In his latest New York Times op-ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof offered a litany of horrific testimonies about life in Israeli prisons. He quoted from Palestinian detainees claiming systematic rape, object insertion, forced nudity, and even the use of dogs trained to sexually assault prisoners.
The Israeli Prison Service has a reputation for incompetence. There have been cases of abuse, even famous cases of prisoners abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face huge numbers of abuse claims. Prisons are not nice places, wherever they are in the world.
So mistreatment of prisoners by Israeli guards isn’t merely possible, it’s almost certain, as in any prison system anywhere in the world. And conditions were especially problematic in recent years. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of Palestinian detainees into the prisons, together with undertrained reservist guards in the early months—guards who had seen Hamas’s videos gleefully documenting massacres that the new prisoners had committed.
I expected, therefore, to find in Kristof’s column a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must respond to and that even Israel’s friends would recognize as a problem in need of a solution.
