CLICK HERE FOR KEY EXCERPTS

Event introduction

Sharon Kuper: All right, thank you all for coming tonight. I’m sorry about the delay. We actually did have five rehearsals. I just want to actually acknowledge that everybody doing the AB are all volunteers, their community volunteers that have been doing this for decades unappreciated and unacknowledged. So, thank you. So, welcome everybody. I’m Sharon Kuper Holtz and even saying my name out loud is actually a revelation as so many generous will tell you I’ve refused to give my surname. I’ve even asked them to use they press me for a surname—I’d amaze them—which I haven’t used for like 36 years and then shorten it to Cooper half of the time. So, here we are.

I’ve come out of hiding. Didn’t want to draw attention to myself, but here I am. Thank you for joining us for this important world first debate on the accusation of genocide against Israel. We’ve all heard the allegations being screamed by clueless protesters desperate for a cause, but also repeated by global media, NGOs and governments. The evidence they cite is the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory which concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces have committed and continue to commit genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Genocide.

We are a very educated, generous, fair and experienced community. And unfortunately, our experience does involve genocide. Real genocide. Not the nearly defined label that a terror organization provides through smashing borders and kept training sadistic murderers, tortures, and hostage taking while the population celebrates. Not the sort of genocide that they could stop by disarming and surrendering the hostages. Not the sort of genocide where the population is warned of military targets by leaflets, SMS, online maps, and provided escape corridors.

Not the kind of genocide where more than one ton of aid per person is delivered to ensure nobody dies of starvation. Not the kind of genocide where children are vaccinated. Not the kind of genocide that boasts the lowest civilian to combatant fatality rate in the history of urban warfare. So, a few weeks ago, when Patty the Irishman realized my husband and I were Jewish while we chatted in a supermarket in Avenue, he got so emboldened by his moral superiority that he told me he was sorry Hitler didn’t finish the job.

And when I took out my phone and repeated what he said to me to provide him the opportunity to deny it, he doubled down and he said, “Bring back, Hitler.” And soon afterwards, he told me that he was going to put an effing bullet in my effing head. That level of self-righteous hatred and justification for violence and even murder lies in the mistaken belief that Jews and Israelis are all uniquely evil and that we have been found to be genocidal baby killers. My father survived the Holocaust, but his fathers, sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews were taken to Auschwitz.

Today, 80 years later, our global Jewish population is still not recovered to pre genocide numbers. So, let us scrutinize that Commission of Inquiry report that makes such an egregious accusation and the evidence they used to justify. I ask that you recognize that it took a great deal of courage for Chris Sidoti to come here tonight to face us. He didn’t have to. He already commands the world stage through his role on the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory. Global media chase him for his comments in quotes. He consults with NOS’s and governments.

So coming here and facing 350 hostile Zionists is no promotion for him. So I ask you tonight not to disrupt, not to jeer, you don’t have to agree, but we’ve all come here to listen and let us have a very meaningful conversation, exchange ideas and explore some very highly contentious issues and maybe, just maybe, it will be cathartic and satisfying for us all. Now, thank you all for being here. Here’s my husband, Mark, to tell you about the three panelists.

Panelist introductions

Mark Holtz: Thank you all. It’s always a very hard act to follow. I’d like to introduce the participants. So the debate can’t happen without Chris Sidoti who is a human rights lawyer and an advocate with over 50 years working in official institutions and non-government organizations at national and international levels. Since July 21, he’s been a commissioner on the United Nations Human Rights Council’s independent international Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem and Israel. And if we had another 3 hours, we’d discuss the word independent start.

He is also a member of the special advisory council for Myanmar and was a member of the United Nation human rights council independent international fact finding mission United Nations [Unintelligible] department on Myanmar 2017 to 2019. He currently works from Sydney, Australia. He’s been the Australian human rights commissioner and Australian law reform commissioner. Now the other panelist Dr. Brian Cox is a senior fellow at the McDonald Laurier Institute in Canada. He taught international law at Cornell Law School up until this year.

