I read the UN 'genocide' report so you don't have to.
As willing collaborators in Hamas’ strategy, the UN has incentivised terrorists going forward to replicate what Hamas has done — and the price for that will be paid by civilians.
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This is a guest essay by Kyle Orton, a writer focused on terrorism, national security, religion, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The “The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel,” nominally an investigative fact-finding body set up after the 2021 Gaza war by the amusingly named United Nations Human Rights Council, put out a report this week claiming to demonstrate that Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7th pogrom constitutes “genocide.”
Before reading a word of the UN report, any clear-eyed observer should have known it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. Just look at the membership of the UN Human Rights Council.
South Africa, a close ally of Hamas and leader of the “Israeli genocide” campaign, sits there. So does Qatar, home to Hamas’ leadership and chief exporter of anti-Israel propaganda through Al Jazeera. China, a digital totalitarian state that brutalizes Uyghurs and Hong Kongers, joins Russia and Iran in seeking to dismantle the Western-led order while arming and amplifying Hamas.
Ethiopia, fresh off mass atrocities, and Sudan, committing them now, also pass judgment on Israel. Communist Cuba, architect of the Soviet “anti-Zionist” campaign, is joined by Algeria, Kuwait, Morocco, Burundi, Congo, Thailand, and Vietnam — none of them democracies, all hostile to human rights in practice.
This isn’t a bug; it’s the design. The UN’s “human rights” body is run by tyrants. UN “peacekeepers” commit rapes and massacres. UN sanctions enrich regimes and impoverish citizens. Committees on disarmament are overseen by states building illegal nukes. The UN is not a guardian of justice, but a theater where despots redefine words and values, turning the West’s moral language into weapons against the vulnerable.
Israel is a special victim of this set-up. The despotisms that dominate the United Nations apparatus, including the large bloc of Muslim States, are often mutually antagonistic within themselves. Anti-Westernism prevails because it is among the things they all agree on, and Israel regularly serves as a proxy when the chamber wishes to attack the United States and dares not do so directly.
The other binding agent is antisemitism. Even by UN standards, though, Israel’s difficulties at the United Nations Human Rights Council have long been notorious. The Council has a standing agenda item focused on Israel; it does this for no other state. The other nine agenda items are administrative matters or categories of human rights issues (current crises, racism). And the Council often passes more resolutions against Israel alone than all of the nearly 200 other countries in the world, combined.
The UN “genocide” report clocked in at 72 pages and more than 40,000 words.
For anybody following this war, the contents will be familiar because the report is effectively a narrative compendium of the activist talking points that have featured in the information war against Israel, which combine misrepresentation, half-truth, and outright lies.
As an example, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s reference in days after the October 7th pogrom to fighting “human animals” has been misrepresented, by shoddy translations and wilful distortion, as referring to the Palestinian population in Gaza, rather than Hamas and the other Islamic Revolutionary Guards perpetrators, thus “proving” Israel’s genocidal intent, almost from the moment it was uttered.
It is highly revealing that the UN report not only relies on the theme that genocidal intent can be inferred from public statements by Israeli officials, but recycles this specific piece of disinformation, writing:
“The Commission finds that the speech on 9 October 2023 … was directed at the entire population in Gaza and would reasonably be heard and understood as such. … The Commission therefore finds that these statements … evince the direct intention to commit genocide by publicly calling for the elimination of Palestinians in Gaza.”
The problem with this is that it is not true, both in the sense that Gallant was not referring to the Palestinians and — more importantly — even if he had been, it would not demonstrate the requisite “special intent” (dolus specialis) that has to be proven in order to secure a genocide conviction.
Nuremberg, that original sin of “international law,” and the jurisprudence that has grown up since around the 1948 Genocide Convention, is very clear on this. The Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher was put to death because it was ruled his media incitements were crimes and building from that the Convention recognises some speech as in itself criminal, but a conviction for “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” can only be secured when intent has already been proven. Public speech, even if it is inflammatory and hateful, cannot be used as evidence to prove intent for separate crimes under the Convention.
The Rwandan “Media Case,” testing the “hate radio” explanation of the 1994 killings, upheld this view. The judgment against Théoneste Bagosora, the apparent lead architect of the anti-Tutsi massacres, threw out prosecution claims that his public statements demonstrated a genocidal intent and even went so far as ruling that neither his writing of a racially inflammatory document nor his “circulation [of it] to soldiers in the Rwandan army in themselves evidenced a conspiracy to commit genocide.” The first Jugoslavija case that resulted in a genocide conviction reiterated the same thing: “no weight can be placed upon … [the] use of derogatory language in establishing … genocidal intent”.
