Beyond Kristof’s New York Times Column, a Strategy to Compare the Uncomparable
Last week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an opinion essay alleging widespread and lurid sexual violence against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.
‘’The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians’’ immediately sparked worldwide outrage, with critiques ranging from Israeli officials -including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who alleged his views were misrepresented by Kristof,- to activists and editorial boards.
Penned by the longtime NYT columnist and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the author is yet no stranger to publicly apologizing for prior articles after relying on untrustworthy sources.
While the NYT defended the Op-Ed and its vetting process, the Israeli Premier announced plans to sue both the paper and the author for defamation, for what the Israeli Foreign Ministry labeled « one of the worst blood libels to appear in modern press. »
Critics have primarily challenged the most egregious allegations, including claims that Israeli police dogs are trained to sexually assault prisoners, as well as Kristof’s unreliable sources that include a virulent anti-Israel thinkthank whose leadership was previously flagged by Israel for its close links to Hamas.
But beyond the sensational claims and disputed sourcing, the column appears specifically engineered to place Israel and Hamas on the same moral plane regarding sexual violence.
Another curious aspect of Kristof’s essay is its timing, as it was issued just one day prior to the release of « Silenced No More, » the most comprehensive report addressing the sexual and gender-based violence carried out by Hamas and its cohorts on October 7.
Conducted by The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, an independent group based in Israel, the 300 page-long report collected over 400 testimonies and analyzed forensic reports and thousands of video and photographic evidence.
The report’s conclusion was unequivocal: the October 7 sexual and gender-based violence – some of which continued throughout the hostages’ captivity – was embedded within Hamas’s October 7 attack plans as a deliberate weapon of terror deployed to maximize physical pain and psychological devastation.
The report lists and details recurring patterns of rape, gang rape, sexual and bodily mutilation, and postmortem abuse across multiple attack sites that day. It also introduced a new phrase into the lexicon of terror, coined to describe Hamas’s crimes: « kinocidal sexual and gender-based acts » describing acts intended to torture and destroy the family unit. This kinocidal violence encompasses the reported cases of « family members being sexually assaulted or humiliated in each other’s presence, » and the one case in which « family members were coerced into performing sexual acts on one another. »
Perusing the report is excruciating. The examples of catalogued cruelty, such as the findings of metal cans, nails or knives inserted in women’s genitals, or various bodily mutilations, are unfathomable. One witness testimony described an attacker carving off a victim’s breast from a living woman; the severed part was tossed aside and played with by other executioners. This same woman was gang raped and murdered while being raped.
The report confirmed that Hamas’s goals and strategy relied on the widespread and deliberate filming and dissemination of their crimes. Notes attributed to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and the October 7 mastermind, instructed operatives « to document and broadcast the images as quickly as possible: stepping on the heads of soldiers, point-blank shootings, slaughtering people with knives […] Events must be planned from which horrifying images will emerge. »
Other documents recovered from Hamas’s attackers attest to the planned sexual violence campaign, with language instructions in Hebrew (transliterated in Arabic) to say: « Take off your pants, » « Take your clothes off » or « Lie down,» pointing once more to the deliberate weaponization of sexual violence of October 7.
This context matters because Kristof’s column repeatedly invokes and seems to borrow from language and conclusions similar (in terms of scale and intent for example) to those associated with reporting on Hamas’ October 7 crimes. Even the title’s reference to « silence » appears strikingly similar to that of the Israeli report « Silenced No More. »
Kristof’s implication is quite obvious: Israel is perpetrating abuses comparable to those committed by Hamas. While the author concedes that « there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes, » he nonetheless structures his argument to infer that very conclusion.
If Kristof’s piece was timed to shift the discussion away from Hamas’s documented atrocities to his alleged claims of rape by Israel – it partly succeeded. The NYT’s preemptive publication of Kristof’s allegations served as a strategic distraction, preoccupying public attention and coverage focused on verifying or refuting the author’s claims.
Kristof’s piece is transparent in its insidious and cloying intent: to put Hamas’s self-recorded (scores of perpetrators filmed their crimes live on GoPro cameras) and well-documented sexual violence on equal footing with an unsubstantiated widespread Israeli campaign of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners.
Israeli abuse in prisons, including violence, food deprivation or degrading conditions affecting Palestinian detainees should not be ignored. Wrongdoings and unlawful behavior of this nature have been documented and routinely addressed in Israel by human rights’ groups and officials. In 2024, the Israeli Justice Ministry’s Public Defender’s Office visited some state’s detention facilities to address those concerns. Kristof might have chosen to write about this topic then or even since, but he did not.
He similarly omitted the recent reports of Palestinian women who were sexually abused and exploited by Hamas members -a topic covered by The Daily Mail, but largely ignored by major Western outlets, including the NYT.
This asymmetry highlights a general tendency by major media institutions to report on and promote stories about Palestinian suffering if Israel is or can be cast as the perpetrator. News reporting about the conflict is no longer a goal in and of itself, so much as a one-sided endorsement of events.
Kristof concludes his essay by asserting that « The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.»
That very sentence encapsulates the problem at his column’s core: Kristof’s writing attempts to strong arm the reader into viewing Hamas’s self-recorded atrocities and Israel’s alleged sexual violence as interchangeable factual sets. They are not.
Kristof is comparing the uncomparable: the well-documented crimes and celebrations of October 7 by a terror group to allegations of prison abuse by a democratic state, relying on anonymous testimony and dubious sources.
But attempting to draw a moral equivalence between the October 7 crimes to claims of sexual abuse in detention as an organized state policy is not only analytically flawed, it is morally unacceptable. It emphasizes one of two things (that are not mutually exclusive): the author’s blatant ignorance regarding the scale and nature of the atrocities perpetrated on October 7, or sheer intellectual dishonesty and subpar journalism (a genre at which the NYT appears to excel when reporting on Israel.)
Indulging for a moment in Kristof’s fallacious comparison, the only logical conclusion and apparent goal of this article is that if Hamas and Israel are equal in their brutality and disregard for human life, then Israel is no better than the terrorist organization. It should be treated as such, blacklisted, boycotted and ultimately excluded from the international community.
Unable to dispute the overwhelming evidence of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, the Times’ journalist embraced a different approach: advancing allegations against Israel that blur the moral distinction between victim and perpetrator, even at the expense of rigorous and objective reporting.
One is only left to ponder the motives of the author and those of a paper that chose to validate and publish a piece seeking to give credence to unsubstantiated claims of the worst kind.
