NYT pushes back on Israeli criticism of column alleging rape of Palestinian inmates |
The New York Times defended a column that alleged Israeli security forces rape Palestinian inmates, as Jewish groups announced they would protest outside the newspaper’s Manhattan offices on Thursday over the “libels.”
But the Times did not immediately respond to a statement by former prime minister Ehud Olmert accusing columnist Nicholas Kristof of misrepresenting his words so that they appeared to validate the allegations in the Monday op-ed, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.”
Israel had slammed the star journalist’s column, calling it “one of the worst blood libels” in modern media and assailing its use of a report from an NGO whose leaders have been photographed alongside top Hamas officials.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry also alleged that the Times deliberately published Kristof’s column ahead of an independent Israeli report that found Hamas had systematically used sexual violence in the onslaught of October 7, 2023, which sparked the war in Gaza. The Foreign Ministry claimed the Times had been approached with the Israeli report “months ago.”
In a statement Wednesday, the Times said it “never passed on” the Israeli report “and wasn’t told about its completion or the timing of its release.”
“Once the report was made public, we covered its findings,” it said, adding that the Israeli report “has no bearing on Nicholas Kristof’s opinion column or its publication timing.”
In a separate statement, the Times on Tuesday also denied journalist David Shuster’s claim on X that there were “already discussions, including up the masthead, about retracting” Kristof’s column over “issues with source credibility and lack of evidence.”
The Times responded that “there is no truth to this at all,” noting that Kristof was “a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”
“He traveled to the region to report firsthand on the stories of Palestinians who suffered abuse, and his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by independent studies,” the Times said.
Kristof’s column alleged “a pattern........