US President Donald Trump announced that the US had begun “major combat operations in Iran,” calling the campaign “a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”

“We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally… obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy,” he said in a video statement posted on his Truth Social account. “We are going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”

Trump indicated that the goal was to topple the regime, and he called on the Iranian people to seize the opportunity and take over their government.

Here are the questions that remain to be answered (my bold; indents from the news). Summaries are as of 5:30 a.m. today:

a.) What is happening to the Iranian people? The brave people of Iran, many of whom have been killed by the regime in recent protests against the government, are naturally anxious and terrified. They don’t know what is going to happen to their country. From the NYT:

Just as Iranians began their workweek on Saturday morning, U.S. and Israeli strikes sent panicked residents of Tehran into the streets and parents racing back to schools where they had just dropped off their children.

Chaos and uncertainty set in as explosions shook the densely populated city, Iran’s capital, according to witnesses who spoke to The New York Times.

Ali, a businessman from Tehran, said in a text message that he was sitting in his office with many employees when they heard two explosions along with fighter jets streaking over the sky. Employees ran screaming out of the building, he said. He, like several other residents who spoke to The Times, asked not to be identified by his full name because he feared for his safety.

. . .When Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran last June, it targeted mostly military and nuclear sites and strikes in Tehran and assassinated its top military chain of command. The strikes on Saturday appeared far broader, including political targets like the intelligence ministry, the judiciary and the Pasteur gated compound where the president and supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, generally reside, according to residents in the area and local news outlets.

. . . Not all Iranians were angry as they watched the plumes of smoke rising from the blasts, said Arian, a resident of the Ekteban township west of the capital, who said some of his relatives were cheering the strikes. He said he could hear voices outside his building chanting, “Long live the shah,” a reference to Iran’s monarch, who was deposed in the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic Republic to power.

As warplanes launched strikes across the country, President Trump released a video statement announcing to Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” and urging them to rise up gainst the government once the bombing stops.

b.) Did the U.S. strike do substantial damage to Iranian leaders, the Revolutionary Guards, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei?

From the Times of Israel:

Channel 12, quoting unnamed Israeli sources, says the palace of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has been completely destroyed. It says it is not clear whether Khamenei was present. It also says all of Iran’s key leaders were targeted in the strikes so far today.

Which high officials have been eliminated remains to be seen; information out of Iran is thin because there’s an Internet blackout.

From the NYT:

Israel is still assessing its opening strikes, which hit a variety of targets, including figures considered essential personnel in the Iranian war machine, according to an Israeli military official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, in line with army rules. The official refused to elaborate on the identity of those targets. He said that Iran had fired dozens of missiles at Israel so far.

. . . Satellite imagery shows a black plume of smoke and extensive damage at the secure compound of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in Tehran, though his whereabouts were unclear. The image, taken by Airbus on Saturday morning, shows collapsed buildings at the complex, which typically serves as Mr. Khamenei’s residence and main premises for hosting senior officials.

c.) Where is Iran attacking? So far, Iranian missiles have been fired at U.S. bases, at Jordan, at the United Arabe Emirates, and of course at Israel.

From the Toi:

An Iranian missile has fallen on a home in Jordan’s capital Amman, state media reports.

Footage published by Arabic media shows flames and smoke rising from the wreckage.

. . . Jordan’s military says its air force is at work to protect the kingdom and its people while the strikes are ongoing. A military official says that two ballistic missiles targeting the kingdom’s territory “were successfully intercepted by Jordanian air defence systems”.

From the NYT:

The Emirati defense ministry said in a statement that it had intercepted a number of Iranian ballistic missiles and that a person in the capital Abu Dhabi had died as a result of falling debris. “The UAE reserves its full right to respond to this escalation and to take all necessary measures to protect its territory, citizens, and residents,” the statement said.

