Category: Palestine

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.

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 7th 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.

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.

More:

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.

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:

Why I stopped donating to Doctors Without Borders (MSF)

January 11, 2026 • 9:40 am

Years ago I was a big fan of Doctors Without Borders (originally MSF for “Médecins Sans Frontières”, since the group’s origin is French). Supposedly apolitical, MSF, provides medical care to people in regions where it’s scarce—a mission I like. I gave them a fair amount of dosh, including all of the $12,000 or so I got for auctioning off a copy of WEIT signed by many notables and illuminated by Kelly Houle.

Then I began hearing rumors that MSF was anti-Israel, which disturbed me because it’s not supposed to favor one country over another.  The rumors were not unfounded, and MSF’s dissing of Israel increased during the war with Hamas, when it not only bought into the “genocide” narrative spread by antisemites, but also promulgated false rumors about Hamas, Israel, and hospitals in Gaza.  Eventually I took MSF out of my will, diverting those funds to other humanitarian organizations. Yes, MSF is still doing good work in other places, but it will no longer have my support.

This 11-minute Quillette video, narrated by Zoe Booth, summarizes the reasons why I have cooled on MSF. (It’s largely taken from a Qullette essay on MSF called “The humanitarian mask: How activists at Médecins Sans Frontières shape disinformation“.)

I consider the “genocide” canard, the dumbest of all the Big Lies about Israel, as a manifestation of antisemitism. If you want to see why, read Maarten Boudry’s Substack article, “They don’t believe it either,” arguing that even those groups like MSF that accuse Israel of genocide are completely wrong: there’s no evidence that the aim of the IDF is to kill Gazan noncombatants or wipe out Palestinians. An excerpt:

Why then did this war have such a terrible toll on civilians, despite Israel’s efforts? There are two major reasons, both consistently ignored by all the genocide reports: Hamas’ cult of martyrdom, and the perverse incentives created by its unwitting enablers. Hamas is not just indifferent to civilian casualties; it actively solicits them as part of its military strategy. It has constructed hundreds of kilometers of tunnels for its fighters, while failing to build a single shelter for its own women and children. It deliberately fires rockets from hospitals, schools, UN buildings, mosques, and in the vicinity of humanitarian zones. Fully aware that it is no match for the Israeli army on the battlefield, it possesses one secret weapon to bring Israel to its knees: the moral conscience of the international community. If they sacrifice enough innocent women and children and then broadcast the harrowing images and casualty figures all across the international media, they can push Western nations to ostracize, delegitimize, and boycott Israel.

In fact, to any reasonable observer, it is undeniable that the Israeli army cares more about the lives of Palestinian civilians than Hamas. While Hamas invites civilian deaths as part of its strategy, Israel attempts to avoid them. Whereas the Israeli government urges Gazan civilians to evacuate combat zones, Hamas prevents them from escaping or from seeking shelter in their tunnel network. When Israel set up its own system of humanitarian aid, Hamas threatened anyone who dared to collaborate, killed multiple humanitarian workers, and punished Gazans who collected GHF food packages.

Note that those who promulgate the “genocide” myth, including MSF, never accuse Hamas of genocide, despite the fact that the terrorist organization is overtly genocidal, bent on destroying Israel by wiping out all Jews, not merely ones with guns. This Big Lie comes from willful ignorance, and, for MSF, makes their claim of ideological neutrality worthless.  Yes, a few members of IDF may have aimed at civilians, but that is vanishingly rare. The majority of Gazan civilian deaths came from Hamas’s strategy of hiding behind civilians, including their tunnel system (built at huge expense with money diverted from Gaza) and embedding themselves within schools and hospitals. As Maarten notes, the death of Palestinian civilians is part of Hamas’s plan, and the more who are killed the more the world blames Israel.

Further, those who cry “Israeli genocide” never seem to mention the kidnapping of Israeli civilians on October 7, a war crime that was followed by shooting or even strangling some of the hostages. What does MSF say about this?  Nothing. They have, as the video shows, “never issued a single condemnation of Hamas.” That is reprehensible but shows MSF’s own bigotry.