In 2018 he retired from the US military after 22 years of military service including seven of those as a military lawyer. His combat deployments include Iraq up until 2004 as a combat camera operator and Afghanistan in 13 and 14 as an operational law attorney in that field then as chief international and operational law for regional command east. He served as a military prosecutor, a federal prosecutor, a brigade judge advocate, administrative law attorney, legal assistance attorney, and a military magistrate while he was a judge advocate.

His military awards, decorations, and qualifications include a Ranger tag, which he’s wearing tonight, senior parachutters badge, bronze star medal, NATO medal, and basic and advanced collateral damage estimate certification. He holds a JSD degree from Cornell Law School, a master’s of journalism from Carlton University, and an LLM from Queens Law and undergraduate law degrees from the University of North Carolina. well, we’ll clap. That’s a very good I’m sorry, Chris, we didn’t clap after you because I don’t know. Okay. and okay and most importantly a mediator tonight is no slouch himself most yes as important Dr.

Glenn Colitz is an international lawyer, a defense analyst and an academic in law and security. He served in the ADF, the Australian Defense Force, including an operational and legal roles in East Timor and Afghanistan and with a special operations task group and as a military prosecutor. Most recently, he’s been investigating Russian practices in Ukraine. tonight. And this is important, he wears a kipah in special forces camouflage, which he and his colleagues wore at commemorations for the Jewish Australian commander, who I think was a Mount Scopus boy, Greg Sher, who was killed in action in Afghanistan.

Now I also want to say that the security you saw tonight was like immense. This event could not have happened without CSG and everyone at CSG, they are volunteers. They’re standing protecting our community because without them, we don’t have a community. And things like a metal detector, this is, you know, unusual. And I suppose Chris can see what it’s like for Jews living in Melbourne or Australia right now. So, thank you everyone. Look, I want to say something today. Brian choked up a bit when I’m joking. I’m down during our presentation today, Jack, because of him and his lost soldiers. Lost. Let’s keep that in both.

Glenn Colitz: Yeah, let’s keep these guys in. Okay. now for the moderator cracking the whip. As moderator tonight, I don’t propose to interject. It’ll be our learned speakers deserve to be deserve to be heard. Having said that, my questions are very clearly about the law and the facts. Now I like a good anecdote like anybody else. In fact, I told that to you last night over a few of Monakum Malcolm’s whiskeys and some of my jokes were true to me. but if we want anecdotes, we can go to the National Press Club. We’ll watch the ABC. Tonight is about facts and the law. Thanks. Yeah.

Well, on that note, I’ll hand over to our speakers for their opening addresses. We’ll start with you, Chris.

Opening Statements

Chris Sidoti: Thanks very much, Glenn. Shalom alechem, salam aleykum. Peace be with you. It is one of the things that keeps me going that the three peoples of the book have this longing for peace. They wish it to people within their own communities, but we need to wish it to each other as well. In coming tonight. thank you Sharon and Mark for your comments, but you know, I don’t feel particularly courageous. You know, we’re Australians. In coming tonight, I come in the hope that in some way this can contribute to peace for us individually, for our particular community, and for the broader community.

I know that this is promoted as a debate and I understand why, but I need to say that I haven’t come here for a debate. You know, a debate for me is a game. I did debating when I was at school, and that was a bloody long time ago. It’s a game. What we’re discussing tonight is not a game. It’s far too serious. and debate has winners and losers. There’s not going to be any winners and losers tonight. I’m I’m not going to convince a single person in this room and nor is Brian or any of you going to convince me. Why I came tonight is because I need to listen and others need to listen.

Not in an expectation that anybody is going to convince us of anything but that perhaps we will go away with at least some insight into the other perspectives, the other views. So for me tonight is not a debate. I’m going to be listening. I’ll be responding of course. I’ll explain why we have thought what we have thought and why I think what I think not just the anonymous we of a Commission of Inquiry but the I that is personal that’s what I’ve come for and I’m very happy to have this opportunity to do so and I hope that in some way our gathering tonight contributes to peace

Brian Cox: Thank you, Glenn. And thank you, Chris. And especially thank you for joining us today. Today, October 8, 2026, just yesterday, we commemorate the third anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attacks. And during remarks today earlier in the day at AJAC headquarters here in Melbourne, I observed that October 7 is one of those rare days in history where there’s a before this one day and a world after this one day. It joins September 11th, the attack on Pearl Harbor as just examples that come to mind of one specific day, specific activities on that day where there’s a very distinguishable world that exists before that day and after that day.