The reason for enforcing this crystal clear distinction between speech that in and of itself is part of the crime of genocide, and heated wartime rhetoric that is irrelevant to the Genocide Convention, was set out by the International Nuremberg Principles Academy as late as June 2023: “Words may not necessarily reflect one’s intent or ideology.”
It was only after Hamas’ Simchat Torah pogrom against Israel four months later, which might well qualify as an act of genocide under existing precedents (particularly Srebrenica), when there was a political need to find a narrative mechanism to reverse perpetrator and victim, that activist-scholars started pretending not to know about this body of law and embarked on a messaging campaign to convince public opinion that the expert consensus was that wartime rhetoric could be used to demonstrate genocidal intent.
Having misstated and misapplied “international law” on its own terms to use Israeli officials’ public statements as evidence of genocidal intent, the UN report then audaciously argues that, intent having been so proved, the statements are themselves criminal under the “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” provisions! This is having it both ways in the most promiscuous fashion.
The report says “statements made by Israeli officials are direct evidence expressing an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza,” and it is crucial to understand that these statements are the only “direct evidence” offered of genocidal intent. As set out above, even if the report had presented these statements honestly, this is legal nonsense.
The other route the report took was to try to compile “circumstantial evidence” that would prove dolus specialis. The genocide jurisprudence does allow this if the sole explanation for the evidence presented is genocidal intent; if there is any other plausible explanation, the courts are supposed to render a “not guilty” verdict for genocide.
Now, in practice, these high standards have not been maintained. At Nuremberg, the U.S. legal concept of “conspiracy” that would eventually be encoded in the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute was imported into “international law” — over strenuous French objections and with enthusiastic Soviet support. The U.S. had used “conspiracy” laws to fight organised crime, the premise being that if the courts could prove mobsters had entered into a “common plan,” the state could charge the individual mobsters with all of the criminal acts that flowed from that plan, whether or not they were personally involved in each of them.
Adapted to “international law,” by the 1990s this became the “joint criminal enterprise” concept. It has had the general impact of lowering evidentiary standards in convicting defendants for concrete crimes, has sometimes in effect overturned the presumption of innocence, and persistently led to international prosecutors acting as if they “can choose to ignore … direct evidence and go with ‘more’ circumstantial evidence to say that the ‘only’ available inference is one indicative of guilt”, as the presiding judge in one of the Jugoslav cases put it.
Even with the latitude for mischief offered by the “joint criminal enterprise” jurisprudence — which is not explicitly invoked — the UN report’s circumstantial evidence section is a shambles. For one thing, it is prefaced with a paragraph on this war being proceeded by “decades of unlawful occupation” and a full-throated denunciation of “Zionism,” although it is not named as such, for being an “ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and their replacement.” This is a highly partisan political and ideological perspective. It is also one of the few times in the report that reference is made to context of any kind in which war broke out in October 2023, and erases Hamas and heaps blame on Israel.
One of the pervasive distortions of the UN report is the denial of any agency to Hamas. There are only a couple of references to “the attack” on October 7th, and even then they are usually in passing. In one case, the Hamas attack is mentioned only to downplay it as mere “war crimes” and to portray Israelis’ “existential” sense of what had happened as excessive paranoia and further evidence of intent to commit misdeeds in Gaza.
The word “hostage(s)” appears only half-a-dozen times, usually in relation to Israel’s “claimed” war aims or ceasefire negotiations, and once when Israel is accused of “hold[ing] the entire population of the Gaza Strip hostage.” It is quite extraordinary — literally, as well as morally, it takes tremendous ingenuity — to write about the Gaza war and eliminate the hostage crisis that is so central to its origins and perpetuation from view this completely.
Hamas’ combatants in the Gaza Strip are most elusive in the report, as is its military infrastructure and tactics. It is impossible to get any sense of military context from the report; one simply would not know there are two sides fighting from what the report says.
