New York Times confirms Israel using dogs to rape

Palestinian testimonies should have been enough

Last month, I reported on the numerous testimonies from Palestinians who say the Israeli state used dogs to rape detainees.

Mainstream media outlets have overwhelmingly failed to report on this - just as they have largely ignored Israel’s industrialised use of sexual violence against Palestinians more broadly.

That has now changed, at least in part. The New York Times has published a piece by Nicholas Kristof, a twice Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs commentator who represents as establishment a voice as it is possible to find in American journalism.

Based on the testimonies of 14 Palestinians, it’s headlined ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians’.

It is, of course, welcome that this has finally appeared in a mainstream publication - even if it is a newspaper which has done so much to whitewash Israel’s genocide.

But there has already been an avalanche of testimony and evidence about the systematic use of sexual violence by Israel throughout the genocide - and indeed long before October 2023. It has taken all this time for such allegations to appear in the New York Times at all. And even now, they are not on the front page, but tucked away in the opinion section.

The article concerns the use of sexual violence by the United States’ key ally in the Middle East: a state armed to the teeth by Washington and given more US military aid than any other country on Earth. It plainly deserves vastly greater prominence. That it does not receive it tells you, yet again, everything about the value attached to Palestinian lives, wellbeing and suffering.

The piece notes that Israel has, in recent years, “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.”

It cites testimonies from Palestinians who say they were raped with rubber batons, metal rods and other objects, including carrots. They describe extreme pain, bleeding and fainting..

Others recount different forms of sexual abuse. One testimony describes a female guard squeezing a detainee’s penis and testicles until he screamed in agony.

They quote from the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor:

a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

The piece also documents the sexual abuse of children.

And it includes testimony about the use of dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. One Palestinian recalled:

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.”

“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

This builds on other such testimonies which I previously reported on.

The publication of the article has triggered a firestorm. Israel’s Foreign Ministry described it as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”

As Mahmoud Khalil - the Algerian-Palestinian activist detained by ICE in the US, facing deportation for his anti-genocide activism - says:

Everything is a blood libel. The ICJ ruling, a libel. The ICC warrants, a libel. The UN reports, libel. Amnesty, HRW, B’Tselem, libel. Survivors’ testimony, libel. Your own soldiers charged at Sde Teiman, a libel. Chants at protests, libel.

The only entity on Earth that never lies, apparently, is the one currently on trial for genocide.

Indeed, the repeated invocation of the term “blood libel” is absurd.

“Blood libel” has a specific historical meaning: the medieval antisemitic myth that Jewish people murdered Christian children for use in religious rituals. There is no evidence that this ever happened. It was a murderous fiction used to justify persecution.

But nobody disputes that Israel, a heavily militarised state, deploys violence on a mass scale, or that it has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza alone. Even Israel’s defenders do not deny that. To be absolutely clear: medieval Jews were not murdering children in ritual sacrifice. Israel, a state armed with one of the world’s most advanced militaries, has objectively killed vast numbers of people.

Yet “blood libel” is now routinely deployed to smear anyone who speaks out about Israel’s crimes as antisemitic. Netanyahu has even used the term against political opponents inside Israel itself - including figures who fully supported the genocidal onslaught against Gaza.

Pro-Israel apologists are now flooding social media insisting that testimonies about dogs being used to rape Palestinians must be false because such acts are supposedly biologically impossible.

That is simply untrue.

There are Holocaust testimonies describing how the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie trained dogs to rape women.

In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, a German shepherd dog named Volodia was trained to rape prisoners by Ingrid Olderock, a Chilean-German torture official known as “The Dog Lady”.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright has also written about evidence that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak regime trained dogs to rape detainees.

There is already overwhelming evidence that Israel uses dogs to attack Palestinians. The Israeli army itself accepted responsibility in the case of Muhammad Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome who died after being attacked by an Israeli military dog.

There are, in addition, extensive testimonies from Palestinian detainees describing attacks by Israeli dogs.

We also know about the case of a Palestinian detainee allegedly gang raped by Israeli soldiers on camera - an incident that triggered pro-rape riots in support of the accused soldiers, attended by Israeli politicians. Reports at the time said footage was leaked by a senior Israeli military lawyer, who later resigned and reportedly attempted suicide.

All charges were dropped against the soldiers. They were transformed into national heroes. Netanyahu referred to them as “heroic warriors”.

It is also worth noting that the New York Times piece quotes Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009 and a longtime former member of Netanyahu’s Likud party:

“Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.”

There is now overwhelming evidence that the Israeli state is systematically using sexual violence against Palestinians.

The silence surrounding these crimes once again underlines the extent to which Israel’s actions are whitewashed - and the extent to which Palestinian suffering is treated as though it simply does not matter.