Another evidence-free UN genocide charge against Israel – and another media feeding frenzy

This latest report, published yesterday, is chaired by Navi Pillay, the former chair of the overall Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Pillay has a long history of supporting extreme – some would say deranged – anti-Israel bias. In 2022 her fellow UNHRC commissioner, Miloon Kothari, gave an interview in which he said: "We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by, whether it's the Jewish lobby, or it's specific NGOs, a lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us.” He also questioned why Israel was even allowed to be a member of the UN. In the face of widespread criticism of his blatantly antisemitic comments, Pillay defended him, claiming his words had been "deliberately misquoted to imply that 'social media' was controlled by the Jewish lobby." The transcript showed there had been no misquotation – those were his exact words.

As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2009, Pillay set up four separate "fact-finding” missions targeting Israel – four more than for any other country. She also oversaw the Goldstone Report, which even its own lead author, Richard Goldstone, ended up repudiating. She sanctioned the appointment of Richard Falk as UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinians, despite – more likely because – Falk’s long history of antisemitic statements, such as pushing 9/11 conspiracies about the Jews. Pillay also convened the 2009 Durban II conference, which was boycotted by most Western countries, and at which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was handed a platform to deliver an antisemitic speech. When Jewish groups protested, Pillay dismissed them as "lobby groups focused on single issues." Pillay is on record describing Israel as an apartheid state and has signed petitions calling on governments to "sanction apartheid Israel."

As UN Watch points out, this week’s HUNHRC report “appears to be presented under the Commission’s mandate to “collect, consolidate and analyse evidence” in order to “maximise the possibility of its admissibility in legal proceedings,” such as before the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) or the International Court Justice (“ICJ”).

The UN Guidance and Practice for fact-finding missions provides that evidence must be evaluated for its “reliability” and “truthfulness,” that investigations must be conducted with “integrity,” meaning “without any bias,” and that factual findings must be “adequately corroborated” by at least two other “independent and reliable” sources.” This would be a joke were it not to appalling.

The report is entirely one sided, takes its so-called evidence regarding intent, knowledge, and targeting decisions from witnesses whose outlook is prima facie loaded against Israel and whose testimony cannot be verified, and which ignores all facts which paint a different picture from the conclusion the report clearly sets out to reach.

To quote UN Watch again: “These shortcomings would be troubling in any fact-finding exercise. They are particularly concerning here because the Commission’s findings are intended to inform international legal proceedings, including before the ICC and the ICJ. Findings of this nature – particularly those purporting to establish intent and criminal responsibility – would ordinarily require rigorous testing and corroboration before being relied upon in judicial proceedings. Yet international courts have an established practice of relying on UN reports as evidence. This report therefore undermines not only the integrity of international fact-finding, but also the application of international law and confidence in the UN system as a whole.”

I urge you to look at UN Watch’s detailed legal rebuttal – destruction is a more accurate description – of the report, here.

Meanwhile, these are its key points. Most obviously, it exposes how the gravest accusation of all, that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza, which is an accusation of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, is made without a single verified example. The report simply concludes that because children died in the war – a tragic but unavoidable occurrence in war – this is proof of deliberate targeting.

The report does not consider in any way the role of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as if they were not even present – concluding that the IDF, under orders from Israeli political and military leadership, was engaged in the deliberate killing of children for the sake of killing children. “Across 94 pages, the Report never acknowledges that the IDF was fighting a heavily armed force of tens of thousands of Hamas and PIJ operatives who constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, embedded military infrastructure throughout civilian areas, and routinely operated from homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and displacement zones. The result is a fictionalised account of the conflict in which there is no armed opposition, no complex urban battlefield, and no armed actors in Gaza other than the IDF. Combined with the erasure of militant activity in the West Bank, this distortion enables the COI to advance the fabricated narrative that Israeli forces were trained, directed, and deployed to deliberately target children as a matter of policy.”

As UN Watch puts it, the report’s extreme length is intended to create the impression of rigorous evidentiary and forensic review, yet it still cannot mask the fundamental absence of reliable proof for its central allegations.

None of this will be reported because it does not fit the now near-universal narrative – that Israel is a uniquely evil rogue state which commits genocide to satisfy its blood lust. But who now cares about the truth?