Vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, Musandam, Oman, May 8, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

A ship was reported seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and was heading for Iranian waters on Thursday, a British navy agency said, as the US and Chinese leaders met in Beijing to discuss global problems including the Iran war.

After the talks between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, a White House official said the two leaders had agreed that the Strait of Hormuz should be open, and that Iran should never obtain nuclear weapons.

China is close to Iran and the main buyer of its oil. Iran has largely shut the strait to ships apart from its own since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on Feb. 28, causing a major disruption to global energy supplies.

The US paused the bombing last month but added a blockade of Iran‘s ports.

DIPLOMACY ON HOLD

In an interview with CNBC in Beijing, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he believed China would “do what they can” to help open the strait, which he said was “very much in their interest.” Before the war, about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies passed through the strait.

But diplomacy to end the conflict has been on hold since last week when Iran and the US each rejected the other’s most recent proposals.

In the latest incidents on the trade route, an Indian cargo vessel carrying livestock from Africa to the United Arab Emirates was sunk in waters off the coast of Oman.

India condemned the attack and said all 14 crew members had been rescued by the Omani coastguard. Vanguard, a British maritime security advisory firm, said the vessel was believed to have been hit by a missile or drone which caused an explosion.

Separately, British maritime security agency UKMTO reported on Thursday that “unauthorized personnel” had boarded a ship anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah and were steering it toward Iran.

“The company security officer reported that the vessel was taken by Iranian personnel while at anchor,” Vanguard said.

Security in that area is particularly sensitive, as Fujairah is the UAE‘s sole oil port on the far side of the strait, allowing some exports to reach markets without passing through it. Iran included that part of the coast on an expanded map it released last week of waters it claimed were under its control.

Still, Iran appears to be making more deals with countries to allow some ships to pass through the strait – if they accept Tehran’s terms.

A Japanese tanker crossed on Wednesday after Japan’s prime minister announced that she had requested help from the Iranian president. A huge Chinese tanker also crossed on Wednesday, and Iran‘s Fars news agency reported on Thursday that an agreement had been reached to let some Chinese ships pass.

Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said 30 vessels had crossed the strait since Wednesday evening, still far short of some 140 that typically crossed daily before the war, but a substantial increase if confirmed.

According to shipping analytics firm Kpler, some 10 ships had sailed through the strait in the past 24 hours, only a slight increase from the five to seven ships that have crossed daily in recent weeks.

Iran‘s Judiciary Spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Thursday the seizure of “US tankers” violating Iranian regulations was being carried out under domestic and international law.

IRAN‘S THREAT ‘SIGNIFICANTLY DEGRADED’

Thousands of Iranians were killed in the US and Israeli airstrikes in the first weeks of the war, and thousands more have been killed in Lebanon since the war reignited fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.

Lebanese and Israeli envoys were meeting with US officials in Washington on Thursday in efforts to end the hostilities.

There has been little progress in talks on ending the war in Iran since a single round of talks was held in Pakistan last month.

Trump said his aims in starting the war were to destroy Iran‘s nuclear program, end its capability to attack its neighbors and make it easier for Iranians to overthrow their government.

A senior US admiral told a Senate committee on Thursday that Iran‘s ability to threaten its neighbors and US interests in the region had been dramatically reduced.

“Iran has a significantly degraded threat, and they no longer threaten regional partners, or the United States, in ways that they were able to do before, across every domain,” Admiral Brad Cooper said. “They’ve been significantly degraded.”

But Cooper declined to directly address reports by Reuters and other news organizations that Iran, which stockpiled arms in underground facilities, had retained significant missile and drone capabilities.

Iran‘s rulers, who had to use force to put down anti-government protests at the start of the year, have faced no organized opposition since the war began. And their closure of the strait has given them additional leverage in negotiations.

Washington wants Tehran to hand over the uranium and forgo further enrichment. Iran is seeking the lifting of sanctions, reparations for war damage, and acknowledgment of its control over the strait.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Photo: Screenshot

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s latest article, which accuses Israeli soldiers and prison guards of widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners, has prompted a wave of backlash, with critics arguing the column is riddled with false claims and based on questionable sourcing linked to the Hamas terrorist group.

Israel plans to sue the Times over the column, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “blood libel about rape.”