And we carry the pain and the loss of October 7th every day, but especially on the anniversary, yesterday was the third anniversary. One of the things that stands out to me, one of the reasons there is a world before the October 7th terrorist attacks and the world after is that the sentiment that is now so popular, the anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and even anti-Jewish sentiment that has become so prevalent and such a feature of our everyday lives on that day and shortly thereafter transitioned from being fringe and marginal to mainstream and a part of our everyday existence and it started on October 7th.

And it’s useful to keep that framing in mind because one of the primary tools that has been used to justify the rampant anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment and indeed anti-western sentiment since then is international law. That’s my focus. That’s my specialty as Mark indicated with the overview of my background. I and Glenn the moderator, we’ve spent an entire career practicing this law, this body of law, international law, especially the law involving armed conflict, either as combat soldiers or as military members or as legal advisers.

My background is fairly unique as far as I can tell in terms of engaging in public discourse. I see international law as it exists in doctrine as I spent 15 years as a combat soldier applying before I became a military lawyer and spent seven years advising on. And then as I retired in 2018 after 22 years of service, I’ve spent my career now, my third career, first combat soldier, then military lawyer, and now international law professor, bringing to the public forum my perspective as a longtime practitioner on international law involving armed conflict.

I appreciate that Chris has agreed, as Sharon suggested, has agreed to come here for this debate or for this conversation. Whether it’s framed as a debate or a conversation, as Chris said, and I agree, it’s an opportunity to listen. This crowd, I am certain, will not be disruptive. It will not be disrespectful. Even if every person in this room, I’m not sure that’s the case, but even if every person in this room disagrees with every word Chris says, this room has been the people who are here for this conversation will not be disruptive because we do want to listen.

What I bring to the conversation is a different perspective and a different approach than Chris has. But what I will bring is an explanation for why I believe there are inherent and systemic deficiencies in the UN Commission of Inquiry’s work. And this UN Commission of Inquiries work is relied on by the media generally, by governments, by courts, by administrative review tribunals as evidence that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza among other violations of international law.

I disagree and I bring to this conversation or debate, however it’s framed, 22 years of experience applying this law and practice and that is the perspective that I bring to this conversation here and to my public engagements and discourse beyond this room. Thanks.

Debate

Glenn Colitz: I’m going to start with the questions now and I’m going to pose the questions to Chris and then invite Brian to respond. So the first question is the commission reports conclude that Israel has committed four of the five acts listed in the genocide convention. Can you explain what factors you relied on to establish genocidal intent since this is the most challenging aspect of the genocide inquiry? 

Chris Sidoti: Thanks Glenn. I need to split up your question in parts because genocidal act is not the same as genocidal purpose and the evidence for some is different from the evidence for others.

The genocide convention has like most criminal laws two components to the definition of genocide. The first is the act part and the second is the intent part. That’s no different to what we find in our criminal law in this country and most criminal laws. The convention defines five categories of genocidal act. Of those five categories, our commission, as Glenn has indicated, found that four categories of act had occurred during the course of the war in Gaza since 7 October 2023. The fifth category had not.

The fifth category is the removal of children from one group and placing them with another group defined by racial, religious, ethnic, national terms. Just by way of an aside, my practical introduction to the law of genocide covered that fifth genocidal act.

I was a commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission on the inquiry into the separation of indigenous children from their families. In the 1990s and on the basis of that category alone, the removal of children, the placement with another racial ethnic group, we found then that the policies of separation of indigenous children in this country constituted genocide. That category was not present in Gaza but the other four categories were. The question of intent is different and it is particularly different when we come to the crime of genocide. There are two elements to intent for genocide.

The first is an intent to do the acts themselves. But the second is what is called genocidal purpose. The acts must be carried out with the purpose of destroying a defined group in whole or in part. Both of those aspects are important, in whole or in part. The definition does not require a purpose to destroy a particular group in its totality, but the part is sufficient but is not very clear as to how that is actually defined or applied in practice. So that’s the law that we were dealing with so far as the four categories of act are concerned. We drew on all of the various types of evidence that are available.

