JERUSALEM: Israeli authorities will take The New York Times to court over a piece it published denouncing alleged widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar have ordered the “initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times”, according to a joint statement issued by their offices.
It said the lawsuit was being pursued “following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper”.
The investigation, published on Monday (May 11) as an opinion piece by columnist Kristof, is based on testimonies gathered in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 14 men and women who said that they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces.
The report described “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”.
According to the report, “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes”.
The foreign ministry rejected the report when it was published, saying Kristof had based it “on unverified sources tied to Hamas-linked networks”.
It also accused the paper of deliberately timing the publication to “undermine” an independent Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence perpetrated during its Oct 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which was published on the same day.
Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank since Hamas’s 2023 attack, which triggered the war in Gaza.