There is not much reports of damage to U.S. military bases or to other Middle Eastern countries, though missiles have been fired at them:

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, called Iraq’s foreign minister, Fuad Hussein, to inform him that Iran will be targeting U.S. military bases in the region, according to an Iraqi foreign ministry statement published on the ministry’s website. One of those bases is in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region. The Iraqi statement said Mr. Araghchi had “clarified that these attacks were not targeting the countries involved, but were limited to military sites.”

Likewise, Israel is sending civilians to bomb shelters, but not much damage has been reported. From the NYT:

Iran fired a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, the Revolutionary Guard Corps said in a statement on Telegram.

It also launched missile attacks targeting U.S. military bases in the region, including Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Fars reported.

Qatar’s ministry of defense said that it had “successfully thwarted a number of attacks” targeting its territory. The attack echoed another strike last June, when Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at an American military base near the Qatari capital, Doha, in response to a U.S. attack on its nuclear facilities.

From reader Jay, who’s following the Israel Home Front Command’s warning system. Jay says that “I have now gotten red alerts for every region in Israel I have alerts set for: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. Apparently the whole country is under attack by Iranian missiles.” For example:

d.) How is the world reacting? They are, of course, distressed and worried, calling for the U.S. not to set off a wider war. From the ToI:

Countries in the Middle East and around the world voice fear of a regional conflagration after the United States and Israel launch long-feared strikes on Iran.

Russia calls on its citizens to leave Iran, with former president Dmitry Medvedev saying that talks with the United States had just been a “cover.”

The European Union warns the situation in the region is “perilous” and calls for civilians to be protected in any conflict.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, on X, urges “all parties to exercise restraint,” stressing it is “critical” to “ensure nuclear safety” after the US indicated Iran’s nuclear sites were in its crosshairs.

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas announces the withdrawal of the bloc’s non-essential personnel from the region.

The UK government fears the strikes could blow up into a broader Middle East conflict, and urges its citizens in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE to find shelter.

“We do not want to see further escalation into a wider regional conflict,” a government spokesperson says, adding that the UK’s “immediate priority” is the safety of its citizens in the region.

From the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / Vice-President of the European Commission. Note the beginning which takes Iran to task:

The latest developments across the Middle East are perilous.

Iran’s regime has killed thousands. Its ballistic missile and nuclear programmes, along with support for terror groups, pose a serious threat to global security. The EU has adopted strong sanctions against Iran and…

— Kaja Kallas (@kajakallas) February 28, 2026

UPDATE from the NYT:

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and his foreign minister, Anita Anand, backed the American action. “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” they said in a joint statement.

******

Anthony Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, said his government endorsed the U.S. attacks on Iran. “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security,” he said in a statement. He said Iran has been a “destabilizing force” for decades, and pointed to the two terrorist attacks in 2024 in Australia that the Australian government had said had been directed by an arm of the Iranian military. In one attack, men set fire to a Jewish kosher restaurant, and in another arsonists firebombed a synagogue, injuring one congregant. Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador afterward. (Reporting from Washington)

The reaction of the West is surprisingly mild, and even positive, probably because they, too, have put sanctions on Iran, and are not that unhappy about the prospect of regime change in Iran.

I have been ambivalent about this attack, worried that there would be substantial death to civilians should the U.S. put boots on the ground, which I saw as necessary if the U.S. really wanted regime change. Perhaps change can be effected without a ground war, but it’s early days now, and we’ll see. I am not sure, either, whether Iranian civilians truly can, in the face of the Iranian military, take over their government. The Revolutionary Guard has substantial weapons; the Iranian people almost nothing.

I am less worried about Israel, which survived a previous Iranian attack without much damage; the Iron Dome and its successor defenses are good at taking down missiles. But they’re not 100% effective, and there could be substantial loss of life as well as destruction of historic sites.

The world has changed overnight, so stay tuned to the news. The outcome right now is completely unclear.

Trump approves at least five committees to run Gaza, with nobody wanting to go after Hamas

January 20, 2026 • 9:30 am

Well, the cease-fire agreements in Gaza are proceeding, as Trump has appointed some committees (all approved by the UN) to run the territory. But again we have a dog’s breakfast, as there are multiple committees with two big problems: there are at least five committees with somewhat overlapping functions and members, and, second, there is no roadmap for the major task of getting rid of Hamas.