We drew on eyewitness evidence. Those eyewitnesses could have been in some respects victims who survive. They can be medical doctors, nursing staff who were present. They can be international humanitarian workers who were present. So anyone who is capable of being able to describe on the basis of what they saw what had happened.

We also had access to an enormous volume of digital evidence and this is very different from other conflicts. The volume of digital evidence that is available. Both Israeli soldiers and the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants seem to have obsessions with photographing or videoing or audio recording themselves doing acts and posting them online. We have over 17,000 pieces of digital evidence. We have to verify it and we only accept that evidence that is verified. Some of the evidence is very easily disposed of.

There were some early videos for example that were posted online. When we did the analysis of them, we found that they were in fact videos of events that took place in northern Iraq in about 2017. And so of course that was discarded, but we have a lot of that digital evidence. We have satellite photographic material. We do not come to conclusions unless we ourselves have conducted an investigation. We do not rely on media reports and we do not rely on information that is given to us unless the information can be categorized as firsthand information that is primary evidence or is digital evidence that we ourselves can confirm.

We, in fact, I should indicate came very late to the conclusion in our genocide report and that’s because we had to conduct the investigations ourselves. You know it was September last year a little over a year ago now that we produced that report almost 2 years after this current escalation of fighting occurred. So it was not something that we rushed into. We were not prepared to make any comments about the issue of genocide and didn’t until such time as we were satisfied that our own investigations were sufficient to form conclusions. I’m sorry I’m longwinded but you asked a long question Glenn.

The last thing I will go to is the question of genocidal purpose because that’s the most significant issue and that is the most difficult issue. You know, there have only been two cases of state responsibility for genocide that have gone before the International Court of Justice. You know, two cases in almost 80 years. And so this is not something that is well developed in case law and the law in fact is in many respects still evolving. But one of the reasons why there have only been two cases is because of the difficulty of establishing genocidal purpose.

Now I talked a minute ago about the work I had done on the separation of indigenous children. In that case it was pretty easy in the end because we had all of these official statements of policy coming out of federal and state governments in this country during the 1930s and the 1940s. In the end it did not prove to be particularly difficult. But normally there is no smoking gun. There is no policy statement that you can rely on. There are often indicators.

But genocidal purpose can be established not just by the smoking gun, the direct conclusive evidence such as we found on the removal of children. It can also be established by what in our legal system we call circumstantial evidence. In the international system it’s generally referred to as inference, but it’s pretty much the same as circumstantial evidence. Inference and the test of inference is a very high test. According to the International Court of Justice, to form a conclusion that the purpose is genocidal on the basis of inference requires that inference be the only reasonable inference available.

That’s a really high test. It’s a test in fact that in my opinion is higher than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. You know you can say you can have four or five possible inferences that you can draw from circumstantial evidence and you can conclude I have no doubt that this is the inference that we must draw. But in the case of genocidal purpose, it has to be the only reasonable inference, not just the one that we have no reasonable doubt about. And so it’s a very high test. And that also was one of the reasons why it took us so long to come to the conclusion.

Now I can go later into some of the factors that we took into account specifically, but the question Glenn asked was a general one about our approach. And so I wanted to give you the detail of our approach. I should make the last comment. One of the difficulties that we face is that the Israeli authorities do not cooperate with our commission in any way. That’s not unusual. Russia doesn’t cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. Belarus doesn’t cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry on Belarus. Myanmar didn’t cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry I was a member of dealing with Myanmar.

It’s standard practice. so it’s not unusual, but it does make the job more difficult and it pushes us back to relying more on inference than on other factors when you can’t get access to the information in the hands of the state that we’re investigating. One of the bit of ironies I think is that the State of Israel not cooperating with our work and all these other states as well, Russia and Belarus and Myanmar and the rest. It means that the commissions of investigation are hampered to the extent of getting all the detail that the state under investigation has. And that’s where there is a restriction in what we’re able to do.

So we have to rely much more on inference under those circumstances.

Brian Cox: Well, I agree with Chris that the most difficult aspect of establishing genocide is genocidal intent. And I agree that it must be the only reasonable inference. I disagree that the commission has met its burden for establishing genocidal intent and certainly that it’s the only reasonable inference. And if we read from the Genocide Convention, as Chris paraphrased, Article Two establishes that it’s any genocide is the act of committing any of the five enumerated acts with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnical racial or religious group.

