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Read it yourself: The UN report on Israel targeting Palestinian children stands up to scrutiny
S9Read it yourself: The UN report on Israel targeting Palestinian children stands up to scrutiny Submitted by Peter Oborne on Mon, 06/29/2026 - 21:58 The 94-page document offers a clear accounting of horrific war crimes, even as a wave of pro-Israel commentators attempt to discredit its findings An injured child cries while receiving medical care at a hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, after an Israeli strike, on 29 May 2025 (Eyad Baba/AFP) On A United Nations commission this month published a report saying that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children since 7 October 2023, and that it committed genocide , war crimes and crimes against humanity in the process. Since then, the UN has come under ferocious attack, while one senior journalist was smeared simply for drawing attention to the report. When Alex Crawford of Sky News highlighted the UN findings on X (formerly Twitter), former Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons accused her of “the usual baseless propaganda, amplified by the usual players, serving the usual dark agenda”. Columnist Stephen Pollard, who writes for the Telegraph and other mainstream outlets, reposted Crawford’s tweet, saying : “Gosh - whoever would have expected @AlexCrawfordSky to post stories that don’t have any evidence supporting them, just to be able to libel the world’s only Jewish state? I’m shocked!” Israel’s foreign ministry echoed these attacks, calling the UN report a “libellous sham” and “a propaganda piece as outrageous as its previous ones”. .push({}); Rather more serious - and detailed - criticism came in an article for the Spectator, where commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti, a founding trustee of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, argued that the UN report is in essence a fraud. "Once again, a United Nations body has accused Israel of the gravest crimes imaginable: this time, the deliberate murder of children," wrote Sacerdoti. "And once again, when you actually open the report, the evidence simply isn’t there." If Sacerdoti is correct, this UN report must surely be withdrawn at once with an official apology, and those who wrote it fired. These are very serious charges from a respected writer in one of Britain ’s best-read political magazines. They call out for a response. In the paragraphs below, we will examine whether Sacerdoti’s claims stand up. Baby shot by quadcopter Firstly, Sacerdoti writes : “The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has published a 94-page paper claiming Israel ‘deliberately targeted’ Palestinian children during the war in the Gaza Strip - language implying war crimes and crimes against humanity.” .push({}); But the UN report isn’t “implying war crimes and crimes against humanity”, as Sacerdoti asserts. It explicitly states that Israel committed such crimes, noting on page 76: “Based on the evidence reviewed, and consistent with its previous reports, the Commission finds on reasonable grounds that the Israeli authorities and the Israeli security forces have continued to commit the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” Nothing is “implied”. The report is explicit. Next, let’s turn to Sacerdoti’s discussion of a case documented by the commission, wherein a 10-day-old baby was shot by a quadcopter. This is what he writes : "Take the report’s own marquee example, set out in its paragraphs 59-60: a ten-day-old baby allegedly shot through the head by an Israeli “quadcopter” while breastfeeding inside a tent in the Nuseirat camp in April 2024. The Commission’s reasoning, in its own words, is that because it happened in daylight, the drone operator “would have been able to see inside the tent” – and from that single inference it concludes the baby was deliberately targeted. For this to be true, a drone would have had to hover at ground level, see through canvas, pick out a 35-centimetre infant’s head, and fire a precision shot, all based on a photo of a bullet, with no chain of custody, no ballistics analysis, and no witness who even claims to have seen a drone." We do not ask readers to take Sacerdoti's word, still less our word. We urge them to study it themselves and reach their own conclusions Sacerdoti makes several dubious assertions here. Firstly, he says that the quadcopter would have had to “see through canvas” in order to target the baby. This is wrong - the quadcopter could have shot the baby after entering the tent. On page 16, the UN report says : “On 12 April 2024 at 13:00, a 10 day-old-baby boy was shot by a quadcopter while being breastfed by his mother inside their tent in Nuseirat camp. The mother was alone in the tent, breastfeeding her baby, when a single bullet from a quadcopter hit the baby in the head and exited through the back of his head, hitting the pillow behind her.” It doesn’t say that the shooting occurred from outside the tent. Secondly, Sacerdoti asserts that the commission simply looked at “a photo of a bullet”. This is false - the report explicitly notes that the commission “viewed and analysed images of the bullet that hit the baby”. So it wasn’t just one photo; multiple images were seen and analysed by the commission. Thirdly, Sacerdoti says there was “no witness who even claims to have seen a drone”. How does he know this? In the methodology section of the report, on page 4, the commission explicitly says : “Multiple sources of information were consulted; thousands of open-source items were collected and verified; and remote and in-person interviews and group discussions with victims and witnesses were conducted.” The report doesn’t state either way as to whether there was witness testimony in this case - but Sacerdoti asserts as fact that there wasn’t. In addition, Sacerdoti fails to mention that the methodology section of the report also notes : “The Commission consulted two independent forensic pathologists who provided forensic analysis of the evidence, including computed tomography (CT)-scans, medical reports, photographs and videos, of the children who were shot and either killed or maimed.” .push({}); Invisible boundaries According to Sacerdoti’s analysis , there is “one cited incident in the report which might at first seem more plausible, coming from a soldier’s own account, via a December 2024 Haaretz investigation, of the shooting of a Palestinian teenager near a restricted corridor in Gaza”. Sacerdoti frames this incident as an unfortunate chapter of accidents leading to a 16-year-old boy being inadvertently killed due to stepping into a forbidden zone. Yet he fails to mention that the Haaretz article confirms that the lines marking these forbidden zones were “invisible boundaries”, and that “even soldiers manning ambush positions say they weren’t always clear where these lines were drawn”. Thus, the child was killed after crossing a line that he might not have even been aware of. Despite this, Sacerdoti writes that “lines were drawn and warnings not to cross them were issued”, implying that civilians would have known not to cross. Sacerdoti also leaves out the soldier’s testimony to Haaretz that his unit gleefully used a ridiculous amount of force against this child - despite having no idea as to whether he was armed: “We responded as if it was a large militant raid. We took positions and just opened fire. I’m talking about dozens of bullets, maybe more. For about a minute or two, we just kept shooting at the body. People around me were shooting and laughing.” While Sacerdoti says that only after the shooting did Israeli forces learn that the victim was a child, that is not stated in the Haaretz article, which quotes the soldier as saying: “We approached the blood-covered body, photographed it, and took the phone. He was just a boy, maybe 16.” This does not mean that no one in the unit was aware prior to the killing that he was a child, or at least that he resembled a child. In addition, Sacerdoti fails to inform Spectator readers that the Haaretz article reports that even after discovering that the dead child was a civilian, the unit still justified the killing, and the commander falsely labelled the victim a “terrorist”. "An intelligence officer collected the items, and hours later, the fighters learned the boy wasn't a Hamas operative – but just a civilian. "That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us for killing a terrorist, saying he hoped we'd kill ten more tomorrow," the fighter adds. "When someone pointed out he was unarmed and looked like a civilian, everyone shouted him down. The commander said: 'Anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians. Everyone's a terrorist.' This deeply troubled me – did I leave my home to sleep in a mouse-infested building for this? To shoot unarmed people?"'. Sacerdoti suggests that this case occurred because it was “extremely difficult for the Israeli army to differentiate between civilians and combatants”. In fact, soldiers gleefully showered this child with bullets for crossing an invisible line, and then after determining that he was a civilian, they still supported the killing - their commander even congratulating them on it, according to the Haaretz report. Sacerdoti leaves Spectator readers in the dark about these facts. 'Target practice' theory Sacerdoti further calls into question the professional expertise upon which the UN report relies. He writes : “One doctor cited speculates Israeli soldiers used children for ‘target practice’ based on which body part was hit, but this type of speculation and guesswork is not evidence.” Yet it is not simply “speculation and guesswork”; the doctor in question is quoted on page 13 of the report as reaching this conclusion “based on the clustering of injuries”, citing “a very clear pattern”. It is not merely “based on which body part was hit”, as Sacerdoti asserts, but rather on the fact that specific parts of the body were being repeatedly hit on specific days. British gastrointestinal surgeon Nick Maynard, who volunteered at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, has testified to this, as reported by Channel 4 News in July 2025: “We’ve seen multiple injuries, predominantly in young teenage males, some as young as 11, 12, 13, 14-year-olds, who are being shot at the food distribution sites. And I’m hearing the same story from all the patients I’ve treated and operated on … they’re being shot by Israeli soldiers or by quadcopters, which are the remote drones being controlled by the Israelis, and they’ve been shot in multiple different body parts.” Drones and decomposing babies: What's in UN report on Israel's genocide of Palestinian children Read More » Maynard also pointed to “a clustering of different body parts on particular days”, telling Channel 4: “One day, they’re coming in having been shot in the abdomen. Another day, they’re coming in having been shot in the head or the neck. Last Saturday, we had four young teenage males, all who came in at the same time, having been shot in the testicles.” He added: “So there’s a very clear pattern, and it’s almost as if a game is being played that today it’s gonna be the head, tomorrow it’s going to be the abdomen - and these injuries are devastating.” The clustering and pattern of injuries both support the “target practice” theory. Sacerdoti ignores this. It is worth noting in this regard that in June 2025 - several weeks before Maynard’s Channel 4 interview - Haaretz reported testimony from soldiers who said they were ordered to deliberately shoot at unarmed Palestinians waiting for humanitarian aid at food distribution sites in Gaza. The UN commission has published a formidable report that reaches a number of damning conclusions about the conduct of the Israeli army. Any supporter of Israel is fully entitled to respond. While Sacerdoti has made an honourable - and valuable - attempt to clear the Israeli army of terrible crimes, we believe that the weight of evidence pointing in the opposite direction is overwhelming. We approached Mr Sacerdoti to give him the opportunity to respond to our criticisms. As this article went to press we had not heard from him. The UN report is available here . We do not ask readers to take Sacerdoti’s word, still less our word. We urge them to study it themselves and reach their own conclusions. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Irfan Chowdhury Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0
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