Prominent New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff says Palestinians have recounted to him 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.”
Kristoff asked in his column on Monday: “What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.
“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.
“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”
Al-Sai was blindfolded, he said, and heard someone say in Hebrew, which he understands, “don’t take photos”. That suggested to him that someone had pulled out a camera. One of the guards was a woman who, he said, grabbed him by the penis and testicles, and joked, “these are mine,” and then squeezed until he screamed from pain.
The guards left him handcuffed on the ground, and he smelled cigarette smoke. “I realised it was their smoking break,” he said.
Kristoff said Al-Sai was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.
Kristoff recounted in his column: “Al-Sai said that he had been asked to become an informant for Israeli intelligence, and he believes that the purpose of his arrest and imprisonment under the administrative detention system was to pressure him to agree. Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused.
“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,” Kristoff said.
Kristoff said by one count, Israel had detained 20 000 people in the West Bank alone since the October 7 attacks, and more than 9 000 Palestinians were still being held. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.