A joint statement by Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described the op-ed by Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, as “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press” and said the country would sue for defamation.

The column accused Israel of “sexual violence against men, women, and even children” by Israeli security personnel, including allegations that prisoners were stripped naked, groped, penetrated with objects, and raped by specially trained dogs.

The Foreign Ministry also accused the Times of timing Kristof’s column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” to appear a day before the release of an independent Israeli report, similarly titled “Silenced No More,” which found that Hamas systematically used sexual violence during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and against hostages in captivity in Gaza.

The ministry said the Times had been approached with the Israeli report “months ago.”

That report, conducted by an independent group, the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, is based on an archive built over two years, with more than 10,000 photos and video segments, over 1,800 hours of footage, and more than 430 testimonies.

The report outlines rape, gang rape, and sexual torture of both women and men, including intentional burning and mutilation, and one case where family members were coerced into performing sexual acts on one another.

“There was laughter. There were jokes. They were passing them from one to another. It wasn’t — it was done for fun,” one survivor of the massacre at the Nova festival told the commission in testimony.

“I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams — screams you have never heard anywhere. It’s between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die,” she said.

The acts constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide, according to the authors of the nearly 300-page report, who recommended that both Israeli and foreign courts prosecute the perpetrators, noting that the victims of Oct. 7 represented 52 nationalities.

Former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler served as a principal contributor to the report, which was also endorsed by Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, former UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu, former chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone Prof. David Crane, and former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak.

Kristof’s column on Tuesday cited an unnamed Palestinian journalist who said he “was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.” Canine experts have noted that training a dog to rape a human – especially a male – is extremely unlikely, if not impossible.

He also claimed to have shared the abuse allegations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who responded, “Do I believe it happens? Definitely.”

But Olmert later issued a statement to the Times saying that he “did not validate these claims.”

“Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy,” he said in the statement, which The Free Press published. “I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”

Kristof also relied on corroboration from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization that watchdog NGO Monitor and Israeli authorities allege has ideological and operational links to Hamas. Its chairman, Ramy Abdu, who made social media posts on Oct. 7 and 8, 2023, that praised the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, has been accused by Israeli authorities of being an operative for Hamas-affiliated institutions, and the group is frequently accused of spreading pro-Hamas propaganda and disinformation.

Writing on X, Netanyahu said that he instructed his legal advisers “to consider the harshest legal action,” adding that the report “defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers.”

“We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law,” he said.

But a lawsuit would face steep hurdles, especially if filed in the US, where the Times would likely argue Kristof’s column was protected opinion and Israel would have to prove “actual malice” under American defamation law, according to an article in The Jerusalem Post. Even an Israeli judgment could be difficult to enforce in the US if American courts found it incompatible with First Amendment protections.

Cardozo constitutional law professor David Rudenstine told Haaretz that such a case would be unlikely to succeed, explaining that libel claims generally require an identifiable person to show reputational and financial harm, meaning the case would likely have to be brought by Netanyahu or another official rather than Israel as a whole.

“It would be Netanyahu v. The New York Times, just like Donald Trump suing The New York Times,” Rudenstine told the paper.

Even then, the plaintiff would face the high US bar of proving the Times knew the claims were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. 

The Times defended the column, saying it was “extensively fact-checked.”

Sexual violence is wrong, and carefully researched reports of sexual violence should be taken seriously, regardless of the nationality of the reported perpetrators.

There should be no reason for me to write that obvious sentence. This week has given me two: the backlash against a Nicholas Kristof New York Times essay alleging widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention, and the release of a new report on sexual crimes committed by Hamas as part of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack.

The response to both was painfully predictable. Kristof’s reporting was denounced by many pro-Israel commentators. Some Jewish and Zionist groups organized a protest outside the Times building for Thursday. Israel is now planning to sue the Times, calling Kristof’s piece a collection of “hideous and distorted lies.”

On social media, some pro-Palestinian voices were quick to dismiss the Oct. 7 report, insisting it was unverified.

What both of these discourses are missing: We are not talking about a team sport. A report about sexual violence is not — or should not be — treated as a football flag or card, inspiring outrage at the referees if it goes against the side you root for. To see sexual violence in terms of sides at all is grotesque.

