The United Nations has released a report accusing Israel of committing “genocidal acts” and sexual violence as part of its war strategy in Gaza. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the allegations unfounded, biased, and lacking all credibility.

Observers noted that the report’s unverified conclusions were also quite dangerous, as they will further fuel already exaggerated anti-Israel sentiment around the world.

Unable to prove that Israel was actually committing genocide, ie. trying to kill all the Palestinians, the UN commission instead focused on the fact that the war in Gaza had contributed to an increase in maternity deaths, and therefore amounted to a “crime of extermination.” Of course, similar phenomena occur in just about every war zone, and most of those are not labeled “genocides,” but are rather seen as the unfortunate inevitable consequences of armed conflict.

The accusation of sexual violence was even more absurd.

Israel’s UN mission responded: “The [Israeli Defence Forces] has concrete directives … and policies which unequivocally prohibit such misconduct.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the UN’s Human Rights Council as an “antisemitic, corrupt, terrorist-supporting, and irrelevant body,” emphasizing that Israel’s withdrawal from the council was deliberate.

Netanyahu noted that the council’s report failed to highlight Hamas’s war crimes, even as it made false accusations against Israel. “This is not the Human Rights Council – this is the Council of Blood Libels,” said the Israeli premier.

Opposition leader Benny Gantz also denounced the report, calling it “deceitfully false.” Gantz said even with all Israel had seen in the past 16 months, this marked a new low for the UN and its peddling of antisemitic libels. He stressed that the only “genocidal acts” and “sexual violence” to occur in the area in the past 16 months occurred during the Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023. But the UN Human Rights Council did not see fit to focus on those.

Gantz said the true aim of the report was to try to draw moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, which is an entirely false narrative.

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