As far as buying into Hamas propaganda goes, MSF has, as the video shows, accused Israel of deliberately striking the Al-Ahli Hospital, despite subsequent investigation having convinced all rational observers (and yes, even the New York Times) that the “strike” was an explosion of a rocket misfired AT Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad—a rocket that landed in the hospital’s parking lot. There is in fact video showing the path of the misfired rocket, as well as photos of the damaged parking lot itself. As the Quillette article notes (and I’ve appended a tweet):

On 17 October, Abu-Sittah was working at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City when a major explosion rocked the compound. MSF immediately quoted him in a press release: “We were operating in the hospital; there was a strong explosion, and the ceiling fell on the operating room. This is a massacre.” Abu-Sittah was one of six Palestinian doctors who held a grotesque press conference from the hospital parking lot surrounded by the bodies of those allegedly killed in the blast. His testimony was broadcast globally, and presented as the objective account of a medical professional who bore witness to a devastating Israeli air strike. With the added credibility bestowed by MSF’s endorsement, his words were used to support international condemnations of Israel for the alleged perpetration of systematic war crimes.

Shortly afterwards, Israel and the US produced evidence showing that the explosion occurred in the hospital parking lot and that it was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli airstrike. The New York Times and a number of other major news platforms admitted that their initial coverage had relied on unverified claims and amended their reporting as new information became available. Even Human Rights Watch—hardly an impartial observer of Israeli combat operations—conceded that “the possibility of a large air-dropped bomb, such as those Israel has used extensively in Gaza, [is] highly unlikely.” MSF, on the other hand, refused to correct the record. More than two years later, it has still not retracted or corrected Abu-Sittah’s false testimony.

Did MSF retract its accusations?  Of course not, even though Human Rights Watch—itself anti-Israel—did.

As the video above shows, MSF has distanced itself from some of the more extremist people it once endorsed, but it has not publicly retracted or even modified its claims. That too is reprehensible.

I found a 2016 article in the Forward, an Israeli newspaper, that is telling. Already stung then by accusations of antisemitism, the executive director of MSF USA denied “institutional antisemitism.”. The bolding is mine:

We are perceived by some as taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when communicating about the West Bank and Gaza, where MSF has been operating medical programs for more than 20 years.

. . .MSF does not work in Israel — not because of any bias, but because Israel can cover its medical needs. While MSF has offered medical support at various times, including during the 2006 Lebanon war, these offers were respectfully declined, given Israel’s strong emergency medical capabilities. We are therefore not in a position to make medically based observations regarding Israeli suffering. To be clear, Palestinians are by no means the sole victims in this conflict. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, other factions and so-called lone-wolf attackers are in no uncertain terms responsible for crimes and violations of the laws of war, such as indiscriminate attacks.

Palestinian leaders bear direct responsibility for their actions, including firing into civilian areas rockets that have killed and wounded Israelis and perpetuated fear and psychological trauma among so many.

While not witnessed directly by MSF teams, allegations of Hamas and other fighters placing weapons or command centers near or inside health facilities and other civilian structures would amount to grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. Such tactics directly endanger noncombatants, including medical personnel and patients, and are explicitly forbidden under international law. Responsibility for other obstacles to health care must also be forthrightly assigned.

How that tune has changed! The same “crimes” of Hamas given in bold somehow were neglected by MSF after October 7, 2023.  Hamas is apparently seen as the innocent victim of Israeli genocidal aims. In an undated statement after the current war began, MSF tries to exculpate itself again. An excerpt (bolding is theirs):

Why are your statements so critical of Israel? Why are you not talking about Hamas?

As humanitarians, we grieve for all civilian lives lost [JAC: except for Israeli ones], and the vast majority of the victims of this conflict are civilians, including many elderly people, women, and children. Violence against civilians is never justified, and all civilians deserve protection. [JAC: what about the Israeli hostages?]

