Nicholas Kristof is one of America’s top journalists. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has spent much of his career reporting on human rights abuses, poverty, war, and social injustice around the world.

Kristof grew up in an Oregon town, 35 miles southwest of Portland. His mother and father were both university professors. After gaining a B.A. from Harvard in only three years, Kristof was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he earned a Master of Arts and a law degree. Over the years, the writer has also received numerous honorary degrees and journalism awards for reporting that often focuses on vulnerable and marginalized people.

Recently, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Kristof titled ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.’ The predictable outrage has been substantial. War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu called Kristof’s piece “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press.“

Israel’s accomplices and apologists claim that Krisof’s reporting cannot be true. Netanyahu promised that Israel will sue for defamation, even if it is unclear how a lawsuit against the US newspaper could be pursued.

For those who do not subscribe to the New York Times, here are excerpts of Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 column:

It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.

Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023…

And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me 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.

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.

(Editor’s note: Kristof offers graphic descriptions of beatings and sexual torture alleged by a Palestinian journalist who was detained by Israeli security forces in 2024.)

…Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.

I became interested in reporting on sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners after Issa Amro, a nonviolent activist sometimes called the Palestinian Gandhi, told me when I previously visited that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame…

It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them…

Israel’s Ministry of National Security declined to comment for this article. The prison service “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse, said a spokesman who declined to be named…

“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”

…One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military approved the soldiers’ return to duty.

…If the Trump administration insisted on a resumption of Red Cross visits to prisoners, if the U.S. ambassador visited rape survivors with cameras in tow, if we conditioned arms transfers on an end to sexual assault, we could send a moral and practical message that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter the identity of the victim. For starters, the ambassador could ensure that those Palestinians who dared to speak for this article are not brutalized again for their courage.

How does this kind of violence happen? Decades of covering conflict have taught me that a combination of dehumanization and impunity can propel people into a Hobbesian state of nature. I’ve encountered this drift toward savagery in killing fields from Congo to Sudan to Myanmar, and I think it also roughly explains how American soldiers came to sexually abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, called detainees “scum” and “Nazis” and boasted of making prison conditions harsher for Palestinians. When such attitudes prevail, sexual abuse can become one more tool to inflict pain and humiliation on Palestinians…

…Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused…

“Sexualized violence is used to pressure communities” to leave their land, according to a new report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of international aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council…

Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to and they were reluctant to speak…

The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike…