When UN Secretary-General António Guterres placed the Israel Prison Service on his annual blacklist of entities credibly suspected of committing patterns of sexual violence in conflict zones, he achieved something remarkable in its perversity: he put the Jewish state on the same list as Hamas terrorists who filmed themselves raping and mutilating Jewish women on October 7. The UN announcement, which reached Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon by phone on Thursday, triggered an immediate Israeli severance of all ties with Guterres’s office. Israel will not resume contact, the Foreign Ministry stated, until a new secretary-general takes office when Guterres’s term expires on December 31.
“The UN secretary-general has put Israel on the same blacklist as Hamas, ISIS, and the most depraved terrorist organizations in the world,” Danon said. “This is a moral disgrace and a complete collapse of any credibility left to the UN.”
The New York Times Sets the Stage
Two weeks before Guterres made his announcement, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” The piece alleged, based on conversations with 14 Palestinian men and women, a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners, implicating soldiers, settlers, Shin Bet interrogators, and, above all, prison guards. Kristof himself acknowledged there is no evidence Israeli leaders ordered rapes, yet he argued Israeli security forces had built a culture in which such violence had become “standard operating procedure.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry called it “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press,” adding that Kristof had executed “an unfathomable inversion of reality” by turning the victim into the accused — a nation whose citizens suffered the most documented acts of sexual terrorism in modern Israeli history on October 7.
Kristof’s column was published the same day as a 300-page study produced by the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, an Israeli NGO established to document the October 7 atrocities — a study that found Hamas’s sexual violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the attack. The Foreign Ministry stated that the NYT’s decision to publish Kristof rather than those findings was “part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN secretary-general’s blacklist.”
Among the most explosive claims in the Kristof piece: that Palestinian prisoners were raped by specially trained dogs.
The UN’s Long Double Standard
To understand the full scope of what Guterres has done, one must recall how long the UN dragged its feet on Hamas’s sexual violence against Israelis. Israel has long accused the United Nations of reacting too slowly to the rape and sexual violence carried out by Palestinian terrorists during the Hamas-led atrocities that sparked the Gaza war.
It took until March 2024 — nearly five months after October 7 — for Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, to complete a mission to Israel and issue a report finding “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred.” Despite the five-month delay, the UN team did not manage to meet with a single survivor of sexual violence “despite concerted efforts to encourage them to come forward.”
Hamas was not formally added to Guterres’s blacklist until August 2025 — nearly two full years after October 7. Within months of Hamas’s inclusion, Israel found itself placed “on notice” for possible future inclusion. Now, less than a year later, Israel is on the same list.
The contrast in speed and institutional urgency could not be more glaring. Hamas terrorists filmed their own crimes. Survivors testified. Hostages released from Gaza described ongoing sexual abuse in captivity. Forensic evidence was collected. Israel’s Civil Commission produced a 300-page, two-year investigation documenting that Hamas’s sexual and gender-based violence was systematic and widespread. And still the UN took nearly two years to act. When it came to Israel, anonymous Palestinian testimonies sourced through a Hamas-linked NGO and laundered through a New York Times op-ed moved the needle within months.
A Coordinated Campaign
Israeli diplomatic sources told Channel 12 that Guterres pushed to include Israel on this year’s blacklist over Patten’s own objections. That detail is worth sitting with: the UN official who actually investigated sexual violence in the Israel-Gaza conflict apparently resisted the very move that her boss made under apparent political pressure.
Israel provided documents, data, and detailed responses to every claim it received. It invited UN personnel to visit the sites of alleged atrocities. Senior officials from the Prison Service, the IDF, and the Justice Ministry were made available to Patten’s delegation. Patten’s team canceled their trips to Israel, citing technical issues and security concerns. According to Ambassador Danon, the UN “never clarified any specific cases” to Israel, and never gave Israel “the basis” for the blacklist decision.
“Guterres chose to ignore the facts and continue the campaign of incitement and lies against Israel,” Danon said.
US-based human rights attorney Elliot Malin did not mince words: “It’s directly contrary to the purpose of the UN and its establishment. In an institution where they commonly single out and demean a democracy while ignoring the atrocities of totalitarian states, even elevating them to prominent roles in UN appendant bodies — this is just another demonstration of the inability of the UN to act in a fair and balanced manner.” Malin called for every democratic state to withhold funding from the UN until the decision is retracted and the organization is fully audited for systemic bias.
Guterres’s term ends on December 31. Israel considers this blacklisting his final act of political warfare against the Jewish state — a parting cherem, a declaration of excommunication from basic moral legitimacy.