Our statements and reporting are rooted in the experiences of our patients and staff on the ground, and the actions we directly witness in the areas where we work. In Gaza, Israeli armed forces’ activities are central to the challenges civilians face, particularly in terms of access to medical care and the safety of health workers and facilities. We report on these realities because they directly impact our ability to provide care.

That is about as weaselly as it comes.  By placing tunnels and combatants in and under hospitals, Hamas itself is impeding “access to medical care and the safety of health workers and facilities.” That’s not to mention their theft of food and supplies intended for Gazan civilians.

As Hamas refuses to lay down its arms, and MSF refuses to condemn their terrorism, I am closing my wallet to MSF and directing considerable resources to alternative groups like Helen Keller International, the Malaria Consortium, and Peter Singer’s organization the Maximize Your Impact Fund.

I haven’t told MSF how much money they’re going to lose because of their ideological position.  They wouldn’t care anyway.  I believe I told them, after they kept begging me for more after our initial donation, that they could expect no more donations from me.  As for others reading this site, where you donate is of course up to you, but be sure to check out whether recipients are politically and ideologically neutral.

Natasha Hausdorff explains the UN resolution approving Trump’s plan for Gaza

November 20, 2025 • 12:00 pm

Here’s Natasha Hausdorff (legal director of the UK Lawyers for Israel) explaining, in an 11-minute video, the U.N. Security Council’s resolution approving Trump’s plan for ending the war in and reconstructing Gaza.  She notes that this approval is not legally binding, but goes through the most important of the plan’s 20 provisions.

Some of the problems I’ve mentioned before, including the difficulty of bringing Arab neighbors aboard and constructing an international peacekeeping force, finding a decent transitional government to run Gaza, and the insoluble problem of disarming Hamas (a provision of the plan that Hamas of course rejects). She notes that the UN resolution clearly states that a “state of Palestine does not yet exist,” which embarrasses not only Palestinians, but also the many countries like France and the UK who have already recognized such a state. (5:05). (She notes that the UK decision has been applauded by Hamas, and thus is good for the terrorist group.)

She doesn’t mention the difficult issue of the West Bank. That’s not part of the U.N. resolution, but I’d like to hear her views on it, anyway.

From Commentary: now that the fighting in Gaza seems to be over Seth Mandel calls out the antisemitic libels

November 2, 2025 • 9:40 am

Commentary is a Jewish magazine, and a conservative one, and if you want to dismiss this article because of that, go ahead, but you’d be obtuse to do so. The article below, which is short, puts paid to the libels that Israel not only committed genocide in Gaza (to me, making such a claim is a touchstone of antisemitism) but also deliberately starved the Gazan population. (I’ll will say, though, that Israel’s brief 11-day withholding of food from Gaza was a mistake.)

But these false accusations, combined with the “progressives'” ignoring of real genocide in Sudan. give us a real idea about the motivations of many during this conflict.  I’m not a big exponent of “whataboutery”, but the deaths in Sudan have now mounted to over 150,000, and there are ample atrocities, including the recent attack on a maternity hospital by antigovernment forces in which nearly 500 of patients were killed willy-nilly. Could a reason for “progressives'” ignoring this war be because most of the perpetrators (and victims) are Muslim, with no Jews being involved?”

At any rate, Commentary writer and editor Seth Mandel, whom I’ve found to be a reliable reporter, calls out the antisemites in a new article in Commentary. Click the headline below to read for free.

Mandel makes several points (my summary):

1.) The UN doesn’t want to war to end. That’s because the organization, which is pro-Palestine and also supports an organization, UNRWA, that’s rife with Hamas terrorists, can now be called to account because the cease-fire allows investigations of death tolls and UNRWA involvement that could be ignored when all the news came from Hamas.

