MANHATTAN — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar ordered the initiation of a defamation lawsuit in Israel against The New York Times over a column alleging widespread sexual violence by Israeli soldiers, prison guards and settlers against Palestinian detainees. The Times said the threatened legal action is without merit.

The column, written by opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, was published Monday in the paper's Opinion section under the headline "The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians" and ran to 3,700 words. Kristof said his reporting was based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces, and the article included first-person descriptions of rape and assault with objects, as well as a claim by an unnamed Gaza journalist that he was raped by a dog on the command of the dog's handler.

"There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel's 'standard operating procedures' and 'a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians'," Kristof wrote.

In a joint statement, Netanyahu and Saar accused the paper of publishing "one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press." Israel's foreign ministry alleged that Kristof based his piece on unverified sources tied to Hamas-linked networks.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry also said the Times served "a Hamas-driven narrative" and deliberately timed its piece to undermine a Civil Commission report documenting Hamas's sexual atrocities. The ministry said, "The Times chose to publish one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press."

The Times said the threat is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative, and that any such legal claim would be without merit. The paper previously updated its earlier reporting on Hamas sex crimes after an Israeli investigator said critical details were false.

Last year, five soldiers were charged with assaulting a Palestinian detainee from Gaza at Sde Teiman military prison, including one soldier accused of stabbing the detainee's buttock with a sharp object. CCTV video of the incident was leaked by Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the then-Israeli Military Advocate General, leading to her resignation and arrest. The charges against the five soldiers were dropped in March this year.

Scores of Jewish protesters demonstrated outside the paper's office in Manhattan, calling for Kristof to be fired.