TV News LIES

What’s most shocking about the latest accounts of sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli custody is not just their inherent horror. It is that despite so much evidence being so visible for so long, the machinery of abuse and denial continues to deepen.

Nicholas Kristof’s recent reporting on the issue in the New York Times brought important public attention to the issue. But abuses in Israeli custody have long been reported by former detainees, lawyers, doctors and journalists, and documented by human rights organizations. Since October 2023, this body of evidence has revealed a horrific reality: Israel’s prison system has been transformed into a criminal network of torture camps.

In his reporting, Kristof documented harrowing testimonies from Palestinian men, women and children describing widespread sexual abuse, rape and humiliation by Israeli soldiers, prison guards, settlers and interrogators. Israel’s response to the reporting followed a familiar script: deny the abuse, lash out at those who document it, and protect the system that made it possible. The ministry of foreign affairs dismissed the New York Times piece as “Hamas propaganda” and has gone so far as to declare that Israel will sue the New York Times.

Other officials and commentators reached for the familiar charge of “blood libel”, called for the New York Times to be shut down, and broadly did everything in their power to delegitimize not only the work of Kristof, a world-renowned journalist who has covered sexual abuse in conflicts across the globe, but that of anyone trying to bring this abuse to light.

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Mustafa Badaha drove along the edge of his land, past rows of olive trees he could no longer access. A red string put up by Israeli settlers demarcated the border of what was stolen from him in Deir Ammar, a Palestinian town around 17 kilometers northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. The settlers had recently established a new outpost in the area named Ramataim Zofim.

“Everything is legal—I have permits—but it makes no difference. A settler comes and simply says, ‘This is my land. You have no place here,’” Badaha told Drop Site. For years, he cultivated the land, building a small summer home where his family would gather. “Now, no one can go there—if we try, we are attacked,” he said. “What was once my joy is now my greatest fear.”

Settlers began routinely attacking Palestinians in the area back in August 2025. “They came here armed, created problems with the youth and the families, and even fired live ammunition,” Badaha said. He contacted the Palestinian Authority, who reached out to Israeli authorities. “The attacks kept increasing day after day. At first, the settlers were about 500 meters away, then gradually they kept getting closer until they reached the houses,” he said. “Every day there are provocations. They block the road, and with the youth we reopened it several times. Recently, there was another major attack and they blocked the road again.” After contacting the Israeli police, the Israeli military eventually arrived and detained Palestinians from the community instead of the settlers.

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Raneem Mousa lifts a heavy volume from a shattered shelf inside the centuries-old library of Gaza’s Great Omari Mosque.

With a small brush, she gently sweeps away layers of dust before passing the book to a colleague, who wipes it clean with a soft cloth. 

Together, they carry it to what they call the “safest corner” - a small space reserved for the volumes they have managed to salvage.

It is a painstaking, improvised effort to rescue rare books and manuscripts from a historic collection devastated by Israeli bombardment during the genocide in Gaza.

“The library was filled with shrapnel, rubble, and dung from stray animals taking shelter,” Mousa, 35, told Middle East Eye.

Hundreds of shattered books and torn papers were scattered on the ground, covered in stones.”

A master’s graduate in Arabic language, she is among a group of Palestinian women volunteers from the Eyes on Heritage Institute in Gaza City who have launched what they describe as a “first-aid” mission to preserve what remains.

“We began by removing stones and cleaning the space,” she said.

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An Alabama woman has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that her civil rights and those of her infant daughter were violated after jail staff where she was incarcerated allegedly left her to labor alone for more than a day.

Tiffany McElroy, now 28, was booked into an Alabama jail in May 2024. Three days after arriving, she said she felt her water break weeks before she was expected to give birth.

McElroy, who was being held on charges stemming from an allegation of substance use during pregnancy, later discovered she had suffered a pregnancy complication that could have progressed into sepsis. According to the lawsuit, she informed a guard that her water had broken and believed she would be taken to a hospital for treatment.

Instead, the complaint states that another guard who checked on her later that morning accused her of wetting herself and instructed her to return to her cell. The lawsuit says that over the following 24 hours, McElroy repeatedly asked jail employees to call 911, but they never did – even as other inmates pounded on cell windows and tables while pleading for assistance.

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Mounted by dogs, penetrated by carrots, and rectums torn by batons. 

These are just some of the harrowing testimonies of the rape of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, detailed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in a landmark piece published on Monday.

None of it is new.

Middle East Eye revealed similar testimonies last month, from a report titled “Sexual violence and forcible transfer in the West Bank: How the exploitation of gender dynamics drives displacement,” by the West Bank Protection Consortium.

The group documented at least 16 cases involving sexual crimes perpetrated by Israeli settlers and soldiers.

And in March, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, said in her report to the UN Human Rights Council that "the Israeli prison system has degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty" with acts that include rape of Palestinians with bottles, metal rods and knives.

But for a corporate media giant like the NYT, which has often overlooked and doubted Palestinian narratives, such storytelling is novel, and the Israeli government immediately slammed the decision to run it.

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Pointing to the corner where he once shared tea with his mother, Fakhri Abu Diab stands amid the ruins of his demolished home in anguish.

“I remember as a child going out with my mother to tend the land, then coming back to this spot to share a cup of tea,” the Palestinian father of five said, gesturing towards the shattered remains of what was once his family home.

Located in occupied East Jerusalem's al-Bustan neighbourhood, the house was demolished by Israeli authorities in 2024.

It was one of dozens of Palestinian homes razed in the area south of Al-Aqsa Mosque as part of plans to expand Israeli settler projects and biblical-themed parks. 

“They demolished my childhood, my memories, and even the scent of my mother,” Abu Diab, a long-time anti-occupation activist, told Middle East Eye.

Al-Bustan is one of the three main sections of Silwan, a Palestinian district bordering the southern walls of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.

For decades, Silwan and other Palestinian neighbourhoods surrounding the Old City have been at the centre of Israeli demolition campaigns and displacement efforts.

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