2.) There was no Israeli genocide; that much is clear to anybody with neurons. Of course it may be true that were a few deaths of Gazan civilians who were killed by the IDF deliberately rather than being “byproduct” casualties of IDF soldiers attacking Hamas. But I’d like to ask the “pro-genocide progressives” this:  if Israel intended to wipe out all Gazans, why did it send IDF soldiers into the territory, risking their lives, rather than simply bombing Gaza flat? After all, more than 1,100 IDF soldiers have died in that effort: far more than the number of hostagers rescued.

3.) There is no credible evidence of a famine, a near-famine, or Israeli-caused mass starvation in Gaza.  While throughout the conflict, which may be at an end, we heard repeatedly that Gaza was in the grips of mass starvation, the deaths by starvation were very, very few, and most of them involved people with pre-existing conditions.

Now for some excerpts by Mandel:

No one’s having more trouble accepting the possibility of peace than the United Nations.

While Gazans are finishing school, opening cafes, and posting photos of their full chicken dinners, one UN agency is still banging the drum of “acute malnutrition”—this as the crossings are open and the aid is flowing. UN relief coordinator Tom Fletcher, the source of the “14,000 dead babies in 48 hours” lie—one of the more dangerous and consequential hoaxes of the war—is meeting with the Irish government, which has itself achieved a previously unimagined level of irrelevance. And the International Court of Justice, the UN’s pretend world court, is issuing new demands of Israel to give Hamas-adjacent UN activists more access in Gaza.

All of it is meaningless, of course, having long been overtaken by events. Palestinian social media is currently the UN’s worst nightmare: Gazans with big smiles and full bellies. As John Lennon and Yoko Ono famously said, war is over if you want it. It’s just that the UN doesn’t want it.

Thankfully, nobody cares what the UN wants. But it’s worth examining why the UN is so angry that the war has ceased and Palestinian lives are improving.

One reason is that the war’s end makes it possible to start compiling definitive statistics. And those statistics make it crystal clear that UN-affiliated agencies and their partner NGOs have conducted large-scale fraud, the blast radius of which has incinerated the credibility of much of Western academic and “humanitarian” institutions.

About the “starvation”.  First, a couple of tweets showing the exaggerated claims (the IPC is the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification):

This tweet is based on a JNS article, but on the UN’s own data (see article here):

Of course I am not cold-hearted about these deaths: after all, each one is a child loved by its parents, and each death is heartbreaking. My point is simply to show that the claims of “mass starvation caused by Israel” were always exaggerated–to the point of almost being totally false. And unless you want Gazans to die to support your narrative, this is heartening. From Mandel:

Let’s start with food. Salo Aizenberg—who probably deserves some sort of medal for his painstaking work compiling the true statistical toll of the war—pointed out this week that the UN-backed IPC declared a Gaza famine in August, and that we can now check the numbers against the prediction and verify exactly what the IPC got wrong.

Between the famine declaration and the cease-fire, there should have been 10,143 famine deaths in Gaza. Using Hamas’s own numbers of such deaths—which are obviously not undercounted—the total famine deaths in that period was 192.

That means the IPC predicted about 10,000 famine deaths and was short by about 10,000. The IPC is now at Candace Owens’s level of credibility and statistical reliability.

There was no famine. That’s not an opinion, it’s an indisputable fact. Also indisputable is that there was no near-famine. It wasn’t a close call.

That, by the way, is good news. Although the anti-Israel activist world was hoping for mass starvation, those of us who aren’t monsters are very happy that there was no famine in Gaza. Pay attention to those who dispute this and those who show their disappointment.

Now that the dust is settling, we can see that the ratio of civilian deaths to combatants was about 1.5 to 1: a remarkably low value for urban warfare in which Hamas used human shields. It is in fact the lowest value known among similar situations, and a testimony to the IDF’s policy of trying to eliminate combatants but not civilians:

Then there is the main event: the accusation of “genocide.” While this has been debunked again and again and again throughout the war—to the extent that anyone accusing Israel of genocide has disqualified themselves from legitimate debate over matters of war and peace—now that there is a cease-fire, we can work with steady numbers.

