https://i.imgur.com/pd0aoXr.png?hfr-cc-image=true  Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof
 
This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give

https://i.imgur.com/pd0aoXr.png?hfr-cc-image=true  Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof
 
I appreciate the intense interest in my column. For skeptics, why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian "security" prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?

Parody Jeff @Parodyjeffx
 
HOLY SHIT
 
Eurovision just turned into a war zone.
 
Israel drops their song and the arena teams up screaming  
“Stop the genocide.”
 
Security drags people out in cuffs mid-performance.
 
Israel is finished. https://t.co/NpvScu1QwM

“The settlement enterprise will not be deterred. We will continue to build, to plant, to defend, and to settle throughout the entire land of Israel.”

« Un manque d’empathie »… A l’Eurovision, les chanteuses croates choquées par une mauvaise blague du diffuseur d’Israël
CRISPATIONS•Dans un post Instagram, la chaîne KAN a tourné en dérision les tatouages arborés par le groupe Lelek lors de la première demi-finale de l’Eurovision mardi. Un commentaire « déplacé » et « un manque de respect », estiment les artistes concernées

Les cinq chanteuses arborent sur le visage et les bras des (faux) tatouages évoquant les « sicanje », des tatouages traditionnels, importants dans la culture balkanique. KAN, l’équivalent de France Télévisions en Israël, a cru bon de faire un trait d’humour à ce sujet en postant sur son compte Instagram une image de la performance croate et en ajoutant ce commentaire : « Quand tu exagères avec les tatouages au henné à Eilat [une ville israélienne] ».

Ce mercredi après midi, le groupe croate a réagi dans une story Instagram :
 
    « Nous sommes dérangées par le commentaire du diffuseur israélien KAN moquant notre culture et les sacrifices faits par des femmes catholiques opprimées. Il est particulièrement dérangeant de tourner en dérision des femmes chantant la douleur et les souffrances féminines tout en montrant un total manque d’empathie et de respect pour la souffrance des autres. »
 
La chaîne KAN a depuis supprimé sa publication, sans faire de commentaire. L’Union européenne de radiotélévision (UER), qui chapeaute le concours, n’a pas non plus livré de réaction officielle.

La chanson de Lelek et leurs tatouages ont précédemment suscité la controverse en Turquie. Sous la domination ottomane, les adolescentes catholiques des actuelles Croatie et Bosnie-Herzégovine se faisaient ces tatouages pour échapper aux mariages forcés et aux conversions imposées à l’islam qu’elles redoutaient.

Up to 80 percent of incidents that Israeli troops in the West Bank record are Jewish attacks on Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was told on Wednesday, amid an unchecked surge of deadly settler violence that has plunged the West Bank into chaos in recent months.

Are Israeli prisons deploying trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners? According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the answer appears to be yes.
 
In a lengthy column published Monday, Kristof recounts a sordid tale from a source he identifies as a “Gaza journalist.” He writes that on one occasion, the journalist “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.”
 
(...)
 
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.

Avi Bitterman, MD @AviBittMD
 
@NickKristof @Megankstack Hi @NickKristof, I don't understand why you are misrepresenting the medical literature on this topic. No cases of canine rape have ever been confirmed in the medical literature, and the very few cases of rectal injuries that are described are documented as being initiated by https://t.co/xJHvA3uM5V

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.”
 
Then there is Kristof’s reliance on the anonymous journalist for his claim of dog rape. One might expect a journalist who suffered such a gruesome experience to publish an account under his own byline. Kristof claims that many of his sources were anonymous because of the shame associated with sexual violence in the Arab world.

At the same time, many Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters in Gaza have also moonlighted as “journalists.” I wrote about one such example in 2024 when a contributor to the U.S.-based Palestine Chronicle named Abdalla al-Jamal was killed in an IDF raid of his apartment in Gaza that liberated three Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7. In other words, a Gaza correspondent was also detaining Israeli hostages.
 
Salo Aizenberg, an independent analyst and board member of HonestReporting, which tracks anti-Israel bias in the media, says there has been a pattern of terrorists who pose as journalists to the Western media. He bases this claim on the death notices released by Hamas, PIJ, and families of the deceased. He told me that he has found more than 50 examples of individuals who were first identified as journalists upon their deaths only later to be celebrated as fighters by their families and the terrorist groups.
 
“The overwhelming evidence confirms that Hamas and PIJ used press cover as part of their war strategy, both for propaganda and military purposes,” Aizenberg said. “Once terrorist groups repeatedly exploit journalism operationally, media organizations cannot continue treating every jailed ‘journalist’ as automatically credible.”
 
Was Kristof’s “journalist source” an example of a militant using a press affiliation as cover to advance his side in an information war?

Up to 80 percent of incidents that Israeli troops in the West Bank record are Jewish attacks on Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was told on Wednesday, amid an unchecked surge of deadly settler violence that has plunged the West Bank into chaos in recent months.

Le cadre général du projet de loi adopté lundi à la Knesset stipule que toute personne, homme comme femme, "qui cause intentionnellement la mort d'une (autre) dans le but de porter atteinte à un citoyen ou résident israélien, avec l'intention de mettre fin à l'existence de l'Etat d'Israël, sera condamnée à mort ou à la prison à perpétuité". Un condamné devra être exécuté dans un délai de 90 jours après le verdict, délai que le Premier ministre israélien pourra renouveler une fois pour le porter à 180 jours, sans mesure de clémence possible.

Kristof’s column was published the same day as a 300-page study produced by the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, an Israeli NGO established to document the October 7 atrocities.
 
The report, based on 430 formal and informal interviews and more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, detailed 13 types of sexual violence committed by the Hamas-led invaders during the attack and against hostages, including rape, gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, executions linked to sexual violence, postmortem sexual abuse, and sexual assaults carried out in the presence of family members, among other acts.
 
“The scale, coordination, and repetition of the conduct demonstrate a widespread and systematic attack against civilians in which sexual violence was deliberately used as a method of terror,” the report said.