HonestReporting’s timely thread on X (formerly known as Twitter) has now been seen by over a million people and has become the source material for much of the online content that subsequently ripped apart Nicholas Kristof’s appalling piece in the New York Times that accused Israel of systemic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners and the obscene charge of dog rape.
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The @nytimes just published one of the most serious sets of allegations imaginable against Israel – claims of systematic sexual violence, including a bizarre story about carrots and trained rape dogs. We checked the sources.What we found is journalistic malpractice. ? pic.twitter.com/vBbLy0Lp0J
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 11, 2026
The thread was liked, quoted, or reposted by numerous influential people on X, including:
Daily Wire editor-in-chief Brent Scher, sports broadcaster Emily Austin, entrepreneur and Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, businessman and philanthropist Bill Ackman, Fox News political analyst Guy Benson, commentator Ryan Saavedra, war scholar John Spencer, former basketball coach Bruce Pearl, rockstar David Draiman, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, UK TV personality Rachel Riley, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, financier and environmentalist Ben Goldsmith, and many more.
HonestReporting Published in Wall St. Journal
HonestReporting also featured in several prominent media outlets, including an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by our very own Rachel O’Donoghue, marking a high point of recognition for the organization’s work by one of America’s most distinguished newspapers.
From @WSJFreeEx: Nicholas Kristof has published a poorly sourced, fantastical tale of torture and dog rape in Israel, writes @rachelodonoghue https://t.co/kyI11wSfMT
— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) May 13, 2026
A little‑known Geneva‑based NGO called Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor published a report in June 2024 alleging that the Israeli military was using dogs to attack Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including to “sexually assault prisoners and detainees in Israeli detention facilities.” Quoting testimony attributed to Palestinian detainees, Euro‑Med claimed that the dogs, equipped with “surveillance cameras” strapped to their backs, were “let loose” on prisoners, torturing them “systematically and sometimes collectively.”
Euro‑Med’s report received no attention from mainstream outlets when it was released, and for good reason. Israel has linked the group’s leadership to Hamas. Euro-Med has a documented record of promoting wild allegations against Israel, including claims of organ harvesting of Palestinian detainees, mass executions in hospitals, and denials of well‑established Hamas activity at Gaza’s Al‑Shifa hospital. This week, Euro-Med’s far‑fetched allegations found their way into a New York Times opinion piece penned by Nicholas Kristof.
Read the full piece here.
And in the National Review
Rachel O’Donoghue was also published in the National Review.
How long will it be before the New York Times issues some kind of correction or retraction of Nicholas Kristof’s column that alleges that Israel systematically sexually abuses Palestinians, including with trained “rape dogs”?
When the Gray Lady splashed the photograph of a supposedly “starving” child on its front page to accuse Israel of orchestrating a “famine” in Gaza — a child who was later revealed to be suffering from a preexisting medical condition, whereas his healthy sibling was conveniently cropped out of the photo — it took five days for a quiet editors’ note to appear online. That episode was embarrassing. This one is worse.
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How long can the New York Times pretend that this will simply blow over? This is about not just one columnist or column. It is about standards. Sensational claims that collapse under scrutiny do not merely damage the Times’ credibility. They trivialize real instances of sexual violence and undermine the credibility of real victims.
The longer the paper avoids confronting what went wrong, the more that damage compounds. At some point, even the New York Times will have to decide whether it can continue hiding behind “opinion journalism.”
Read the full piece here.
Media Cites HR as Pressure Grows on New York Times
Other notable media outlets cited HonestReporting’s work, including:
Nick Kristof’s ‘Dog Torture’ Claim About Israel Doesn’t Pass Muster, Eli Lake, The Free Press, May 12, 2026
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?
Israel Foreign Ministry condemns New York Times piece as ‘one of the worst blood libels’ in modern press, Fox News, May 12, 2026
Pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting called the piece “journalistic malpractice” and sharply criticized his reliance on “freelance journalist” Sami al-Sai as a source.
‘Blood libel’: Israel rejects NYT column alleging widespread rape of Palestinian inmates, The Times of Israel, May 12, 2026
In a series of posts on X, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting challenged Kristof’s journalism, noting that the most explosive accounts came from unnamed sources, while the stories of those named had grown “steadily more lurid over time, with dramatic new details added years later.”
The watchdog noted that Sami al-Sai had taken to social media on October 8, 2023, to praise the Hamas onslaught one day after it occurred, and that he’d eulogized the leader of a West Bank terror cell as “our martyred prince.”
It also noted that about a year ago Sai spoke to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about his alleged assault, but did not mention several specific, graphic details that he provided to Kristof, including being sodomized with a carrot, having his genitals grabbed by a female guard, and discovering “other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth” in his skin.
It also pointed out that Issa Amro, who’d told Kristof in 2024 that he’d been assaulted on the day of the Hamas attack, had earlier told The Washington Post he’d been “threatened with sexual assault” on that day, not that he’d been assaulted.
Journalism Succumbs To Its Wounds, Seth Mandel, Commentary Magazine, May 11, 2026
But then we get to another aspect of the same set-piece scandal. In March, Salo Aizenberg, a board member at HonestReporting and among the most meticulous researchers on the conflict, wrote an article about 10 Gaza “journalists” who turned out to be combatants from Hamas and other local terrorist groups. Aizenberg noted that there were 35 such cases so far, and that independent analysis has found that “60% of those described as ‘journalists’ or ‘media personnel’ had documented ties to militant organizations.” In other words, the majority.
When It Comes to Israel, The New York Times Can’t Help Itself, David Suissa, Jewish Journal, May 12, 2026
But according to HonestReporting, an indispensable media watchdog, Euro-Med’s bias is obvious — it has “documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel.”
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One of the central sources cited in the article is Sami al-Sai. Yet as HonestReporting notes, “the Times failed to inform readers about al-Sai’s documented history of glorifying terrorists and celebrating armed attacks against Israelis.”
Al Jazeera Attacks HonestReporting
We clearly rattled some cages. So much so that Al Jazeera’s “The Listening Post” attacked HonestReporting in a laughable hit piece:
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This is a laughable hit piece. ?While we’re happy to see Al Jazeera paying attention to our insights, we aren’t surprised that the Qatari propaganda outfit resorts to an ad hominem attack rather than addressing the substantive arguments.
But @rgizbert1 clearly hasn’t been… https://t.co/79mm6MVFrr
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 13, 2026
This story isn’t over. There’s more media coverage to come as HonestReporting’s analysis and critique of Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times continues to make waves.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