Aizenberg noted in September that using Hamas’s own statistics, and subtracting natural deaths and fatalities caused by munitions fired by Gazan combatants, one gets a total of about 33,000 civilian casualties. The widely accepted number of combatant casualties is at about 25,000.

Every one of those 33,000 civilian casualties is a tragedy and a testament to the effectiveness and ruthlessness of Hamas’s human-shield strategy. That number also means that there are fewer than 1.5 civilian deaths for each combatant war death, an almost unheard-of level of care for civilians by the Israeli army.

Again, these are the numbers. A genocide didn’t happen—that we knew a long time ago. But it is now clear that there is no plausible case that Israel used excessive force against civilians or targeted noncombatants. The opposite is true: In pursuing Hamas, Israeli soldiers sacrificed their own lives to protect civilians. This is not an interpretation of some contextless video floating around social media; this is established fact.

The United Nations and other “humanitarian” and “human rights” groups needed this war to go on in perpetuity so they could forestall a public reckoning they richly deserve. Peace is bad for their business.

Below is Mandel’s conclusion. I have to say that I’ve lived 75 years and have come across antisemitism only once—in a personal incident in high school. Otherwise I was oblivious to it. But the war in Gaza, with its widely-believed lies and libels, has certainly alerted me to the reason “progressives” pay so much attention to the world’s only Jewish country:

Finally, the “genocide” and “deliberate starvation” accusations can now take their place alongside history’s other assorted grotesque expressions of anti-Judaism. Just as Jews should feel no obligation to refute the accusation that they are “the sons of apes and pigs,” they should similarly avoid the debasement of being forced to answer for the fabricated claims of “genocide,” the intention of which is merely to incite violence against Jews and to diminish the crimes of the Holocaust.

The good news is that (fingers crossed) most of the killing has stopped, and also that we can have peace on campus now that the Hamasniks have lost. But don’t be deceived into thinking that antisemitism is dead. Those who banged drums and chanted “From the River to the sea” have lost most of what they were protesting, but of course the animus against Israel and Jews remains.

Where are celebrations from Democrats in Congress of the hostages’ return?

October 14, 2025 • 11:20 am

Yesterday I spent a while looking on Twitter for various Democrats in Congress celebrating the return of the hostages to Israel, or even the return of Palestinian prisoners to Gaza. I looked at all the members of the Squad, but (with one exception) no dice, Of course you wouldn’t expect to see Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib celebrating, because if you celebrate the return of Palestinians to Gaza, you’d have to celebrate the return of the hostages to Israel. But AOC? She wants to be a Senator, or even President, but. . . crickets, and she has two “X” accounts.

Surely Chuck Schumer would have a word for the hostages, right? After all, he’s Jewish. But no—bupkes.

All the Democrats seem to be busy on Twitter blaming the shutdown on Trump.  And that’s fine, but couldn’t they celebrate the happiness of having hostages held for two years by Hamas coming home? My theory, which is mine, is that doing that would be giving implicit credit to Trump, and that just won’t do in today’s political climate.

Readers may help by doing their own searches, and if you find a Democrat in the House or Senate celebrating the hostage return, put their names and a link below (I haven’t checked Fetterman, but I’m sure he said something).

Actually, Ayanna Presley, a member of The Squad, did say something, though she also celebrated the return of the 2000 Palestinian prisoners, some of which are murderers and terrorists. But then again, she’d more or less have to:

Now this was just a short search, and I’m SURE some Democrats are celebrating the hostage return, but given the decreasing approbation for Israel in the U.S., and the fact that one could impute the latest cease-fire agreement partly to Trump, I didn’t see what I expected.  Any person of good will should have at least a modicum of joy for what happened the other day.  Let me know who you expected to be happy about this but didn’t say squat.

I didn’t look at Republican tweets; I just assumed that they’d say more about the hostage return than the Democrats. After all, they’re in the same party as Trump.