Nicholas Kristof’s 11 May New York Times column (“The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians”) and its accompanying video demonstrate the halo effect that protects many non-governmental organisations from the scrutiny they deserve. In addition to the testimony provided by security prisoners (suspected or convicted terrorists) released from Israeli prisons, Kristof’s essay relies upon quotes from unverifiable NGO reports or statements, and from a United Nations committee that recycles the accusations those statements and reports contain.

The NGO at the centre of Kristof’s essay calls itself the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med or EMHRM), which Kristof blandly describes as “often critical of Israel.” Registered in Switzerland in 2015, this Palestinian NGO has a mailing address in Geneva and an unknown number of staffers paid with funds from undisclosed donors. The publication of a 69-page Euro-Med report on 12 April was the source of Kristof’s accusation that Israel “employs systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.” The report was accompanied by an extensive public-relations campaign, which included promotion in Turkish-government-controlled news platform TRT, Qatar-linked propaganda platform Middle East Eye, and many other outlets that routinely promote invented or tendentious stories about Israel.

The April Euro-Med report was also the source of the most sensational allegation in Kristof’s essay—that Israel trains police dogs to “rape prisoners and detainees.” Anti-Zionist influencers and officials seized on this charge and were already energetically circulating it before Kristof’s essay appeared last week. During an 18 April interview with Indian national newspaper The Hindu, the UN’s special rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese—a serial repeater of antisemitic statements who has been sanctioned by the US government—declared that Palestinian detainees had been “raped ... including with trained dogs.” On X, DropSiteNews, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, and Israeli ex-pat Shaiel Ben-Ephraim repeated this claim and were rewarded with thousands of likes, shares, and hundreds of thousands of impressions.

Ben-Ephraim’s tweet has been viewed over two million times alone, and his status as a former Israeli and repentant Zionist provided Euro-Med’s accusations with a veneer of pseudo-authority. He was duly invited to repeat them on Piers Morgan’s show. His X post was included in Kristof’s May 2026 video and hyperlinked from his Times essay.

Links to Kristof’s column and related allegations began to appear in a number of Wikipedia entries almost at once (possibly placed by graduates of Euro-Med’s “WikiRights” project, which trains anti-Israel propagandists to become anonymous Wikipedia editors). With these successes, Euro-Med achieved its fundamental objectives of demonising Israel and marginalising discussion of the atrocities committed by Hamas in October 2023, extensive details of which were published in the Israeli Civil Commission report the day after Kristof’s essay appeared.

Euro-Med’s Hamas Links

Creating NGOs that misuse the language of human rights and other worthy principles is a very effective strategy for advancing terrorist goals. Individuals associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—which is designated as a terrorist group by the US, EU, Canada, Germany, and elsewhere—are in charge of a network of NGOs, including Al Haq (Law in the Service of Man), the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights. These organisations may sound like they are concerned with human welfare, but they are actually just vehicles for waging political warfare against Israel with libellous accusations of genocide, starvation, and rape packaged in slick research reports. Credulous Western journalists like Kristof take these claims at face value and rarely bother to examine the details.

Euro-Med adopted this model, and Israel has long considered the NGO to be a Hamas propaganda front. In 2012, the organisation’s founder and chairman Ramy Abdu was photographed posing with the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (killed by Israel in Tehran in July 2024). And at a 2013 event he organised in Gaza (“Hamas Movement Within the International Context”), Abdu was pictured next to Hamas’s international-relations officer Osama Hamdan. Abdu also created and led a series of propaganda frameworks, including the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza and the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR). In 2013, Israel’s Ministry of Justice listed Abdu as one of Hamas’s “main operatives and institutions” in Europe. In November 2020, the Minister of Defence sanctioned him “in relation to his work with the designated terrorist organization ‘IPalestine—International Platform of NGOs Working for Palestine (aka ‘IPNGO’)’ that belongs to and acts on behalf of the designated terrorist organisation HAMAS.”

A number of Abdu’s family members have also been identified as Hamas terrorists. His brother Mohammed Saleh Ismail Abdu is wanted by Italian authorities for his role in a Turkish financial network that funnels donations to Hamas. Last December, Italian daily Il Giornale reported that, on 15 February 2025, Abdu had expressed his desire “to transfer the Caliphate to the Gaza Strip.” In March 2025, Abdu paid tribute to his brother-in-law Muhammad Daoud Ismail al-Jamassi after the senior Hamas leader was killed by the IDF:

Another important figure at Euro-Med is Muhammad Shehada, the organisation’s chief of programmes and communications, who posted a picture of himself with Ismail Haniyeh in November 2014 under the caption: “Talking a gently walk and a selfi with the ex-Prime Minister of#Gaza and the leader of #Hamas: #Ismail_Haniya.” Between February 2021 and August 2023, Shehada wrote twenty articles for Newsweek (which still describes him as a “writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip”), and from July 2017 to January 2024, he was a regular contributor to the Israeli left-wing newspaper, Haaretz. In addition to which, he has been quoted by the Washington Post and the New York Times, invited to address a Harvard human-rights centre (in February 2025), and been appointed as a visiting fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations think tank.