So assuming Palestinians apply if actually exists as one of those four groups the intent, the only reasonable inference, would have to be the intent to destroy the Palestinians in whole or in part as such. The intent to destroy Hamas or to end the enduring security threat posed by Hamas is not genocide, it’s war. Now, if we refer to the Commission of Inquiry’s conference room paper report from September 2025, it’s the first time, as far as I’m aware, in a major report that the commission purported to establish genocidal intent.

And we have in this report, in paragraph 167, the report says that they relied on several statements by Israeli officials that advocated for collective punishment against the Palestinian people as a whole or the population of Gaza in particular. Some statements recognized that there was a difference between civilians and combatants, but urged that all Gazans should be punished for the actions of the militants on 7 October 2023. That’s what the commission says in its report in September 2025.

And then it draws on a series of statements made by Israeli officials, government officials purportedly to establish that the intent is to destroy the Palestinian population in whole or in part as such. For example, we’ll come back to that one. There was a statement from Defense Minister Gallant who said that we are fighting human animals and this was very soon after the October 7th attacks. This is purportedly so Yoav Gallant on 9 October 2023 said that we are fighting human animals. It’s clear from the context of Gallant’s statements that what he meant on October 9th, 2023 is that Hamas, who Israel is fighting, are human animals.

And after looking at the brutality, the intentional deliberate brutality of the atrocities committed on October 7th, he can be forgiven, I would suggest, for suggesting or describing Hamas as human animals. But it’s clear from the context of his statements that he did not mean the Palestinian population in whole or in part as such. 

We also have a statement in paragraph 172 from Prime Minister Netanyahu made on 3rd October 2023 who says remember what Amalek did to you. And the commission, the report goes on to say, the commission notes that invoking Amalek in his speech, Netanyahu strengthened the idea that Israel’s war in Gaza is akin to the holy war of total annihilation commanded against the Amalachites. Thank you. 

If we go to that, if we go to that statement from Netanyahu that I have here in November 2023, he does say this is a letter from Prime Minister Netanyahu to our soldiers and commanders in the Swords of Iron. November 6, November 5th, 2023. He does say remember what Amalek did to you. In the line immediately above that, in the line immediately above that, he says, “The current fight against the murderers of Hamas is another chapter in the generations long story of our national resistance, resilience.” Apologies. One line later, he says, and this is a repeated theme that the commission ignores.

And I’ll refer to an even earlier statement from Netanyahu where he also mentioned, remember Amalek. He says in this statement, in the name of those who were injured and killed on October 7th, that’s paraphrasing. Here’s a quote. On their behalf, we have gone to war. The purpose, and this is important, the purpose of which is to destroy the brutal and murderous Hamas ISIS enemy, bring back our hostages, and restore the security to our country, our citizens, and our children. Right after he says, “remember Amalek.” 

What shows up in the report is remember Amalek but not the actual purpose, stated purpose of the conflict: end this enduring security threat posed by Hamas and repatriate all hostages. He also said, Prime Minister Netanyahu on October 28th, 2023—his is just a about a week before the statement that is cited by the UN Commission of Inquiry—remember what Amalek did to you. We remember and we fight.

They could have drawn from this as well. What they skipped, also in this statement—this is the second stage of the war coming up, the ground invasion. The goals of which are clear: destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities and bringing the captives back home. This is also not in the Commission of Inquiry report. Two years later—one year ago yesterday— commemorating the second anniversary of October 7th, Prime Minister Netanyahu once again [said] we will continue to act to achieve all the aims of the war: return all the hostages, which has now been achieved, and destroy the Hamas regime, and ensure that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel. 

What the commission has done—just like Amnesty International, just like Human Rights Watch, just like the International Association of Genocide Scholars, just like random genocide scholars that are that provide these opinions in public discourse—they’ve taken snippets of statements from elected officials to support the inference that the goal of the combat military operations is to destroy the Palestinian population in whole or in part as such, while ignoring the actual stated intent that has been consistent since the very beginning to repatriate all hostages, and to end the enduring security threat posed by Hamas. That is not genocide. That is war.

