Without Evidence The U.N. Accuses Israel Of Genocide – Another Day That Ends In ‘Y’

The United Nations has accused the Jewish state of deliberately hunting Palestinian children, and after 94 pages of this “U.N. report,” it cannot prove a single case.

Technically, the accusation comes not from the United Nations as a whole but from the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a body created by the Council rather than by the Security Council or General Assembly. In practice, however, the distinction disappears. The report is published on U.N. websites under the U.N. emblem, promoted through official U.N. channels, and reported around the world simply as a “U.N. report.” That branding launders the Commission’s allegations through the institutional credibility of the United Nations itself, giving them an authority the evidence does not earn. Most readers will never know the difference, and most headlines never mention it.

The report came this month, and its charges are the gravest of international law: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Yet the only proof it offers is a body count and a theory. Nowhere does it identify a single Israeli soldier who looked at a child, knew the child was a civilian, faced no threat, and fired anyway because the child was the object of the attack. Not one.

The Commission convicts itself in its own caveats, and it does so repeatedly. Incident after incident, it “could not find any indication of a threat” (paragraph 58), “could not verify any claims of exchange of fire” (paragraph 89), does not know who fired or whether combat was underway nearby, and then somehow, every time, reaches a “clear conclusion” of intentional murder anyway.

Here is what the report says: Israeli forces deliberately targeted children across Gaza.

Here is what it leaves out: Hamas.

No tunnels, no human shields, no command posts under hospitals, no acknowledgment that Hamas spent 17 years building a military state beneath the civilian one, hiding rockets under children’s beds and a sniper’s rifle inside a child’s teddy bear. At paragraph 11, the Commission notes “reports of the use of children by the parties to the conflict,” then admits these “have not yet been investigated.” A report on children in armed conflict announces, on page four, that it never looked at the fact that the armed terrorist group in question uses children.

Take the signature horror: an armed quadcopter that, the Commission says, saw inside a tent in daylight and put a single round through a nursing ten-day-old’s head, and another through a four-year-old’s as she was eating. It calls the weapon, in paragraph 60, “a sniper rifle mounted on a quadcopter.” One glaring problem is that one of us served twenty-five years as a U.S. Army infantry soldier, has spent more than a decade studying modern warfare, and has made multiple trips into Gaza with the IDF. No such weapon exists. A .338 sniper rifle does not ride on a small quadcopter and deliver a precision head shot through a tent flap. The Commission appears to recognize this difficulty because four paragraphs later, the same platform is described as firing “an assault rifle,” and 10 paragraphs after that, it becomes “shotguns.” A drone is not a sniper. The report cannot consistently identify its own alleged murder weapon, yet it builds one of its most serious factual findings on this internally inconsistent account.

The forensics are worse because there are none. A child is shot; surgeons remove what the Commission is told was a three-centimeter bullet; and from that one secondhand line it “assesses” a .338 Lapua cartridge, a rifle, and an Israeli division (paragraph 68). No chain of custody, no laboratory, no proof the round was even Israeli. Its experts on ballistics and battlefield intent are doctors, who may be able to describe a wound but cannot know who fired the gun, from where, or why. The Commission cites them anyway, but only when their guesses point one way.

To be clear, children have died in Gaza in heartbreaking numbers, and every one is a tragedy. The laws of armed conflict recognize that civilian deaths, however tragic, can occur even during lawful attacks on military objectives. The legal question is not whether civilians died but why and under what circumstances. What is disputed is whether a child’s death, standing alone, proves a war crime. The Commission says it does. The law says it does not.

At paragraph 268, the report states its theory outright: because Israel “knew that children were present in the areas it attacked” and struck anyway, the attacks “were intentional” and the children “intentionally targeted collectively.” The Commission converts knowledge that civilians might be nearby into intent to kill them. That is simply not the law. Under the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I, knowing civilians are near a military objective triggers the duties of proportionality and precaution; it does not make the strike murder. The Rome Statute crime of attacking civilians requires that civilians be the object of the attack, not its regrettable cost. Genocide demands dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy a group as such; the U.N.’s own International Court of Justice held in Bosnia v. Serbia that such intent must be the only reasonable inference from the conduct. The Commission infers a plan to destroy “the future of the Palestinians” from the bare fact that children died.

Its working rule is even simpler: any target Hamas hides among civilians becomes untouchable, and any civilian who dies beside it becomes proof of murder. The deeper Hamas burrows into homes and schools and hospitals, the safer it gets and the guiltier Israel looks, which inverts the very law that forbids using civilians as shields. The West Bank makes the inversion even plainer: the Commission counts 213 dead minors, tells readers that 206 were boys, and from that ratio divines a “policy of targeting boys” as “future terrorists.” A war on children does not kill boys at 97%. That statistic instead raises the obvious question: many of those “boys” were actively participating in hostilities.

Of course, the Commission never asks the question. Under U.N. definitions, every person under 18 is counted as a child, whether a 10-year-old in a classroom or a 17-year-old carrying an assault rifle. Hamas, meanwhile, has long recruited, trained, and used minors, including teenagers and younger children, a practice the Commission acknowledges has been reported but expressly declines to investigate. By collapsing all persons under 18 into a single category while omitting the role of child soldiers, the report invites readers to equate every “child” casualty with a civilian who was not participating in hostilities. That omission is central to its narrative.

This is how a libel becomes a fact. The body counts originate with the Hamas-run health ministry and are relayed to the world under a U.N. logo. Human rights groups, several funded by the anti-Israel governments that demanded the inquiry, refer to it as settled. Reporters cite the groups without reading the report; policymakers cite the resulting “consensus”; and within 48 hours, the media print “deliberately targeted” as if it is an established fact. It is the same machine that once blamed Israel for the Al-Ahli hospital blast that American, British, and Canadian intelligence traced to a misfired Palestinian rocket. Anti-Israel bias does not need evidence, only an audience that has already convicted Israel.

The messenger does matter, and here it is the Human Rights Council’s only open-ended commission of inquiry, aimed permanently at a single country, on a council where roughly half of all country-specific condemnations name Israel. The world still calls it the Pillay Commission, after the previous chair who famously pronounced Israel guilty of war crimes before she was appointed to judge it. When Washington, D.C., sanctioned the council’s Palestinian rapporteur last year, the commissioners themselves resigned and promised to “reconstitute.” They did not, however, reform it, so the remedy is simple.

A bipartisan group in Congress already drafted the Commission of Inquiry Elimination Act, which would cut U.S. dollars from a permanent mandate that runs on $4 million a year and has dropped even the pretense of fairness or due process. The United States already refuses to fund discriminatory U.N. conduct, and this qualifies by any measure. The Commission titled its report “The essence of childhood has been destroyed,” but it chose the wrong noun. What this report destroys is the essence of evidence, the rule that an accusation of murder must be proven and not merely felt. After 94 pages, it still identifies no soldier, no order, no forensic proof, no battlefield investigation establishing intent, and no evidence capable of sustaining the accusation it makes.

The proper response is not to treat this report as a serious finding. You cannot defend against insanity. But we can and should stop funding it.

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Mark Goldfeder is CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a law professor at Touro Law School.

John Spencer is the Executive Director of the Urban Warfare Institute.