Notwithstanding the esteem in which he is held by parts of the Western press and some Western institutions, Shehada’s social-media feed is a steady flow of Hamas propaganda, including denial of the 7 October atrocities, promotion of frivolous claims of sexual assault against the IDF, and allegations that Israel is “weaponising” the kidnapping and murder of Israeli women and children (specifically Shiri Bibas and her two sons, Ariel and Kfir Bibas). Unsurprisingly, a number of Shehada’s accusations against Israel have turned out to be false.

Richard Falk—a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and professor of international law at Princeton University—is chairman of Euro-Med’s Board of Trustees. In 2011, when Falk was serving as the Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on Palestine (the position now held by Francesca Albanese), his crankery became so egregious that it was even condemned by the office of then-UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. That same year, Falk published a cartoon on his personal blog that depicted an American dog in a kippa urinating on lady justice while it feasts on the skeletal remains of a small human corpse.

Euro-Med’s 2024 Dog-Rape Campaign

In June 2024, two years before Euro-Med’s sexual-violence report came to the attention of Nicholas Kristof, the organisation posted and promoted an article headlined “Gaza: Israeli army systematically uses police dogs to brutally attack Palestinian civilians, with at least one reported rape.” The main allegation, then as now, was that male Palestinian prisoners and terrorist suspects were subject to “systematic sexual violence,” including one instance involving a dog. In keeping with a long-established Palestinian practice, these allegations accuse Israel of doing what its opponents have actually done. The accusations of sexual misconduct are an inversion of the widespread rape and sexual violence perpetrated by Gazans during the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023.

Debunking Kristof’s Claims of Systematic Israeli Sexual Violence

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In this context, the chronology of events related to Euro-Med’s promotion of this story bears examination. On 19 June 2024, Dr. Muneer Al Barash, director general of the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, was interviewed in Arabic by Al Jazeera. According to an unofficial English translation posted on X, Al Barash referred to “trained dogs used to perform vile [sexual] acts on detainees.” Eight days later, the Euro-Med story quoted Fadi Bakr, a Palestinian lawyer arrested after the 7 October atrocities, as the sole witness to the allegation of dog rape. “Throughout the entire ordeal I endured,” he told the NGO, “this was among the most awful things that I witnessed.” But four days earlier, Bakr had given an interview to the radical Israeli opposition NGO B'Tselem and made no mention of this incident, even though he detailed many other aspects of his ordeal. Bakr’s testimony is not included in Euro-Med’s April 2026 report either.

On 24 June 2024, French MEP Rima Hassan posted a clip from an interview with Bakr on X, in which he reiterated his allegation of sexual molestation by dogs. “Israel,” Hassan announced in the accompanying tweet (translated from French original), “has dogs trained to rape Palestinians in detention centres.” Her post received over 900,000 views. That March, she had spoken at a Euro-Med event at the UN Human Rights Council, alongside Francesca Albanese and Muhammad Shehada. Then, in October 2024, Al Jazeera published an article titled “What Did Al Jazeera’s Investigation into Israeli War Crimes in Gaza Reveal?,” in which Fadi Bakr’s testimony that he “saw guards using a dog to rape a young male inmate” was repeated.

In the months that followed, Euro-Med continued to promote this accusation wherever it could. In March 2025, the UN’s permanent and transparently biased Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory published a 49-page propaganda document headlined “‘More than a Human Can Bear’: Israel’s Systematic Use of Sexual, Reproductive and Other Forms of Gender-Based Violence Since 7 October 2023,” which recycled Euro-Med’s claims that Israel “systematically” subjected Palestinians to “sexualised torture” with at least “implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.” In December 2025, the BBC ran an article recycling the allegation that police dogs in Israel were “coached to rape prisoners,” without seeking independent verification of these orchestrated but outlandish accusations.

All of which set the stage for the second report launched by Euro-Med in April 2026, which repeated and expanded upon the 2024 version, and ended up on the front page of the New York Times. Meanwhile, Ramy Abdu, Muhammad Shehada, and other Euro-Med staffers were participating in a wider Hamas-led effort to downplay or deny outright the actual Palestinian sexual atrocities committed on 7 October 2023. Indeed, this appears to have been the primary objective behind the revival of Euro-Med’s two-year-old dog-rape and sexual-violence campaign.