And if we stick to that same report, paragraph 176, after going through a laundry list of cherrypicked selected statements from Israeli government officials, we have the commission considers that these statements by Israeli officials are reasonably interpreted as statements expressing an intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza and they have been acted on as such by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip. They are direct evidence of dolus specialis which is the genocidal intent that’s necessary.

But what they’ve done is ignore—you will not find anywhere in the commission’s report—the stated intent of repatriating all hostages and ending the security threat posed by Hamas because that is war and it doesn’t support the only reasonable inference of genocide. 

Chris Sedoti: Can I just make a couple of comments? we don’t have a lot of time not wait to the end, because it’s directly related to what Brian has said. Just one correction first. Human Rights Watch has not made any comment about whether Gaza constitutes genocide or not. So you can name the rest, Brian, but you need to leave Human Rights Watch out. They haven’t done it. Thank you.

And correct. Yeah. No, it’s a very sensitive issue, that one. Just two comments only and I will be brief.

Firstly, we as Brian quoted look to the issue of the comments that were made by Israeli leaders in relation to the actions that took place as a result of those comments. We did not in our conclusions rely on those comments alone. We did in fact provide context for one of the most serious of Netanyahu’s comments and talked about how he qualified what he said later in the same statement. But it seemed to us that his qualification was not convincing, shall we say, in relation to the statement that preceded it because the actions of the Israeli military was very much in relation to the first one.

But I just want the main thing I want to do is raise a legal complication and that is that the courts have said that a genocidal purpose can exist at the same time as other motivation. They distinguish between purpose and motivation. Now it’s not clear what that distinction means. But one of the factors for us was that if we accept that the goal, the word goal doesn’t appear in the Genocide Convention. If we accept that the goal of the Israeli authorities in Gaza has been the destruction of Hamas, that does not preclude the possibility of genocide being the strategy by which that goal is going to be attained. And that is an issue.

The fighting, the strategy can be undertaken in such a way in our view of the law that it can coexist with a goal of eliminating Hamas and there were a number of factors which we can go into later that induced us to come to that conclusion. I can, I’m happy to deal with that but I just want to clarify that one point at the moment.

Glenn Colitz: Let’s move on to the second question. We don’t have a lot of time. So that, oh yeah, right. So thank you. So how do ICJ provisional measures factor into your assessment of whether Israel is responsible for genocide? 

Chris Sidoti: In most respects they don’t. The provisional measures don’t relate to a finding of genocide. And there has been a lot of misstatement as to what the provisional measures actually said. Where the provisional measures were important though, I must say, is about other issues because the Israeli authorities have not complied with the provisional measures and they’re bound to do so under international law. But they have not.

But the provisional measures really don’t factor significantly into whether or not genocide has occurred. Where they are relevant, and I’ve said this repeatedly publicly, relates to the responsibilities of third states, including Australia, that the provisional measures at least raise the possibility in imposing them that there is a risk of genocide. They don’t address the question of whether there is genocide or not but they raise the question of a risk of genocide and that triggers the obligation to prevent under the genocide convention.

The genocide convention has three categories of crime: committing the genocide, preventing genocide, and inciting genocide. And these three things are not dependent on each other. And so the provisional measures are important as triggering an obligation to prevent, but they do not in my view, in the commission’s view, say anything about whether genocide has occurred or not. Not yet.

Brian Cox: Once again, I agree with Chris to a degree that the report, the Commission of Inquiry report finds that the provisional measures indicated by the International Court of Justice do—the report itself finds it—that they are evidence that there is a serious risk that genocide is being committed. And in fact, if I can refer back once again to the Commission of Inquiry conference room paper from September of 2025, it cites in paragraph 247, the report does a pretty long and extensive explanation, an excerpt of what the provisional the ICJ has indicated of provisional measures.

And then two paragraphs later in paragraph 249, the commission says that these provisional measures have put all states on notice of a serious risk that genocide was being or would be committed. As such, the duty to prevent genocide was triggered due to the actual or constructive knowledge and this is important, as we’ll come back to this actual or constructive knowledge of the immediate plausibility that genocide was being or was about to be committed. Now, this is an understanding or an interpretation of ICJ provisional measures that is not uncommon in public discourse.

