{"id":131677,"date":"2026-06-26T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=131677"},"modified":"2026-06-26T06:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T04:33:09","slug":"29-05-119","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=131677","title":{"rendered":"No, Israel isn\u2019t \u2018deliberately targeting\u2019 children in Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>No, Israel isn\u2019t \u2018deliberately targeting\u2019 children in Gaza<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

Jonathan Sacerdoti<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Palestinian children play in the Gaza Strip (Getty images)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Once again, a United Nations body has accused Israel of the gravest crimes imaginable: this time, the deliberate murder of children. And once again, when you actually open the report, the evidence simply isn\u2019t there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hamas often uses minors as young as 16 as fighters<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The UN\u2019s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has published a 94-page paper claiming Israel \u201cdeliberately targeted\u201d Palestinian children during the war in the Gaza Strip \u2013 language implying war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are among the most serious charges in international law. So you would expect, at minimum, one clearly documented case: a soldier who identified a child as a child, and killed that child for no reason other than that they were a child. After 94 pages, the Commission cannot produce one.<\/span><\/p>\n

What it produces instead, according to a detailed rebuttal by the watchdog UN Watch, is a chain of assumptions dressed up as findings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Take the report\u2019s own marquee example, set out in its paragraphs 59-60: a ten-day-old baby allegedly shot through the head by an Israeli \u201cquadcopter\u201d while breastfeeding inside a tent in the Nuseirat camp in April 2024. The Commission\u2019s reasoning, in its own words, is that because it happened in daylight, the drone operator \u201cwould have been able to see inside the tent\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s 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. The same pattern recurs case after case: a family account, a doctor\u2019s guess about which weapon caused a wound, and a conclusion of premeditated murder. Nothing connecting the dots.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is one cited incident in the report which might at first seem more plausible, coming from a soldier\u2019s own account, via a December 2024\u00a0Haaretz<\/em>\u00a0investigation, of the shooting of a Palestinian teenager near a restricted corridor in Gaza.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Commission cites it as evidence of a culture targeting children. But the soldier\u2019s actual testimony says otherwise: his unit shot the boy under a blanket order that \u201canyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians\u201d \u2013 opening fire before anyone could see who he was. Only afterward, retrieving his phone from the body, did they learn he was unarmed and \u201cjust a boy, maybe 16.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This strategy came about because, tragically, Hamas often uses minors as young as 16 as fighters, and during this war has almost always dressed its fighters in civilian clothes, not uniform, even sending them unarmed to collect weapons hidden earlier on at their destination.<\/span><\/p>\n

This made it extremely difficult for the Israeli army to differentiate between civilians and combatants, so lines were drawn and warnings not to cross them were issued. In these circumstances, some have argued that that Israel\u2019s rules of engagement were reckless, or some of its soldiers were trigger-happy, resulting in too many innocent people being killed. But even that would not be evidence of a policy to murder children because they are children \u2013 the far graver charge the Commission is actually making.<\/span><\/p>\n

The report leans heavily on doctors, who are, generally speaking, highly trusted members of society. But they are people trained to treat gunshot wounds, not to identify which weapon fired the bullet, from where, or why. They aren\u2019t eye witnesses to alleged attacks, and have no way of knowing the veracity of a story told to them by an interpreter, or by someone bringing in a child for treatment.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Gaza Strip, it would not be easy to tell a doctor that the child they are treating was shot by a terrorist from Hamas or other Palestinian terrorist group. Such a report would open up the parents, family or anyone else making it to potential intimidation, torture or death at the hands of the terrorist regime in Gaza. One doctor cited speculates Israeli soldiers used children for \u201ctarget practice\u201d based on which body part was hit, but this type of speculation and guesswork is not evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a deeper trick at work, too. Throughout the report, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad \u2013 tens of thousands of fighters who spent seventeen years burying weapons, tunnels and command posts beneath homes, schools, mosques and hospitals \u2013 simply vanish from the page. Strip the enemy out of a war and every dead child looks like a deliberate execution rather than what war actually is: chaotic and lethal. The Commission then quietly invents a new rule of war, treating any Israeli strike on a position embedded with civilians as proof of intent to kill those civilians.This is a standard no army on earth has ever been held to.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of this is to wave away the deaths of real children, which are a genuine tragedy. But an allegation this serious demands proof equally as serious. The Commission has none, and chose to publish anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

This, in fact, is the point of the exercise. A UN Commission of Inquiry is not just a press release, it is a sort of laundering operation. Activist claims, unverified family testimony and hospital hearsay that would never survive a courtroom go in one end; out the other comes a glossy document bearing the UN crest and the imprimatur of \u201cindependent\u201d experts.<\/span><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t new for the UN, which only recently attacked Israel over a separate, equally damaging allegation<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

That manufactured credibility is then handed to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice as if it were vetted fact, because judges and journalists alike assume the UN has already done the hard work of verification. But it hasn\u2019t. The public sees \u201cUN report finds Israel deliberately killed children\u201d and takes it as established truth, when an advocacy narrative has simply been given a UN letterhead. That is how bias gets dressed up as authority \u2013 and how a country can be convicted in the court of world opinion before any real court has heard a shred of tested evidence. Worse still, these reports will be used as \u2018evidence\u2019 in real courts, and nobody will question it because it came from the UN.<\/span><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t new for the UN, which only recently attacked Israel over a separate, equally damaging allegation: that Israeli forces and detention facilities were guilty of systematic conflict-related sexual violence, serious enough that Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres placed Israel on a UN blacklist alongside Hamas, Isis and Boko Haram. Asked at the press conference unveiling that report whether she had personally examined the underlying evidence, the UN\u2019s own Special Representative on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, replied: \u201cIt\u2019s not the responsibility of my office to do any verification.\u201d Pushed on whether she\u2019d seen the raw evidence, she said simply: \u201cNo, because it\u2019s not my job.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, erupted at the organisation over it, telling a UN official to her face: \u201cYou are part of Israel\u2019s persecution. Shame on you.\u201d He had a point. An organisation that places a state on a list alongside terrorist groups, with nobody in the chain claiming to have checked the facts, has little claim to being impartial, rigorous or fair.<\/span><\/p>\n

Israel is not above criticism, and its conduct in Gaza deserves scrutiny like any other military\u2019s. But scrutiny built on speculation and unverifiable testimony does not provide that accountability. UN bodies damage not only Israel\u2019s reputation, but also their own, when they simply launder wild allegations with little or no evidence by printing the UN\u2019s name over them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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No, Israel isn\u2019t \u2018deliberately targeting\u2019 children in Gaza Jonathan Sacerdoti Palestinian children play in the Gaza Strip (Getty images) Once again, a United Nations body has accused Israel of the gravest crimes imaginable: this time, the deliberate murder of children. And once again, when you actually open the report, the evidence simply isn\u2019t there. Hamas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131677"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131694,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131677\/revisions\/131694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}