The U.N.’s Manufactured Scapegoat: Exposing the COI’s False Case Against Israel

When tragedy strikes, people often look for someone to blame. But when the wrongdoer doesn’t fit a preferred narrative, some manufacture a scapegoat instead. In its most recent report, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (COI) does exactly that.

The COI’s playbook is nothing new: Dust off old, discredited allegations, repackage them as fresh findings, and level them once again at its favorite target, Israel.

The COI’s false accusations start before the report even begins – in its title: “‘The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed’: Israel’s Deliberate Targeting of Palestinian Children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory Since 7 October 2023.”

For a report presumably built around Israel’s “deliberate targeting” of children, a surprisingly small fraction – a meager 13 pages of the 94-page document – is actually dedicated to “examples” of such alleged targeting.

But what is “deliberate targeting”? The COI does not say. Rather, the COI intentionally misconstrues facts and omits critical context in an attempt to label tragic civilian deaths as the deliberate targeting of children.

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We’ve filed a response with the U.N. exposing the COI’s manipulation and drawing a clear line between fact and fiction that it so irresponsibly blurred. Our response makes the following points:

The COI describes incidents of children’s deaths in Gaza and then accuses Israel of intentionally targeting Palestinian children and defying international law. But what the Report leaves out is just as telling as what it includes. The Report tells a story of senseless and illegal violence. Not mentioned are the warnings given by Israel to civilian populations, the strategic military value of certain targets, and Hamas’s well-known use of human and child shields in an awful attempt to protect terrorist installations.

For example, the COI’s cited instances of “deliberate targeting” include a 16-year-old boy shot and killed by Israeli soldiers, a five-year-old child injured when a grenade was thrown into a crowded house, and 170 children who tragically died in Israeli airstrikes. But there’s much more left out that tells the full story.

The COI intentionally ignored key facts: the explosive the 16-year-old boy threw at Israeli forces moments before his death, the phone calls Israel made warning the five-year-old’s family to evacuate, and the evacuation orders Israel issued to civilians before the airstrikes.

After seeing the entire picture, these examples are hardly demonstrative of Israeli forces deliberately targeting children.

Further, the report is little more than a copy-paste of false accusations from past COI reports, including its report on sexual and gender-based violence. The COI has simply rebranded old claims to keep pushing the same narrative under a new label.

Our response offers the following examples:

The allegation of strip searches that was extensively covered in the March 2025 report on sexual, gender-based, and reproductive violence, for example, is now covered in the new Report as a crime against Palestinian children. Paragraph 258 of the new Report posits that Israeli soldiers made fun of Palestinian women’s lingerie—something that has nothing to do with the alleged targeting of children. Yet, the Report lumps these disparate activities together in a poor attempt to concoct a new accusation. Moreover, the COI had already made this false accusation in its report on sexual and gender-based violence. Now the new Report discusses it under the heading “Dehumanization of Palestinian childhood.”

Rebranding like this is both dishonest and unprofessional – and it doesn’t stop there. The COI also relabels the targeting of hospitals and schools – previously discussed in a separate report – as not only “deliberate targeting” of children but also ignoring critical context: Hamas was operating a network of tunnels beneath those hospitals and stockpiling weapons in schools it had converted into military installations.

The COI’s serious allegations against Israel lack any credible evidence, and the ACLJ refuses to let these baseless accusations go unanswered. As an “independent” commission, the COI is barred from selectively applying international law – yet that is precisely what it has done, once again.

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