Kristof defended the allegation under questioning at Harvard, even as an audience member challenged his reasoning and sourcing.
During an event at Harvard University last week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof defended his widely-debunked claims that Israeli forces use trained dogs to rape Palestinians, claiming in part that the reporting is solid because he heard the allegations from several different human rights groups that had not communicated with each other.
During the Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy last week, moderator Ned Price asked Kristof about his explosive May report about Israel’s alleged use of sexual violence against prisoners as “organized state policy.” The piece makes several grave claims about conditions in Israeli prisons, including about the alleged use of trained dogs to rape prisoners.
Price gave Kristof the opportunity to respond to questions about the integrity of the sourcing in the reported opinion column, which relies predominantly on claims from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and several individuals with checkered backgrounds.
Price noted much of the “fiercest criticism” of the piece centered on Kristof’s claim that Israeli forces were using dogs to rape detainees, a claim that critics have noted is attributed to Euro-Med, which the Israeli government has previously contended is a front organization for Hamas. The leader of Euro-Med has said that the Israeli treatment of Gazans could justify “a million October 7ths.”
Asked if the claim withstands scrutiny without Euro-Med’s account, and if he has any regrets about relying on an organization like Euro-Med for the sensitive allegation, Kristof argued that he “did not rely on Euro-Med” for that detail.
He said the alleged dog rape was brought to his attention by a prisoner from Gaza who claimed to have been subjected to the treatment.
“And so then I called around among human rights organizations who were interviewing Palestinians and they had heard this as well,” he said, adding that he then looked into “medical literature” exploring the possibility and found that dogs had been used to rape prisoners in World War II by Klaus Barbie, a German SS and Gestapo officer, and others, and again in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship.
He suggested he should have delved into the topic more in the report, given that it was covered in just several paragraphs of his 3,000 word piece but that it ultimately “became a vehicle to push back on the whole piece.”
Later in the event, an audience member pushed back on Kristof’s assertion that the claim had weight because it was brought up by several didn’t human rights organizations without the organizations communicating with each other.
“People in human rights organizations don’t talk to each other?” the audience member asked.
“Oh, they certainly talk to each other, yes,” he acknowledged.
She also asked if Kristof knows how many people have been raped by dogs, and he said he was not sure.
The bias of Euro-Med, where the claim seems to have originated, is obvious. It has “documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel,” according to HonestReporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog.
Those unfounded accusations include that Israel was stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians, that Israeli soldiers were executing patients in cold blood at al-Shifa Hospital, and, perhaps most notably, that Israeli forces have trained dogs to rape prisoners.
While Euro-Med first published the claim about dogs in 2024, the group issued a new report in April containing new detainee testimony making the same allegation, through the same unverified methodology, as Eli Kowaz writes in his own criticism of the Kristof piece.
And canine behavior expert Michael S. Gould previously told National Review that the suggestion that dogs could be trained to rape prisoners is “absurd.”
“I’ve trained dogs to do a lot of things in my life. But no, that’s absurd,” said Gould, who began working with dogs in 1982 as one of the first members of the New York City Police Department’s Canine Unit and later went on to become a canine forensics expert and consultant. “It’s absurd for many reasons: the sexual instincts of dogs, their anatomy, the actual physical concept of it.”
“Could you train a dog to bite someone in their genitals? Of course you can,” he said, but added that dogs “don’t stand erect,” and don’t have the instincts or trainability to rape a person, never mind on command.
The dog rape claim first picked up steam after it was amplified by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim. The former academic and Zionist-turned-“whistleblower,” who has recently trafficked in anti-Israel conspiracy theories, left UCLA in 2020 after multiple sexual‑harassment allegations, including one involving a minor.
His claims were later picked up by the Electronic Intifada, Owen Jones, and Novara Media. But what the media outlets failed to mention is that Ben-Ephraim has himself acknowledged the dog rape claims were “not verified.”