Once again, a United Nations body has accused Israel of the gravest crimes imaginable: this time, the deliberate murder of children. And once again, when you actually open the report, the evidence simply isn’t there.
Hamas often uses minors as young as 16 as fighters
The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has published a 94-page paper claiming Israel “deliberately targeted” Palestinian children during the war in the Gaza Strip – language implying war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are among the most serious charges in international law. So you would expect, at minimum, one clearly documented case: a soldier who identified a child as a child, and killed that child for no reason other than that they were a child. After 94 pages, the Commission cannot produce one.
What it produces instead, according to a detailed rebuttal by the watchdog UN Watch, is a chain of assumptions dressed up as findings.
Take the report’s own marquee example, set out in its paragraphs 59-60: a ten-day-old baby allegedly shot through the head by an Israeli “quadcopter” while breastfeeding inside a tent in the Nuseirat camp in April 2024. The Commission’s reasoning, in its own words, is that because it happened in daylight, the drone operator “would have been able to see inside the tent” – and from that single inference it concludes the baby was deliberately targeted. For this to be true, a drone would have had to hover at ground level, see through canvas, pick out a 35-centimetre infant’s head, and fire a precision shot, all based on a photo of a bullet, with no chain of custody, no ballistics analysis, and no witness who even claims to have seen a drone. The same pattern recurs case after case: a family account, a doctor’s guess about which weapon caused a wound, and a conclusion of premeditated murder. Nothing connecting the dots.
There is one cited incident in the report which might at first seem more plausible, coming from a soldier’s own account, via a December 2024 Haaretz investigation, of the shooting of a Palestinian teenager near a restricted corridor in Gaza.
The Commission cites it as evidence of a culture targeting children. But the soldier’s actual testimony says otherwise: his unit shot the boy under a blanket order that “anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians” – opening fire before anyone could see who he was. Only afterward, retrieving his phone from the body, did they learn he was unarmed and “just a boy, maybe 16.”
This strategy came about because, tragically, Hamas often uses minors as young as 16 as fighters, and during this war has almost always dressed its fighters in civilian clothes, not uniform, even sending them unarmed to collect weapons hidden earlier on at their destination.
This made it extremely difficult for the Israeli army to differentiate between civilians and combatants, so lines were drawn and warnings not to cross them were issued. In these circumstances, some have argued that that Israel’s rules of engagement were reckless, or some of its soldiers were trigger-happy, resulting in too many innocent people being killed. But even that would not be evidence of a policy to murder children because they are children – the far graver charge the Commission is actually making.
The report leans heavily on doctors, who are, generally speaking, highly trusted members of society. But they are people trained to treat gunshot wounds, not to identify which weapon fired the bullet, from where, or why. They aren’t eye witnesses to alleged attacks, and have no way of knowing the veracity of a story told to them by an interpreter, or by someone bringing in a child for treatment.
In the Gaza Strip, it would not be easy to tell a doctor that the child they are treating was shot by a terrorist from Hamas or other Palestinian terrorist group. Such a report would open up the parents, family or anyone else making it to potential intimidation, torture or death at the hands of the terrorist regime in Gaza. One doctor cited speculates Israeli soldiers used children for “target practice” based on which body part was hit, but this type of speculation and guesswork is not evidence.
There’s a deeper trick at work, too. Throughout the report, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – tens of thousands of fighters who spent seventeen years burying weapons, tunnels and command posts beneath homes, schools, mosques and hospitals – simply vanish from the page. Strip the enemy out of a war and every dead child looks like a deliberate execution rather than what war actually is: chaotic and lethal. The Commission then quietly invents a new rule of war, treating any Israeli strike on a position embedded with civilians as proof of intent to kill those civilians.This is a standard no army on earth has ever been held to.
None of this is to wave away the deaths of real children, which are a genuine tragedy. But an allegation this serious demands proof equally as serious. The Commission has none, and chose to publish anyway.
This, in fact, is the point of the exercise. A UN Commission of Inquiry is not just a press release, it is a sort of laundering operation. Activist claims, unverified family testimony and hospital hearsay that would never survive a courtroom go in one end; out the other comes a glossy document bearing the UN crest and the imprimatur of “independent” experts.
This isn’t new for the UN, which only recently attacked Israel over a separate, equally damaging allegation
That manufactured credibility is then handed to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice as if it were vetted fact, because judges and journalists alike assume the UN has already done the hard work of verification. But it hasn’t. The public sees “UN report finds Israel deliberately killed children” and takes it as established truth, when an advocacy narrative has simply been given a UN letterhead. That is how bias gets dressed up as authority – and how a country can be convicted in the court of world opinion before any real court has heard a shred of tested evidence. Worse still, these reports will be used as ‘evidence’ in real courts, and nobody will question it because it came from the UN.
This isn’t new for the UN, which only recently attacked Israel over a separate, equally damaging allegation: that Israeli forces and detention facilities were guilty of systematic conflict-related sexual violence, serious enough that Secretary-General António Guterres placed Israel on a UN blacklist alongside Hamas, Isis and Boko Haram. Asked at the press conference unveiling that report whether she had personally examined the underlying evidence, the UN’s own Special Representative on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, replied: “It’s not the responsibility of my office to do any verification.” Pushed on whether she’d seen the raw evidence, she said simply: “No, because it’s not my job.”
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, erupted at the organisation over it, telling a UN official to her face: “You are part of Israel’s persecution. Shame on you.” He had a point. An organisation that places a state on a list alongside terrorist groups, with nobody in the chain claiming to have checked the facts, has little claim to being impartial, rigorous or fair.
Israel is not above criticism, and its conduct in Gaza deserves scrutiny like any other military’s. But scrutiny built on speculation and unverifiable testimony does not provide that accountability. UN bodies damage not only Israel’s reputation, but also their own, when they simply launder wild allegations with little or no evidence by printing the UN’s name over them.
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