Here’s the composition as given by the NYT (bolding below is mine):

Mr. Trump’s “Board of Peace,” which he named himself the chairman of, is backed by a legal United Nations mandate and had previously been expected to be composed of world leaders who would supervise the Trump administration’s plan for an “International Stabilization Force” to occupy, demilitarize and govern Gaza during a yearslong reconstruction effort.

But the list of officials on the executive board announced on Monday included three members of the Trump administration — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff and Robert Gabriel — as well as Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law; Ajay Banga, the head of the World Bank; the billionaire Trump ally Marc Rowan; and former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Of the seven, only Mr. Blair is not American, and he was previously the Middle East envoy for the Quartet, a diplomatic group made up of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union, and considered a candidate to lead a transitional government in Gaza.

A second executive board, similarly named the “Gaza executive board,” includes a wider roster of foreign officials from Europe and the Middle East, and is implied to be in a supporting role. Some American officials sit on both executive boards, as well as Mr. Blair.

Maj. Gen. Jasper Jeffers, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Central, which operates in the Middle East, was also tapped to lead the “International Stabilization Force,” the peacekeeping force authorized by the United Nations to be deployed to Gaza as part of the peace plan. General Jeffers previously helped oversee a brokered cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon last year.

Note that what seems to be the most important committee is almost all American, and the peacekeeping force, which presumably will be tasked with disarming Hamas, is also headed by an American general. So who is going to disarm Hamas? Israel can’t, as that would violate the ceasefire agreement, and the U.S. certainly won’t send troops to Gaza. So how will Hamas disarm and disband: the first item on Trump’s agenda?

Trump apparently will solve it by threats:

It is not clear how the international force would ensure that Gaza is demilitarized. Hamas, which specializes in insurgent tactics and has not disbanded its battalions of armed fighters, has long regarded giving up all its weapons as tantamount to surrender, with armed struggle against Israel a crucial part of its ideology. On Thursday, Mr. Trump threatened Hamas with a renewed conflict if they did not disarm, writing on social media: “they can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”

The Times of Israel, as usual, has more information about the committees, and notes that the Board of Peace isn’t really the most important board, with the Gaza Executive Board really tasked with doing the heavy lifting. Bold headings are mine. And the ToI article implies that the NYT missed two committees:

The Board of Peace:

The Board of Peace is the umbrella body that was mandated by the UN Security Council to oversee the postwar management of Gaza until the end of 2027.

The Board of Peace is chaired by Trump, and will largely be made up of heads of state from around the world.

Formal invitations to become members of the Board of Peace were sent out on Friday, and by Saturday the leaders of Turkey, Egypt, Canada and Argentina confirmed having received the offer — an indication that they will likely accept

While this is the most prominent of all the panels established, the Board of Peace will play a generally symbolic role and be more relevant during the fundraising stage, a senior Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel.

The Gaza Executive Board:

The Gaza Executive Board is the operational arm of the Board of Peace and the body that will actually oversee the postwar management of Gaza.

Sitting on the Executive Board are Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, senior Qatari diplomat Ali Thawadi, Egyptian intelligence chief Hassan Rashad, UAE Minister of International Cooperation Reem Al-Hashimy, former UK prime minister Tony Blair, US special envoy Steve Witkoff, top Trump aide Jared Kushner, Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan, Israeli-Cypriot businessman Yakir Gabay, former UN humanitarian coordinator Sigrid Kaag, and former UN envoy to the Mideast Nickolay Mladenov.

Israel has expressed opposition to the makeup of the Executive Board, apparently taking issue with the inclusion of representatives from Turkey and Qatar, who were heavily critical of its prosecution of the war in Gaza.

However, the inclusion of both countries demonstrates their perceived utility to Trump, who has touted his personal relationships with the leaders of Turkey and Qatar as well as their success in pressuring Hamas to accept a ceasefire deal in October.

