Read it yourself: The UN report on Israel targeting Palestinian children stands up to scrutiny

AI Summary

A recent UN report accuses Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian children during the Gaza conflict and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The report has faced strong criticism from pro-Israel commentators and officials who label it propaganda and discredit its findings, while detailed analysis defends the report's credibility.

Read it yourself: The UN report on Israel targeting Palestinian children stands up to scrutiny 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”. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).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.” (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).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 beh