Columna The Telegraph, 28.06.2026 Edmund Fitton-Brown, diplomático británico(1984-2017), exembajador en Yemen(2014-2017) y académico(FDD)
- An absurd report claiming that Israel has committed genocide is the latest example
The United Nations has taken its unhealthy obsession with Israel to a new extreme, with the claim by an independent UN commission that it deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza. This update on the ancient anti-Semitic trope of Jews murdering babies is now endorsed by the UN’s so-called Commission of Inquiry in their latest report.
A cursory glance at their findings reveals a striking absence of empirical evidence to substantiate their most explosive claims. Instead, they appear to rely on anecdotes elevated into proof, inference transformed into certainty, and allegations repeated so often they masquerade as facts.
The Commission points to the number of Palestinian children killed during the war and assumes intent. It cites the use of large munitions in densely populated areas apparently as proof that children were the target, rather than acknowledging the reality that Hamas deliberately embedded itself within civilian areas in order to use the people of Gaza, including children, as human shields.
As has been the practice in much Western media coverage throughout the conflict that Hamas initiated with the Oct 7 massacre, the BBC breathlessly reported it, without mentioning until paragraph eight that the body’s three-person panel “does not officially speak for the UN”.
The old Carl Sagan axiom – extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – appears lost on the panel. The report claims that Israel targeted Palestinian children in Gaza directly by shooting at their vital organs using precision weapons, such as quadcopter drones (yes, really) and snipers, and by using high-impact weapons in strikes on residential buildings, schools, and displacement camps crowded with children.
And yet, despite being the most broadcast war of all time, the evidence that is actually provided for such bold claims is extraordinarily thin. Of course, for the usual suspects, this is enough: there’s nothing so devilish about the Jewish state that they won’t swallow it.
Then there’s the charge of genocide made by what the BBC calls an “expert panel”. This charge isn’t even claimed by the disgraced ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who sought arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes. Genocide, after all, has a specific meaning in international law and requires demonstrable intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.
The threshold was deliberately set high. It is not satisfied merely because a war costs the lives of a large number of civilians, however awful those deaths may be.
For decades, the UN has displayed a remarkable capacity to reserve its greatest indignation for Israel while relegating genuinely catastrophic abuses elsewhere to the diplomatic margins. Year after year, Israel attracts more country-specific resolutions at the General Assembly and Human Rights Council than the rest of the world combined, while the mass internment of Uyghurs in China, the slaughter in Syria, the devastation of Sudan and the systematic starvation of civilians in conflicts from Ethiopia to Yemen struggle to command any institutional energy.
The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item devoted exclusively to Israel – a distinction enjoyed by no other country on earth, including North Korea, Iran and Russia. Even former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged the UN had produced a “disproportionate volume of resolutions, reports and conferences criticising Israel”.
I encountered this phenomenon during my own time at the United Nations. It was impossible for any Israeli to secure a senior appointment in the organisation, no matter how well qualified. Israel is the only country of its political and economic weight never to have held a position at Assistant Secretary-General level (roughly a two-star general equivalent) or above. I also encountered cases of UN staff and contractors self-censoring on issues related to Israel for fear of being accused of anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias, as damaging an accusation as one of racism.
But by far the worst example of this bias is embodied by UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, some of whose staff have been accused of being directly involved in the Oct 7 attack on Israel.
As recently as 2024, the UK maintained a longstanding position of condemning the UN’s hostility towards the world’s only Jewish state. Successive British governments rejected the Commission of Inquiry’s open-ended mandate and criticised its obsessive focus on Israel. But that consensus has been overturned by a Labour government more ideologically and politically sympathetic to this excessive level of scrutiny, or more in hock to special interest groups as obsessively hostile to Israel as the UN is.
The tragedy is that, while the UN has rightly attracted condemnation from informed critics, it has somehow retained an almost sacrosanct halo among much of the wider public. To many, the UN remains the ultimate authority in international affairs. That reverence allows weak evidence, activist assumptions and ideological predispositions to be laundered into accepted wisdom.
The UN’s disproportionate focus on Israel has long ceased to be a curiosity of UN procedure. It has become a pathology that distorts priorities, consumes diplomatic bandwidth and allows some of the world’s worst regimes to escape meaningful scrutiny by sheltering in the comforting consensus of anti-Israel indignation. It has also become a cottage industry, with networks inside the UN acting in concert with well-organised bad actors like Qatar and Turkey to sustain a relentless momentum of anti-Israeli attacks.
Many casual observers may believe the Commission when it claims to be defending vulnerable children. In reality, by substituting ideology for evidence and prejudice for impartiality, it undermines the credibility of international law itself. And, in the process, demonises Israel, Israelis, and Jews at large as bloodthirsty child killers.
The UN should pay attention. This is the kind of abuse that has drawn the ire of the US, which is withholding its UN dues and has sent the organisation spiralling towards budgetary collapse. Unless the UN gets its house in order and brings these rogue agencies and commissions to heel, António Guterres may not have much left to hand over to his successor at the end of this year.
