How "Blood Libel" Became Israel’s Shield

Allegations Once Dismissed as Antisemitism Are Now Widely Documented

Demonstrators call for the retraction of a column by Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times’ Manhattan office on 14 May 2026. Photo credit: Grace Gilson

No sooner was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s report about Israeli soldiers’ systematic sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners published this past week than the charge of “blood libel” was suddenly leveled everywhere at Israel’s critics. It’s what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Kristof and the Times of spreading; what the Israeli foreign ministry is charging them with; what pro-Israel protesters are yelling outside the paper’s headquarters; and what various propaganda arms of the US pro-Israel lobby are flinging.

To be clear, “blood libel” is a centuries-old antisemitic myth that Jews ritually killed Christian children and baked their blood into their bread. Kristof’s article is a thorough piece of reporting based on interviews with fourteen Palestinian survivors, as well as with their families, investigators, and officials, and which surived the New York Times’s fact-checking process and famously pro-Israel editorial line. The two have absolutely nothing in common.

This is the latest case of Israel and its boosters cynically reaching for this talking point to distract and hector people away from thinking about its very real war crimes with empty charges of antisemitism. After all, that Israeli soldiers use rape and other forms of sexual violence against Palestinians was well documented long before Kristof’s piece and undeniable, not just because Israeli citizens literally rioted over a criminal investigation into a group of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) rapists—one of whom was later perversely turned into a celebrity by the Israeli media—but because Israeli soldiers have cheerfully admitted to it. From the start of the genocide in Gaza to today, pro-Israel forces have lazily screamed “blood libel” any time Israel has come under criticism for one or another bloodcurdling atrocity.

When Israel was accused of bombing Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital in the first month of the genocide, Israeli officials and their various US proxies like the Anti-Defamation League cried “blood libel,” even charging that simply reporting on the accusation was tantamount to accusing all Jews everywhere of feasting on children’s blood. The Israeli military would never attack a hospital. How could anyone even think such a thing?

Fast-forward a year, and Israel had attacked or destroyed nearly every single hospital in Gaza, openly and shamelessly. Within only a few months, what was once “blood libel,” that to even suggest such an action might have happened was tantamount to inciting antisemitic hatred, became something that Israeli officials and the IDF regularly, casually took credit for and justified.

In fact, it even repeatedly attacked and ultimately put out of service the very hospital, Al-Ahli, whose October 2023 bombing had sparked the “blood libel” charge in the first place, telling patients and others in the hospital to evacuate mere minutes before blowing up its emergency care ward and other essential parts. But by this point, the IDF had normalized its destruction of hospitals. This time there was no global outrage, and Israel didn’t even bother to smear critics of the attack as antisemitic liars.

Next it was accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza that was “blood libel,” whether in the form of the accusations brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the conclusion of respected human rights groups, or in the analysis made by people using their eyes and ears. Two years on, not only did the ICJ find that it was “plausible” that Israel had carried out a genocide—based in large part on a stream of of public statements from Israeli government and military officials openly saying they planned to slaughter anyone in Gaza—but a plethora of genocide scholars, many of them Jewish and Israeli, themselves determined that genocide was exactly what Israel was carrying out in the Palestinian enclave.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s objection was a perfect example of the cynical abuse of this term. Herzog wailed that including in South Africa’s ICJ complaint his statement that there was “an entire nation out there that is responsible” for 7 October, and that civilians were not aware or involved was “absolutely not true,” was “blood libel,” since later in the statement he included some pablum about how Israel abides by international law.

Herzog then proceeded to launch into another lengthy justification for attacking civilian targets, insisting that “Hamas operates from the heart of the civilian population everywhere, from children’s bedrooms in homes, from schools, from mosques, and hospitals,” and pointing to “the involvement of many residents of Gaza in the slaughter” of 7 October.

Then, saying Israel was carrying out indiscriminate bombing of Gaza was the “blood libel.” This was what Oregon Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkley got hit with after he criticized what he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “indiscriminate bombing of Gaza” on Easter in 2024 and called for then-President Joe Biden to withhold further bomb shipments to Israel. “A US senator. Peddling blood libel. On Easter. We’ve been here before . . . , ” Israel’s antisemitism envoy wrote on X/Twitter.

