JTA — A week after a university commencement speaker was canceled because of a tweet claiming that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, the allegation leapt into the pages of The New York Times.

The columnist Nicholas Kristof included the claim in a column alleging widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

Detailing the account of an unnamed Gaza journalist who says guards summoned a dog when he was imprisoned in 2024, Kristof writes, “He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.” Linking to a range of pro-Palestinian sources, he notes that other prisoners had recounted similar experiences elsewhere.

Israel has rejected all of the allegations in Kristof’s column, which has elicited condemnation from Jewish groups for what they say is a “a modern-day blood libel” even as some say they believe it is important to take seriously claims of abuse in Israeli prisons. The New York Times has stood behind the column and said Kristof’s column reflects rigorous reporting and standards.

Neither Israeli officials nor The New York Times have commented specifically on the dog-rape claim, and the newspaper and Kristof did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s requests for comment. But a canine training expert said the allegations seem implausible if not completely impossible.

[It’s] highly unlikely that anybody is going to be able to train a dog to successfully commit a sexual assault

[It’s] highly unlikely that anybody is going to be able to train a dog to successfully commit a sexual assault

James Crosby, a retired police lieutenant and canine aggression expert affiliated with Harvard University’s Canine Brain Project, told JTA that it was “highly unlikely that anybody is going to be able to train a dog to successfully commit a sexual assault.”

Crosby said dogs can be trained to carry out some behaviors that could be seen as sexual but he was much more skeptical of the central claim that Kristof described.

“You could train the physical behaviors of jumping up and moving the hips back and forth and so forth. That is not necessarily sexual behavior from a dog,” Crosby said. “The actual penetration and so forth, I think that would be a lot more problematic.”

Israeli human rights groups have separately alleged both sexual assault in security prisons and the use of dogs to intimidate and assault Palestinian prisoners.

Kristof is defending the claim that the two phenomena happen in tandem, tweeting on Tuesday, “To those who say that canine rape is impossible, despite the many Palestinians who have described it, I’d note that at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs. Sigh.”

A handful of records in medical literature have concluded that injuries to humans came from being penetrated by a dog. A review of the cases included in PubMed, a medical research database, showed that most reflect instances where humans forced dogs to perform sexual acts on them, but one 2019 case report from Uruguay described injuries to a 6-year-old girl that a physician attributed to the family’s pet.

Crosby said that he was unsure if it was biologically possible to train a dog to have an erection on command but stopped short of saying that training dogs to rape humans was “impossible.”

“I’m not saying it can’t happen because, I mean, I’m a retired police officer, and I’ve also been dealing with fatal dog attacks and dog stuff for a long time, and there are always people out there that are twisted enough to do what you don’t think they can,” Crosby said. “The depths of human stupidity and nastiness are just always unplumbable (sic).”

Whatever the case, it’s clear that the dog-rape claim has escalated rapidly as a charge against Israel in recent months.

There are always people out there that are twisted enough to do what you don’t think they can

There are always people out there that are twisted enough to do what you don’t think they can

The accusation has circulated........

© The Times of Israel