As with the hostages, this cannot be unintentional. The word “tunnel,” for instance, appears precisely once when discussing the Israeli airstrike at the European Hospital in May. The report lies in claiming a tunnel was not found under the hospital and the report pointedly omits that Hamas’ then-leader, Mohammed Sinwar, was killed in the strike — a rather solid confirmation of the Israeli claim “that they had targeted a Hamas command-and-control complex underneath the hospital.”
The effect of the totality of the report is to leave the reader with the impression that Israel initiated military operations in Gaza out of the clear-blue sky and has directed its fire exclusively at civilians, since there are no militants in Gaza. It is this framing that allows the UN authors to claim that “genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn based on the pattern of conduct of the Israeli authorities.”
As to this “pattern of conduct,” it includes “using unguided bombs and other heavy munitions,” which is to say waging war. Elsewhere in the report, we find this attempt to criminalise war more explicitly:
“[T]he Commission finds that the Israeli security forces were aware that their military operations since 7 October 2023 would cause the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. Furthermore, considering the duration of the military operations and reports of high numbers of deaths, it is reasonable to find that the Israeli authorities knew of the high numbers of casualties in Gaza since 7 October 2023. Nevertheless, Israeli authorities did not intervene to change the means and methods of warfare employed; on the contrary, the military operations persisted over time and caused even more Palestinian deaths.”
None of this even hints at breaches of the laws and customs of war. It is not even specified here that the casualties are civilians, but had it been so it would make no difference: the oft-abused “principle of proportionality allows … an attacker to conduct an attack in the knowledge that civilians will be injured or killed, and civilian objects damaged,” if it is judged that the military advantage gained by the attack is worth that cost. Awful, yes, but lawful — the definition of war.
Yet the next sentence in the UN report is: “The Commission therefore finds that the Israeli authorities intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible through its military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023.”
This is absurd.
By erasing Hamas from the picture, the UN is able to present damage to hospitals as part of a “pattern” of evidence that can “only” be explained by genocidal intent, rather than as evidence of Hamas’ criminal misuse of the facilities for military purposes. The damage to buildings generally is held up in the report as evidence of something untoward, which it is not. (Mosul and Raqqa were left as moonscapes by the war to evict the Islamic State, but because Israel was not involved the complaints of “human rights” groups were met with a deafening silence.)
Similarly, the number of fatalities related to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (the UN agency exclusively for Palestinians) is presented as axiomatic evidence of Israeli criminality, rather than evidence of how deeply this UN agency is intertwined with Hamas.
In one of the most staggering passages of the report, the damage to schools is claimed to be in itself “relevant for the assessment of dolus specialis of genocide” because the buildings are a “source of stability, hope, and possibility of a future,” therefore their destruction falls under the Genocide Convention Article forbidding the imposition of conditions “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group.” One need not note that it has been public knowledge for more than a decade that Hamas routinely stores its weapons in schools, something reported by The Washington Post — one of the most brazenly activist anti-Israel media outlets in a very competitive field — and complained about by UNRWA! This is ludicrous as written.
“The Commission notes that the ‘intent to destroy’ does not mean that such destruction needs to have occurred,” which is at least technically true, though nobody really believes a genocide conviction would occur if there had been no bloodshed. Where some clarity on what is going on here emerges is in the report’s claim that the “underlying acts” it is using as evidence of genocidal intent need not have afflicted civilians: The report treats the deaths of “non-civilians” (i.e., terrorists) as evidence of genocide.
It is “evident” that by creating the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which provides food to Gazans, Israel aims “to continuously impose starvation and unlivable conditions of life for Palestinians in Gaza,” according to the report. Which is one view. What clearly annoys the authors of the report is Israel attempting to remove “control over aid distribution in Gaza” from Hamas — a goal that is entirely legitimate, if shambolically executed.
The report says keeping the civilians in the Strip during the war “makes Gaza unique among war zones this century,” which is correct, but then says “the Israeli military has prevented them escaping,” which is another moment where one can barely believe what is on the page.
And it gets worse: “This situation infers a clear intent on the part of the Israeli authorities to trap Palestinians in Gaza, creating such conditions that would … ultimately lead to their destruction.”
Israel has called repeatedly for the temporary evacuation of Gazan civilians since late 2023 — in line with best-practice urban warfare such as the West depopulating Mosul and Raqqa before confronting the Islamic State — and every time the UN, the “humanitarian” NGOs, “human rights” groups, regional governments, and many others have screamed “ethnic cleansing.” It is simply untrue to say Israel has trapped Gazans in the Strip and it is immensely cynical to use the fact they have been so trapped as evidence of Israeli criminal intent when it was accusations of Israeli criminal intent that prevented Gazans getting to safety.
