Yesterday, I wrote about the Nicholas Kristof piece in the New York Times detailing supposed sexual abuse perpetrated by Israel against male and female palestinian Arab prisoners. It includes the allegation that Israel uses dogs to sexually abuse prisoners.
Commentators have since pointed out how it is impossible to train a dog to do so on command.
Two dog experts confirm it is impossible to train a dog to become aroused and anally penetrate a human on command. Medical journals only describe human initiated bestiality. The @nytimes @NickKristof did not fact check the story. This is how low anti-Israel discourse has fallen. pic.twitter.com/PNTgzAKads
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) May 13, 2026
This should be enough to show how the allegations are concocted. But I did some further digging and found a further indication of this.
One of Kristof’s sources was Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which – as Honest Reporting identified – has documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel.
They first raised the allegation of Israel using dogs to sexually abuse prisoners in June 2024, including in this article. One of the supposed victims they quote is a lawyer called Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr:
Euro-Med Monitor received horrific testimonies from recently released detainees confirming the brutal and inhumane use of Israeli police dogs to rape prisoners and detainees. Lawyer Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr, who was released on 22 February after 45 days of detention, told the Euro-Med Monitor team:
“They held me in a building they called ‘Diapers’ and forced me to wear diapers for two days. Then they dragged me into a dark, musty-smelling, closed-offroom with an iron chair in the centre. The soldiers bound my arms while I was sitting on it. I was speaking normally before I lost consciousness for a while. By the time I woke up, my foot had exploded from the electric shocks [they had given me]. The military doctor then gave me an Acamol pill, and since I was unable to move or speak, the soldiers brought me back to a barn’s and [put me in] a container for a few hours. I remained in the barn until, after a while, the soldiers hurriedly drove me and two other young men to a different location in a military jeep.
“There, the soldiers took off the blindfolds covering our eyes for the first time. The soldiers later pulled the young man sitting to my right, forced him to sleep on the ground, and tied his hands and feet. Suddenly, the occupation soldiers let loose trained police dogs on the young man, who was subjected to [rape]. Throughout the entire ordeal I endured, this was among the most awful things that I witnessed. Everything was a lot [to go through], and this was just one more [incident] added to the heap of torments. I was hoping todie so that this would not happen to me, but one of the soldiers told me to get ready. [Yet] something miraculous happened in the prison; the torture session quickly ended, and we were brought back to the barn.”
Here is the same man detailing his treatment to Canada’s CBC a month later:
Fadi Bakr, 26 and a law graduate from the University of Palestine, was searching for food for his wife and kids in Khan Younis on Jan. 5 when he was caught in the crossfires of fighting between Hamas militants and the IDF. He was shot and took refuge in a nearby building, but that ended up being the one the IDF was targeting.
“There was nothing more for me than to pray,” he told CBC’s El Saife.
Bakr said those hours he spent stuck in the building were the longest of his life. Then, he was arrested.
“[An IDF soldier] stripped me of all my clothes, underwear and everything … and told me to get on my knees,” he said. “A soldier came and tied my hands behind me with a plastic tie.”
Bakr said the soldiers suspected him of being a Hamas militant, which he denied. Afterward, he said, he was blindfolded and dragged naked behind a pickup truck to an Israeli checkpoint, where he was beaten, then taken to another undisclosed location.
“We were in a 10-metre room, and I was lying on a body that was decomposing,” he said. “He [the soldier] cocked his gun and told me, ‘If you don’t tell me which tunnel you came out from, I will kill you like this body right here.'”
What Bakr described about the rest of the time he was detained included sleep deprivation, being placed in rooms with loud music that he said detainees called the “disco room,” electrocution and regular beatings.
“They used the worst kind of torture,” he said. “I was wishing for death in a crazy way.”
These seem like two totally different versions of the same event. And notice what is missing from the second account. One month he is witnessing a biological impossibility involving police dogs, and the next, he’s forgotten the “most awful thing” he ever saw while speaking to the CBC. Probably because it never happened. Which, by the way, puts in doubt the truth of any of his allegations.
And in case you are wondering, it is definitely the same man. Compare the below screenshot from a June 2024 tweet from Ramy Abdu, Chairman of Euro-Med (left) with one from the CBC report (right).
Curiously, Fadi is not mentioned at all in the more recent Euro-Med report linked to in the Kristof piece, even though instances of supposed dog rape are detailed.
In other words, here we have yet more glaring inconsistencies that point both to the unreliability of one of Kristof’s main sources and to the dubious nature of the allegation itself. That the New York Times nevertheless saw fit to amplify these claims to millions of readers represents a staggering abdication of journalistic responsibility.