On 12 May 2026, an Israeli non-governmental framework known as the Civil Commission issued a report based on 10,000 photos and videos, 1,800 hours of video footage (most of which was streamed by the Hamas attackers on 7 October to boast of their achievements), and 430 testimonies from victims and eyewitnesses. The report painstakingly documents the sexual and gender-based crimes committed during the massacre, demonstrating that these were “systematic, widespread, and a key, calculated component of the brutal terror assault.” On the day the Civil Commission’s report was released, the Daily Mail published an article about its contents and promoted it on X with the words: “Full depravity of Hamas during October 7 revealed for the first time: New report details how terrorists performed almost unimaginable horrors upon Israeli families.” Ramy Abdu responded: “If you want an example of a shallow and worthless report—this is it. Not a single solid piece of information or credible testimony to build on.”

Organ Harvesting and Blood-Drinking 

Euro-Med’s dog-rape allegations and the wider claims of sexual violence are the most recent in a series of demonisation efforts engineered to elicit revulsion at alleged Israeli behaviour. In November 2023, the NGO published an article in which it alleged:

The Israeli army has been holding the bodies of dozens of Palestinians killed during its genocide in the Gaza Strip beginning on 7 October, and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has called for the creation of an independent international investigation committee into organ theft suspicions.

As in the case of sexual violence, the NGO’s statement was paralleled by stories on Al Jazeera and high-profile social-media posts, including from the American-Palestinian model Gigi Hadid (74 million followers), who shared a video on Instagram (subsequently deleted) in which she claimed that Israel had been harvesting organs from deceased Palestinians without their families’ consent. Euro-Med and Abdu did not invent the organ-theft canard—it dates back at least as far as August 2009, when it appeared in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet—but they have done their best to resurrect it.

Shortly after the Euro-Med post appeared, Al Jazeera (French) ran a segment with a comedian who calls himself “Abdel en Vrai,” in which he repeated the claims: “According to the human rights NGO Euro-Med, the Israeli army is stealing corpses of Palestinians from hospitals they had bombed! And the crazy part is, when corpses were handed over to the Red Cross, health specialists in Gaza examined them and noticed missing organs like livers, kidneys, or hearts!” The Al Jazeera presenter also referenced the Euro-Med statement directly.

In June 2024, Abdu revived the campaign with a post on X that received 482,000 views, and which received the endorsement of French MEP Rima Hassan (381,000 views). “Israel has an insatiable appetite for drinking the blood of Palestinian children,” Abdu declared in another post. “Is it a religious doctrine or a psychological obsession?” After condemnations of this medieval blood libel, Abdu responded that “Israel’s blood thirst is verified by its own leaders and military’s repeated statements and the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians.” He then deleted his previous post, but its objective had already been achieved.

The Eighth Front

As this brief history demonstrates, Euro-Med-led political campaigns that promote Hamas objectives behind a facade of concern for human rights have contributed significantly to what Israelis call the eighth front of the post-7 October war—the battle to shape public opinion and narratives. The demonisation exemplified by Nicholas Kristof’s pseudo-investigation of sexual violence greatly amplified the pre-existing myths of widespread Israeli violations of fundamental moral principles.

Copying the established strategies and methodologies of NGO superpowers like Amnesty International, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders—not to mention the smaller NGOs in the PFLP network—Euro-Med dresses propaganda up as research reports to provide their demonisation campaigns with a veneer of credibility and authority. Most of the claims in these documents are based on unverified eyewitness accounts, some of which are anonymous.

Bias and Betrayal

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Conspicuously, Euro-Med was not mentioned in the response from the New York Times public-relations spokesperson on 14 May, nor in Kristof’s posts defending his own article. Instead, they refer vaguely to “several analyses documenting the practice of sexual violence” and repeat their own unsubstantiated claim that “details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups…”

Treating the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor as though it were an impartial watchdog required the New York Times’ editors to ignore the group’s clear anti-Israel agenda, extensive open-source evidence linking it to terror organisations, and its general lack of credibility and trustworthiness. This illuminates the seductive influence of the NGO halo effect among journalists. It ought to be obvious that human-rights advocacy and support for terror organisations are antithetical. Perhaps the dog-rape farce will finally prompt a journalistic reevaluation of NGOs’ presumed moral authority, a critical reexamination of their conflicts of interest, and an end to reproducing their press releases and executive summaries as if they were irreproachable news copy.