The fact that Israel was carrying out indiscriminate bombing of Gaza was, even at this time, an undeniable fact. That’s not just because by that point, Israel had dropped at least two Hiroshimas’ worth of bombs on Gaza; relied on massive, unguided munitions that even US military officials refused to use in urban areas; and at one point dropped more bombs in a week than were dropped in whole months and years of US wars, flattening Gaza on the scale of or worse than German cities carpet-bombed in World War II. It’s also because Israeli intelligence officers admitted the IDF had radically loosened its rules around bombing civilian targets, allowing them to actively carry out bombings of civilian targets that would knowingly kill as many as hundreds of innocent people if it meant murdering even one Hamas target.

After that, the “blood libel” was pointing out that the IDF had killed thousands of children, including many hundreds of infants. An especially risible entry in this disgraceful genre came from the novelist Howard Jacobson writing in the Guardian, where he took a different tack: rather than denying the IDF was slaughtering kids nonstop like most genocide defenders (a classroom’s worth every day for two years, as the head of UNICEF put it last year—presumably also blood libel), Jacobson said it was “blood libel” that we had to hear so damn much about it.

“Night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. . . . Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians,” he wrote. “Only compare reporting from Gaza with reporting from Ukraine. Bombs have fallen there, too, but how often is the burial of Ukrainian children the lead story?”

Yes, let’s compare. A recent study of more than seventeen thousand stories in establishment media outlets found that even though the number of children killed in Ukraine is a small fraction of those killed in Gaza, they were mentioned significantly more in media reports than Gaza’s more than ten thousand dead children. Besides that, despite the caterwauling of Israeli officials and propagandists, we now know that the Israeli military privately acknowledges that the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll is accurate, and that its own military intelligence database calculated the civilian death rate at a staggering 83 percent.

Next up was last year’s famine in Gaza, deliberately engineered by Israel, which, after destroying Gaza’s food production capacity and a years-long siege preventing anything from coming into the territory, blocked thousands of aid trucks filled with food for months on end. That, too, was a “modern blood libel,” as Netanyahu put it, a charge echoed by other arms of the Israeli state and pro-Israel propaganda voices, which absurdly seized on a New York Times report about the famine—in particular, the fact that one starving child featured in the report also happened to have cerebral palsy.

As with every other example on this list, what Israeli officials and others squawked “blood libel” at in public turns out to have been a reality they readily acknowledged in private, with Israeli military officials quietly concluding that Gazans were facing imminent starvation as a result of their government’s blockade of the territory, a fact that was already undeniable thanks to copious eyewitness testimony and data. In fact, a number of Israeli officials didn’t even bother to pretend: the far-right extremists who wag the dog of the Israeli state both threatened and openly cheered on the starvation they were inflicting on Palestinians in the territory.

There was a third New York Times piece that was the target of “blood libel” charges: an October 2024 report based on interviews with literally scores of health care workers who had served in the territory, complete with X-ray images, about how numerous Palestinian children had been shot in the head and neck. This, too, was well corroborated, including by the BBC nearly a year later, which compiled ninety-five cases of children being shot in the head or chest.

But by that point, the “blood libel” crowd had lost interest and moved on to denying Israel’s latest novel monstrosity in Gaza, which happened to be the daily massacres of people at Israeli food distribution sites. That was “blood libel” too, even though various contractors working at the aid sites came forward to say they had seen it, there were videos backing it up, and IDF soldiers themselves told Israeli newspaper Haaretz they had been ordered to do so, which got the news outlet labeled a blood-libeler by no less than Netanyahu and his defense minister.

That’s right: in the up-is-down world of Israeli genocide propaganda, an Israeli newspaper reporting the words of IDF soldiers can also be accused of inciting antisemitic hatred.

In other words, Israel and its boosters have—for the past three years but even earlier than that—almost exclusively thrown the term “blood libel” around to describe very real atrocities that are either objectively true, later proven correct, or even freely admitted to by Israeli officials. It will be the same story with Kristof’s reporting, which will sadly not be the last time this crowd cheapens and degrades the charge of antisemitism to defend the ghoulish behavior of one out-of-control country.