Sexual violence is a desecration and a violation. To say you take it seriously but rush to dismiss the idea that a country or people you support could have carried it out is to not take it seriously at all. The idea that it’s necessary or desirable to show support for a cause by refusing to believe that someone associated with that cause could have carried out sexual violence is its own kind of violation.

Kristof’s piece is long and upsetting. It is difficult to read. “In wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards,” Kristof wrote. Among the allegations he includes: charges of canine rape, which some observers have called into question and which some have claimed discredit the entire piece.

(Kristof is far from the first to report that sexual violence is widespread within the Israeli justice system; a report earlier this year from the progressive Israeli group B’Tselem, for example, included similar findings. And Kristof is clear that he is not alleging that Israeli leaders order rape, but rather that sexual violence within the Israeli detention system is routine.)

Also difficult to read were the immediate denunciations of the story issued by people like Deborah Lipstadt — once former President Joe Biden’s antisemitism envoy — who have fervently decried the lack of international sympathy for victims and survivors of reported sexual violence carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Kristof anticipated those reactions, noting in the piece that, whatever one’s views on the Middle East, we should be able to condemn rape. “Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023,” he wrote.

Where is that moral clarity now?

Some critics said that the piece only ran to overshadow the release of a new report on Hamas’s sexual violence by the Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes By Hamas Against Women and Children. To claim as much is to look at coverage of sexual violence through a cynical lens, one in which the question is not “who was hurt and how can these grievous wrongs be righted?” but rather “who benefits?” (The Times in fact covered the Civil Commission report in an in-depth article.)

Others, like the Israeli foreign ministry, responded by accusing the Times of engaging in a new blood libel — the antisemitic allegation that Jews use non-Jewish blood for rituals. That charge has largely responded to the canine rape allegation, but been employed to attempt to broadly discredit the range of Kristof’s reporting. To attempt to discount all the allegations the piece uncovers with this term is, effectively, to refuse to take seriously any charges of sexual violence so long as the reported perpetrator is Jewish.

That is not to say we should automatically assume that all reports of sexual violence are accurate; only that neither should we assume they are inaccurate based on the identity of the alleged wrongdoers.

A similar kind of out-of-hand dismissal from certain pro-Palestinian camps greeted the release of the Civil Commission’s report, which found that sexual violence by Hamas was “systematic,” “widespread” and “integral to” the assault on Oct. 7. The report’s lead author, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, said the goal was to make sure that what happened could not be “denied, erased, or forgotten.”

But a quick social media search shows that some who are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis are doing exactly that. I saw many voices instinctively insisting that the report was not verified, in much the same way that pro-Israel posters automatically questioned Kristof’s writing.

It is one thing to draw a distinction between the two reports — to say, for example, that one describes a horrific past event while the other reports on an ongoing practice — but another to insist that sexual violence did not happen.

(To those who insist that the Civil Commission cannot be trusted because it is Israeli, consider that when, in 2024, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan applied for arrest warrants against the leadership of Hamas, he said that he had reason to believe that they had responsibility for rape and other acts of sexual violence. And the United Nations Special Representative similarly found “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred during the attacks of 7 October 2023 in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape.”)

What are we doing — not only to victims and survivors, but also to ourselves — when we automatically believe that yes, this side carries out sexual violence, but no, that side doesn’t?

I would argue that — besides the obvious and tangible risk of denying heinous crimes — when you say that your side could not have carried out these horrific acts, you are not just denying the reported victims their humanity. You risk robbing yourself of your own humanity, too.

I know that there are some who feel that to take allegations against those they support seriously is to abandon their nation, their family and their identity. But this kind of reflexive denial actually weakens identity, rather than strengthens it. It suggests that the thing we’re clinging to is not robust enough to survive accountability.

To love Jews does not mean you have to pretend that Jews are incapable of behaving in ways that are wrong or violent. We know that that’s not true. I have no doubt that, in response to this column, I may be accused, as I sometimes am, of hating Jews. But what kind of love demands that you refuse the possibility of wrongdoing?

When we say we’re against sexual violence, we should mean it across the board — no matter the identity of the reported victims and alleged perpetrators. We should mean it regardless of whatever loyalty we may feel to groups we cherish being a part of. We aren’t lessening our commitment to our identities by doing so. We are just insisting that our identities incorporate our full humanity.

The post Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point appeared first on The Forward.