@Aizenberg55: 🧵UN Human Rights Council issue...

🧵UN Human Rights Council issued a "report" claiming, without a shred of evidence, that IDF forces by national policy identified, aimed & killed Palestinian children as such, sometimes for target practice. I wrote a rebuttal for @UNWatch summary below. 1/
unwatch.org/un-watch-legal…

1. Failure to provide corroborating evidence of any incident of IDF soldiers targeting children: A review of the incidents cited by the COI shows no evidence supporting the report’s headline allegation. In none of the cases can the COI definitively establish that a civilian Palestinian child was identified by an IDF soldier and intentionally targeted for death. That conclusion is speculative throughout. The COI’s methodology effectively assumes that a child killed in Gaza was both killed by the IDF and intentionally targeted merely because the child died.

2. Erasure of Hamas as a belligerent: The Report erases Hamas and other armed groups as active belligerents despite their deployment of tens of thousands of operatives throughout Gaza and their extensive military infrastructure built over 17 years, including vast tunnel networks, weapons stockpiles, booby-trapped buildings, and command facilities embedded within civilian areas.[2] There is no acknowledgement or discussion of Hamas’s use of hospitals, schools, mosques, residential buildings, and humanitarian zones for military purposes, or its openly acknowledged strategy of operating from within the civilian population.[3] A reader would come away believing the IDF was deployed in Gaza against only women and children. By ignoring the existence of Hamas and other armed groups as an opposing fighting force in Gaza, the COI creates a framework in which the deaths of children are presumed to reflect deliberate targeting rather than the realities of combat in an urban battlefield.

3. Presumption of no military presence: Throughout its incident-by-incident assessments, the COI repeatedly makes comments such as: “The Commission could not find any indication of a threat towards members of the Israeli security forces” (g., para. 58). But the COI has no way of knowing whether Hamas or PIJ operatives were present, engaged in combat, or operating from the area at the time of an incident, especially given Hamas’s exclusive use of civilian clothes for combat and its operations from apartments and concealed tunnel shafts beneath civilian areas. This assumption is foundational to the entire report. By presuming the absence of active combat or a military presence from the outset, the COI treats the death of a child not as a possible consequence of urban warfare, crossfire, militant activity, or error, but as presumptive evidence of intentional targeting by the IDF.

4. Reliance on local sources: The COI relies on family testimony to determine how children were killed, yet provides no explanation for how family members could know the circumstances of a strike or whether a child was deliberately targeted. Witnesses could not realistically know the full Gaza battlefield environment surrounding an incident, including the positions and movements of IDF and militant forces across a dense, 360-degree urban combat zone. Nevertheless, the COI accepts claims of certainty from family members about the source of fire and responsibility for a death.

5. Doctors as battlefield and ordnance experts: The COI repeatedly relies on medical professionals as expert testimony on military events and ordnance identification, even though doctors and hospital staff are not trained in weapon systems, ballistics, battlefield reconstruction, or combat analysis. This reliance is itself fatal to the report’s methodology. For example, the report cites a doctor who claimed, “she saw around five children shot by quadcopters” (para. 64), yet provides no explanation for how the doctor could determine the source of fire, the circumstances of the shootings, or whether the bullets came from Israeli quadcopters at all. These hospital-based testimonies appear throughout the report as featured evidence.

6. Unsupported attribution of bullets and ordnance: The COI repeatedly cites images of recovered bullets or fragments as proof that IDF forces were responsible for a shooting, yet provides no documented chain of custody, independent forensic verification, or explanation of how the munitions were authenticated. The report simply assumes that photographs or testimony regarding bullets presented by local hospital staff originated from Israeli weapons systems. Militant groups in Gaza also use a wide range of ammunition and captured weaponry, making unsupported attribution methodologically unsound. Without forensic analysis establishing the origin of a projectile and maintaining a verified chain of custody from the scene to investigators, the COI cannot reliably determine who fired a shot, let alone infer intentional targeting.

7. No mention of Hamas’s infiltration of Gaza hospitals: The report simultaneously treats Israeli operations against hospitals as presumptively criminal while also relying heavily on testimony from doctors and medical staff within those same institutions as neutral and authoritative evidence. Yet extensive evidence emerged throughout the war showing that Hamas used hospitals for military purposes, including command centers, tunnel infrastructure, and hostage detention.[4] Numerous healthcare workers and hospital personnel were later identified by Hamas and PIJ themselves as operatives, often commanders. This context is critical both to assessing the legality of military operations involving hospitals and to evaluating the credibility and independence of testimony originating from within institutions infiltrated by Hamas and PIJ.

8. Invention of new Laws of Armed Conflict and application of them to Israel: The COI asserts that if Israel attacks a location knowing civilians, including children, are present and would be killed, the attack is therefore unlawful and constitutes evidence that civilians were intentionally targeted. This directly contradicts the established Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), which permits attacks on military objectives even when civilian casualties are foreseen, provided the applicable rules governing distinction, proportionality, and precautions are satisfied. Under the COI’s invented framework, military objectives placed in civilian structure or otherwise embedded among civilians effectively become permanently immune from attack, and any resulting civilian deaths are treated as proof of extermination, willful killing, and deliberate targeting.

9. Failure to Address Child Soldiers: Although the COI briefly acknowledges reports concerning the use of children by Palestinian armed groups (para. 11), it does not investigate the issue or acknowledge that not all minors in Gaza or the West Bank are innocent civilians. This omission is highly significant. Hamas and other armed factions have long operated military training camps for minors, promoted armed participation among youth, and celebrated teenage fighters as martyrs.[5] Minors as young as twelve years old killed in Gaza and the West Bank were later publicly praised by Hamas and PIJ as combatants.[6] A report centered on children in armed conflict cannot credibly ignore the widespread exploitation and use of minors by Palestinian armed groups for combat and military activity.