Credibility crisis: ‘NYT’ rape story source caught removing terrorists from its ‘Gaza journalists’ list

The Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the key sources in The New York Times May 11 report by opinion writer Nicholas Kristof accusing Israel of systemic sexual violence against Palestinian security prisoners, has been caught removing terrorists on its list of purported “journalists” killed by Israel.

 

 

Kristof’s report, which has been crumbling under scrutiny, described CPJ as “a respected American organization,” but as JNS reported already in 2024, CPJ’s list of journalists was virtually identical to a Hamas-supplied list, a fact exposed by veteran British reporter David Collier.

By adopting the Hamas list, CPJ helped propel a falsehood within a falsehood, that in addition to the wanton killing of civilians, Israel was targeting journalists.

Now, The Washington Free Beacon reports that HonestReporting, an Israeli media watchdog group, discovered “that in the weeks leading up to the publication of the Times piece on May 11, CPJ surreptitiously removed six names from its running list of ‘Journalist casualties’ in the Gaza War.”

The six names were removed by CPJ between March 29 and May 7, without any “contemporaneous acknowledgment of error from the organization,” the Free Beacon reported. All six were actually “terror combatants.”

This further undermines the credibility of sources used in the Times’ piece, the Free Beacon reported.

The six names that CPJ deleted without mention included a member of “Hamas’ Jabalia Battalion,” “a terror combatant for Islamic Jihad,” “a commander in the Nasser Salah Al-Din Brigades” and three other known jihadist militants.

Their names were added to a “clarifications and corrections” page on CPJ’s website only after HonestReporting’s Salo Aizenberg brought attention to the matter, the Free Beacon reported. CPJ still doesn’t mention their terrorism ties, identifying the six only as civilian journalists or media workers.

“By not issuing a clarification regarding its removal of these names from its list, it is clear that the CPJ is trying to hide its inclusion of so many terror combatants on its list of journalists killed in Gaza,” HonestReporting said in its report. “This removal of names from the running list of killed journalists seems to be much more widespread than the CPJ is letting on.”

The Times report cited statistics from CPJ, whose survey of 59 Palestinian “journalists” released by Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion found that 3% claimed that they had been raped while in custody and 29% that they had experienced some form of sexual violence.

One of the reporters who went on record for the Times, Sami al-Sai, 46, described in the report as a “freelance journalist,” is actually a “confirmed Hamas operative,” according to Aizenberg.

The Times’ report has been pilloried since its publication, as its sources, not just CPJ, have been shown to be seriously compromised.

Despite the revelations undermining the report, and the announcement by Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar that they intend to sue the Times, the newspaper continues to defend it.

Kathleen Kingsbury, the head of Times Opinion, in a May 21 Q&A, insisted that “Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources.”

One of those sources, Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor, which supplied the “dog rape” claim, is headed by Ramy Abdu, who appeared on a 2013 list published by Israel of Hamas’s “main operatives and institutions” in Europe.

On May 20, asked about a photograph in which he appeared with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (2006 to 2017), Abdu said, “I am proud to engage with all segments of my Palestinian people. I do not see for their struggle for the freedom of their homeland anything that places them in the category of terrorism.”