The Founding Executive Board:

In addition to inexplicably sharing nearly the same name as the Gaza Executive Board, the Founding Executive Board also consists of many of the same members.

Joining Witkoff, Kushner, Blair and Rowan on this additional board are US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, World Bank president Ajay Banga and Trump’s former deputy national security adviser Robert Gabriel.

The White House said that each member of the Founding Executive Board “will oversee a defined portfolio critical to Gaza’s stabilization and long-term success, including, but not limited to, governance capacity-building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large-scale funding, and capital mobilization.”

The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza:

. . . .The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza is the committee of Palestinian technocrats that will be tasked with running daily affairs on the ground and providing services for Gazans in place of Hamas.

While Egypt, in announcing the new panel, claimed it consists of 15 members, the actual figure is 12, and they are headed by former Palestinian Authority deputy planning minister Ali Shaath.

. . . . Each of the other panel members was given a portfolio covering the fields in which they are experts.

Abdul Karim Ashour, who heads an agricultural non-profit, will serve as agriculture commissioner.

Aed Yaghi, who currently heads the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, will serve as health commissioner.

Osama Sa’adawi, who previously headed the Palestinian Housing Council nonprofit, will serve as housing commissioner.

Adnan Abu Warda, a former PA Supreme Constitutional Court judge, will serve as justice commissioner.

Maj. Gen. Sami Nassman, who has served in the PA’s General Intelligence Service and is seen as a strong opponent of Hamas, will serve as internal security and police commissioner

And so on, including commissioners for water and municipal affairs, social affairs, communications, economy, and trade. You can see that their duties will overlap. Who resolves conflicts? A member of the Palestinian Authority, which of course is anti-Israel, and is an organization hated by Hamas. Finally, there is the crucial

International Stabilization Force:

The International Stabilization Force is tasked with providing security for the Strip, while gradually phasing out the IDF, which currently remains in control of 53% of the enclave.

While the US has said the ISF will support efforts to disarm Hamas, officials familiar with the matter said the multinational force won’t be expected to engage in kinetic activity to seize weapons from the terror group, which has pledged not to give them up.

Instead, they will support the disarmament process once an agreement is reached, with mediators optimistic that Hamas will agree to a gradual process that starts with the return of heavy weapons, Arab and US officials have said.

. . .The US had struggled to convince countries to contribute troops to the ISF board amid heavy skepticism that Hamas will disarm and that the IDF will withdraw further from Gaza. One of the two countries Washington had publicly touted, Azerbaijan, announced earlier this month that it would not be participating.

US officials briefing reporters last week insisted that they now have enough countries offering troops and that an announcement can be expected in about two weeks.

This is a mess. There are five committees whose jobs are overlapping, a heavy U.S. presence on the supervising Board of Peace, and what I see as the most important committee at the outset—the group tasked with demilitarizing Gaza by erasing Hamas—has no specified troops.

It’s not surprising that no country wants to take on Hamas, since they know the international opprobrium attached to that task. Since Hamas refuses to disarm, this guarantees that there will be extensive fighting in Gaza for a long time to come. Getting rid of Hamas is Job #1, and until that is done, none of the other committees can do their jobs.

Now the UN could run the whole show instead of the U.S., but that might be even worse given the UN’s hatred of Israel. I doubt that the UN has the stomach to disarm Hamas. They have UN troops that could try, but the UN troops in Lebanon, tasked with disarming Hezbollah, are completely ineffectual. UN troops would be useless against the determined fighters of Hamas.

My conclusion: this messy plan won’t work, and therefore the destruction in Gaza will continue for some time to come. And don’t forget that Hamas and the Gazans hate the Palestinian Authority, so there can be no solution that allows the PA to run the Gaza Strip. I feel for the Gazan civilians that must endure this mishigass for years to come. If readers have an alternative solution, do suggest it below.

To describe the odious, terroristic nature of Hamas, which all of you should know about by now (even though many young Americans are on their side), I proffer Rawan Osman, a Syrian-born but pro-Israeli activist who was brought up as an Israeli-hating Muslim:

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