A new United Nations report, which accuses the Jewish state of targeting Palestinian children deliberately, is yet another instance of the global body engaging in antisemitism, according to Israeli officials and an independent watchdog that tracks the global body.
“This is not serious fact-finding,” Dina Rovner, legal adviser at U.N. Watch, told JNS of the new report from the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry into Israel, which accuses the Jewish state of “genocide.”
“It is a predetermined indictment dressed up as an investigation,” Rovner told JNS. “The commission presents itself as an independent fact-finding body, but even a cursory review of this latest report reveals its bias.”
The panel does not speak for the United Nations, but its findings are likely to be cited before the International Court of Justice, a U.N. judicial body in The Hague, and other international bodies, according to Rovner.
“A report that begins with a conclusion and selectively assembles evidence to support it—that is an embarrassment to the United Nations and a disservice to genuine human rights accountability,” she told JNS.
The report ignores evidence that Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups recruit and use children in combat, which affects the casualty figures which the report cites, according to Rovner.
“While accusing Israel of killing more than 20,000 children in Gaza, citing as its source the Hamas Ministry of Health,” the report “completely ignores the documented fact that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups routinely recruit and use child soldiers: Palestinian boys under the age of 18, some as young as 12 or 13,” she said.
Those terrorist groups have published martyr notices and eulogies identifying minors as members, she said.
The report also accuses Israel of deliberately targeting schools, hospitals, displacement camps and civilian infrastructure without sufficiently accounting for “extensive evidence” that Hamas uses those sites for military purposes, according to Rovner.
“Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and others,” she told JNS. “Its leaders, including Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, have openly acknowledged that Hamas benefits from civilian casualties in Gaza. No credible assessment of child casualties in Gaza can ignore these realities.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry stated that the panel’s report is a “propaganda piece as outrageous as its previous ones.”
“The COI is a fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel rather than seek the truth,” it stated. “Using the demagoguery of modern blood libels to defame Israel, the COI actively conceals clear evidence of terrorist atrocities.”
The commission “completely erases Israeli children, who were brutally murdered, kidnapped and targeted by Hamas, while ignoring Hamas’s cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war,” the ministry stated.
“The COI also lacks any credible verification mechanism for its claims,” it said. “Israel utterly rejects this latest libelous sham, as well as all of the COI’s other defamatory reports.”
Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, stated that “this is not an investigative report.
“It is a political blood libel disguised as a U.N. document,” he said. “This commission reaches its conclusions before examining the facts and repeatedly publishes reports that serve one purpose only: to vilify Israel.”
“Instead of addressing Hamas’s crimes, the Oct. 7 massacre, the hostages and Hamas’s cynical use of children and civilians as human shields, the commission has once again chosen to place Israel in the dock,” Danon stated.
According to Rovner, the commission accuses Israel “of the gravest crimes imaginable,” including “intentionally killing children, genocide and extermination.”
But the panel reached those conclusions largely through “second-hand testimony and inference,” without access to the battlefield information needed to determine who was responsible for particular deaths, the circumstances surrounding them or whether militants were present, she said.
“The result is a report that repeatedly presents speculation as fact,” she told JNS. “A report that ignores key evidence and treats speculation as fact does not merely distort public debate. It risks distorting the administration of international justice.”
Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the commission, stated in connection with the report that the “evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces.”
“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,” he stated.
The 94-page report, the commission’s 17th since its creation in May 2021, accuses Israel of intentionally killing, injuring and maiming Palestinian children in Gaza and of targeting schools, hospitals, displacement camps and other civilian sites where children were sheltering.
Some 30% of those killed in the Gaza war were children, according to the report, which points in part to the Israeli military’s use of powerful explosives and other wide-impact weapons in crowded residential areas, despite what it describes as mounting child casualties, as evidence that the attacks were deliberate.
“This indicates that such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional,” the report states.
The commission, whose full name is the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, said in September that Israel had committed “genocide” and “war crimes” in the Gaza Strip.