There is a section in the report claiming Israel has engaged in “rape, sexualised torture, and other forms of sexual violence” in a “widespread and systematic” way. Until recently, the “pro-Palestinian” movement dealt with the self-evident fact that the Israel Defence Forces commits sex crimes at an unusually low rate by claiming it was because Israelis are so racist they will not touch Arabs. As ever, one thing and its opposite are taken as evidence of a sinister Jewish intent. By the report’s own evidence, sexual violence by the IDF is not “systematic,” and it is a struggle to call what is presented “evidence.”
This is not unique to this section. The whole report is littered with hearsay, for example citing media rumours from Al Jazeera — in the text, not just the footnotes — and citing its own previous “findings” that were no such thing. The sexual violence section is unique in this respect: There is barely any pretence to be concerned with the individual alleged crimes because the section is intended as a narrative counter to the genuinely systematic use of rape and sexual torture by Hamas on October 7th, which is almost the only aspect of that hecatomb Hamas’ allies, the Islamists and leftists, have found embarrassing.
The report tips its hand about what it is as early as page eight, where it is written:
“The Commission notes with alarm a report that finds, as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials have listed 8,900 militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza as dead or probably dead. Considering, at this point, 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, it means that 83 percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians.”
The authors like this claim so much it recurs on page 55. It is another piece of activist junk, a propaganda salvo that was launched last month and lives on with the information warriors, despite being immediately debunked. The 8,900 figure comes from a leaked Israeli database that uses a hyper-conservative methodology for identifying slain terrorists.
It is, in short, the bare minimum for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fatalities. The 53,000 number comes from Hamas, which should mean no serious person uses it, full stop, but even if it was for some reason agreed that terrorist propaganda is a legitimate source, on its own terms combining the two sets of numbers like this is mathematically erroneous.
The report was clearly determined to smuggle in Hamas’ strategic messaging, though. A page earlier, the authors had written: “From 7 October 2023 to 31 July 2025, 60,199 Palestinians were killed, of whom 18,430 were children and 9,735 were women.” The citation is to a UN agency, but the figures are once again drawn directly from Hamas. It has been UN practice from the very beginning to launder Hamas’ fatality statistics — its agencies often deceptively and circularly citing one another to obscure the true source — and it is no small thing to have assisted the terrorists’ propaganda like this.
The Hamas strategy relies on inflating the number of Palestinian fatalities, by invention and by using tactics that actually get civilians killed, for the purpose of generating international political pressure that forces Israel into a ceasefire. This use of “human shields” — more accurately a human sacrifice strategy — has been evident in Hamas’ way of war for 15 years, and the group itself has publicly spoken about it. There is, of course, no mention of this evil tactic in the UN report because it would force a radical recalibration of where blame lies for Palestinian civilian deaths.
As appalling as it is for the UN to present an “official” story of this war while concealing one of its core elements, the impact will be much wider and more damaging. As willing collaborators in Hamas’ strategy, the UN, the media, “human rights” groups, and the rest have incentivised terrorists going forward to replicate what Hamas has done — and the price for that will be paid by civilians.
I also read the report, and here’s another point to add. Paragraph 201 of the report contains this doozy:
This makes Gaza unique among war zones this century. . . Palestinians in Gaza have had no way to escape it, either inside Gaza or by crossing an international border. The Israeli military has prevented them escaping from the violence into Israel, from where most of their families fled, or Egypt. This situation infers a clear intent on the part of the Israeli authorities to trap Palestinians in Gaza, creating such conditions that would prohibit them from escaping and ultimately lead to their destruction.
But wait- any time Israel tries to arrange a place for them to go, it’s accused of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘driving Palestinians off their land’. So evacuating them to a safe place is a crime against humanity, but then not evacuating them is genocide? How’s that for a gotcha? Not to mention the absurdity of suggesting that Israel let unlimited Gazans pour in across its borders, and blaming Israel for Egypt being unwilling to allow Palestinians to enter as well.
The UN is a Useless dysfunctional impotent, incompetent, biased, Antisemitic organisation run by tyrannies with their cronies who support terrorist organizations.
If the US stops funding this corrupt organization, it will collapse.