Deceitful UN Commission Falsely Accuses Israel of Genocide in Gaza

The United Nations has just produced another hit job against Israel. The new lopsided report, published by the misleadingly named “UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel,” accused Israel of committing genocide. The report alleged that Israeli authorities and security forces have carried out four genocidal acts enumerated by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.” These are “killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”

This commission, which was appointed by the Israel-hating UN Human Rights Council and chaired by the longtime Israeli-hating Navi Pillay, did not conduct a truly independent, objective inquiry. Far from it. Her commission’s lies and distorted findings were foreordained before it even started its work. All they do is to feed more fodder to Hamas’s and Iran’s propaganda machines.

UN Watch published a rebuttal to the UN Commission of Inquiry’s report, calling it “fatally deficient” in several respects. For example, UN Watch pointed out that the report “selectively misinterprets statements by Israeli leaders, accepts unverified Hamas casualty figures, disregards Hamas’s systematic use of human shields, relies on unverified media reports (such as by Al-Jazeera), and assumes that civilian deaths in Gaza are only the result of deliberate targeting by Israel.”

The most critical deficiency of all is the Commission of Inquiry’s woeful failure to prove the most fundamental element of the crime of genocide in violation of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. The Commission fell far short of proving with reasonable certainty that Israel committed any of the acts enumerated in the Convention “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.” This specific intent is known in international law as dolus specialis. The authors of the Commission of Inquiry’s report think that repeating the legal Latin phrase dolus specialis nine times in their report and relying on sketchy evidence are sufficient to prove their case.

First, Pillay and her fellow Israel haters quoted, out of context, scattered statements made by members of the Israeli government, which they alleged to be “direct evidence of dolus specialis.” The Commission of Inquiry report claimed, for example, that “Statements calling on Israel to exact vengeance against Hamas were made as early as 7 October 2023.” This, of course, was the tragic day that Hamas led its genocidal rampage in Israel, slaughtering, raping, torturing, and abducing innocent Israeli civilians.

Strong words by Israel’s leaders explaining Israel’s use of military force to ensure that Hamas will never commit such horrors again, which the terrorists have vowed to do if given the chance, is not proof of genocidal intent. To the contrary, these statements prove nothing more than Israel’s intent to destroy the terrorist Hamas organization and its co-Palestinian terrorist allies – not to destroy what the Genocide Convention calls “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.”

If Israel had intended to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such,” it had all the military resources it needed to fulfill that intention. Obviously, that has not happened. Even the Gazan casualty figures released by Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, fall far short of the current estimated total population of over 2 million people living in Gaza. And who knows how many of the Gazan civilians who have been killed since October 7, 2023 were killed by Hamas terrorists themselves?

Israel did not deliberately target Palestinian civilians for death or maiming. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tried to minimize civilian casualties whenever possible, for example, by routinely providing Gazan civilians with advance warnings of impending attacks at risk to its own soldiers and opening safe corridors for evacuation. Israel also agreed to pauses in fighting to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to those in need and helped establish food distribution centers where Gazans could receive food packages protected from thefts by the terrorists.

Notably, the Commission of Inquiry report omitted to mention Hamas’s use of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, as human shields. The Commission bemoans Israeli attacks on hospitals, schools, residential buildings, and other civilian facilities without mentioning how Hamas has used these facilities in violation of the Geneva Conventions to hide its terrorist tunnels, fighters, command centers, and weaponry.

The authors also relied on what they conceded was circumstantial evidence. They described this circumstantial evidence as “the pattern of conduct of the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces including during military operations, that were consistent with the sentiments of the statements of Israeli government.”

Israel’s pattern of conduct was consistent solely with its leaders’ oft-stated vow to protect its own citizens by destroying Hamas and its allied terrorist organizations root and branch and to obtain the release of the abducted hostages from Gaza. The UN Commission report did not condemn the hostage-taking. Instead, it dismissed securing the hostages’ release and ensuring that the terrorists lack the means to repeat their October 7^th atrocities as insufficient to justify Israel’s forceful response.

As a spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry declared in denouncing the report, “In stark contrast to the lies in the report, Hamas is the party that attempted genocide in Israel.”

Sadly, as the saying goes, “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” Many legacy media outlets are disseminating the UN Commission of Inquiry’s lies worldwide, without any fact checking or critical analysis. The New York Times even published a guest column by Navi Pillay, which rationalized her Commission’s false genocide charge against Israel.

Many of the correspondents attending UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ September 16^th press conference amplified the UN Commission’s lies with more smears of their own against Israel. They tried to shame the Secretary General into publicly endorsing the genocide accusation, to which he replied that it was not his place to draw a legal conclusion as to whether Israel had technically violated the Genocide Convention. But he repeatedly denounced Israel’s actions anyway and said, “if that is decided by the General Assembly or Security Council, the Secretary-General will be abiding by those resolutions.”

The diplomatic editor of the Qatari state owned and funded Al Jazeera wins the prize for asking the most highly loaded questions of the press conference, after delivering an editorial statement of his own accusing Israel of genocide:

"Secretary-General, I'm sorry. I'm going to raise genocide again. You've explained that you cannot make a legal declaration, but you know that international law is glacial. The Myanmar case started in 2019, and there's still not a verdict five years later. It's not a dry legal question, because it's ongoing every single day, multiple deaths caused by Israel. So won't history judge you harshly if you don't declare what we can all see in front of our eyes? Is this not what genocide looks like, Secretary-General?” (Emphasis added)

Mr. Guterres responded by noting how the UN has denounced “the constant violations of international law and worse, the level of death and destruction that has no parallel in my time in office.” He added that the UN has been “in a leadership position in defense of the rights of the Palestinian people, in the promotion of a Palestinian state.” He concluded by declaring, “That is what history will remember, not a question of semantics.”

It is not a question of semantics, Mr. Guterres. Accusing Israel of genocide is blood libel, which perverts the uniqueness of this legal term first coined in the wake of the Nazis’ slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

The Nazis murdered Jews simply because they were Jews whom Adolf Hitler vowed to annihilate. “We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew,” Hitler said.

The Jewish state of Israel, on the other hand, can only protect the lives of its own people by eliminating the existential threat posed by Hamas and all other Palestinian terrorists who want to replicate Hitler’s genocide against the Jews.

Just as the Left has weaponized the terms “Nazi” and “fascist” to smear their opponents, Israel’s enemies--including pro-Palestinian activists and their lackeys on the UN Commission of Inquiry--have weaponized the legal term “genocide” against Israel. Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for the suffering in Gaza so long as it persists in refusing to release all the hostages and refusing to completely disarm pursuant to a truly unbiased verification process.