By Seth Mandel
Thursday, June 25, 2026
About a third of the way through the latest UN-associated
report accusing
Israel of genocide, I realized why it felt like I’d read this before. It wasn’t
just because of the subject, though such reports are by now a dime a dozen. It
was because I was reading an already-debunked accusation from a prior report.
In other words, I had already read this.
The report was a lazy remix presented to the UN as an
independent document by experts. Sure, they added a new unfounded accusation
here and there, but the conclusion was predetermined and based to a large
degree on other people’s previous lies about Israel.
I’ll explain. The report is focused on “Israel’s
deliberate targeting of Palestinian children” as proof that the Jewish state is
committing the “crime of genocide.”
Which means it sets out to do two things: to show that
Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children because they are children, and
to argue that this targeting itself amounts to genocide.
Now, because genocide requires intent, the conclusion of
the report never gets off the ground. So even by its own “standards” (to use
that term very, very loosely) it unintentionally absolves Israel of genocide
while merely claiming to do otherwise.
What we’re left with, then, is a list of unsubstantiated
Israeli crimes. A representative case: Parents of an injured girl inside a tent
claimed she was shot by a quadcopter outside the tent, and to substantiate the
accusation, the commission looked at “images” of what they were told was the
bullet. The shooting and the victim were intentional because, they said, no one
else was shot.
The great risk faced by the authors, then, was that
someone might actually read the report and realize just how flimsy the
methodology was. As long as absolutely no one read beyond the headline, the
commission members’ reputations could plausibly survive it.
What’s even the point of putting out a report like this?
When I saw the Washington Post story
about the new genocide claim, I understood why the report was issued: headlines
that generate other headlines for the public to ingest and then move on. We are
living in a time of Idiocracy-style institutional embarrassment.
Democracy, as you may have heard, dies in darkness.
Had the reporters (another term one must use loosely
here, I’m afraid) read the report thoroughly, they would have noticed a couple
of things.
First, the repetition of debunked claims: “In a previous
report published in March 2025, the Commission concluded that Israeli
authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in
Gaza through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare,
including the destruction of the Al-Basma In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) Centre.”
As Salo Aizenberg has explained at length,
the case of Al-Basma has become a trigger for the genocide accusation despite
the fact that “no forensic analysis was undertaken, no fragments recovered or
examined, no trajectory studies performed, no experts dispatched, and no effort
made to reconstruct the events of that day. Even the UN report concedes it is
not actually certain how the clinic was damaged, stating it was ‘most probably’
an Israeli shell.”
Most telling of all was the fact that the initial claim
was that Al-Basma was the most damaged structure in the area, supposedly
proving that it was therefore intentionally targeted. But wire photos show
that, right next to the clinic, a multi-story building had been left with a
gaping hole, which, as Aizenberg notes, means that building and not the
fertility clinic was almost certainly the target of any strike.
The Al-Basma story is relevant for another reason: it is
an example of genuinely tragic loss—tanks of frozen embryos were destroyed—but
not evidence of genocide.
This theme reappears throughout the report. “The
Commission applied an integrated child rights analysis in preparing this report
to examine holistically all aspects of Palestinian children’s lives and
development, including the harm caused by Israeli attacks on their physical,
emotional, social and cognitive well-being,” the authors write.
There has indeed been trauma experienced by the people of
Gaza, very much including children. The trauma of war for children, however,
gets eclipsed when bad actors mix truth and fiction, and when those bad actors
manipulate people’s stories into false accusations of genocide.
For example: The report claims that Israeli attacks hit
Gaza schools and therefore prove an intention to deprive Gaza’s younger
generations of a future. Presto: genocide. But the report itself even admits
that Gaza’s schools were closed soon after Hamas initiated the war. Those
buildings—again, as the report itself notes—were then repurposed. Twisting that
into a deliberate destruction of Gazan “education” is not only obviously false
but a cheapening of the impact of war. And that is without even pointing out
that Hamas fighters used these buildings and in many cases turned them into
legitimate targets, making Hamas solely responsible for the deaths caused by
its human shield strategy.
Dishonest activists posing as “experts” will always be
trying to con the public. The media should ask itself whether it really wants
to continue being complicit in this shameful game.
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