I wasn’t surprised to find it in the Commission of Inquiry’s work because it is so common, but it is as false as it is common. And that’s because ICJ provisional measures do not simply do not indicate that there is a plausible risk of genocide. And I will explain why, but you don’t have to just take it from me. We can also hear it from an interview, an excerpt of an interview from the, who was at the time, that the initial provisional measures were indicated. Joan Donoghue was the president of the International Court of Justice and she explained in an interview for BBC HARDTalk why it is that the understanding that provisional measures published by the ICJ do not relate to a plausible risk of genocide. So we’ll hear from Joan Donoghue and then I’ll expand further on her comments. 

BBC Host: Please, would it be fair to say, and I’m no lawyer, and many people watching and listening will not be lawyers, but would it be fair to say that the key point that you made your initial order and ruling upon was whether or not there was a plausible case that should be taken on by the court of genocide in the case of Israel’s actions in Gaza after October 7. And you quite clearly decided that there was a plausible case. Is it right to say that’s at the heart of what you decided? 

Joan Donoghue: You know, I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility, but the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant in this case South Africa. So the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court. It then looked at the facts as well, but it did not decide and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media. It didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible. It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But it the shorthand that often appears which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide isn’t what the court decided. 

Brian Cox: Joan explains that it hinges, the provisional measures hinge on rights and not and therefore you can’t discern from provisional measures that there is a plausible risk of genocide. What she doesn’t explain is why that is. And so I’m going to explain why it is, very briefly.

If we refer to Article 41 of the ICJ of the International Court of Justice Statute Article 41, the court shall have the power to indicate if it considers that circumstances so require any provisional measures which ought to be taken to preserve the respective rights of either party, to preserve the respective rights. Now, if we go back to the Genocide Convention, back to the intent element, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such. There’s nothing in here about rights.

And there’s nothing in here, Article 41 of the ICJ statute about genocidal intent. And so when the court indicated provisional measures, it didn’t have to address genocidal intent at all. Not at all. There was not, there’s not a single portion of provisional measures that reaches intent because intent is on the merits. And provisional measures are based on rights. So they never once have to consider whether it’s plausible that genocide is being committed. Just whether rights can be protected by indicating provisional measures.

If we go back to the way that this is treated within the UN Commission of Inquiry once again as such the duty to prevent genocide was triggered due to the actual or constructive knowledge of the immediate plausibility that genocide was being or was about to be committed. That is not what the ICJ provisional measures suggested or indicated. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can take Joan Donoghue’s word for it. And you can take the word of the ICJ Statute, Article 41, where it says that rights to be rights can be protected by indicating provisional measures and that it has nothing to do with establishing genocidal intent.

Chris Sedoti: And my view is that our paragraph is entirely consistent with then President Donoghue’s comments. 

Brian Cox: Okay. Good.

Glenn Colitz: Question three. I’m just noting the time. All right. what sources did the commission consult to develop the standards for war crimes such as distinction, proportionality, and feasible precautions in the attack as well as for crimes against humanity and genocide? 

Chris Sidoti: The international law is very clear on these issues and you know, I think that Brian and I are completely at one in describing what the law is. So what sources did we consult? We consulted the standard international law sources as laid out in the Statute of the International Court of Justice and other international documents.

The treaties, the jurisprudence, customary international law. Those principles of distinction, proportionality, necessity and so forth are well established in the law. I think that the issue in discussion tonight, the disagreement between Brian and me is not about what the law says, it’s about how the commission is applying it. 

Brian Cox: I like saying this because it’s true and I really appreciate the respectful conversation that we’re having. I agree with Chris to a degree. So, and Chris mentioned distinction, proportionality, feasible precautions in the attack. For many people, these are words.

For someone like me who spent 22 years in military service, it’s more than words. It’s doctrine. And you can’t just put a word on a page and then say that is the rule. The rule has context and it has substance. And what I find as I read the UN Commission of Inquiry’s work is that it fails to articulate an identifiable formulation of specific rules of the law of armed conflict. And the reason that’s important is because if you don’t draw on the actual rules, then you can make up the content and then you can make up the allegation that it’s been violated. That’s my anecdotal approach. But here is the empirical approach.

Going to the conference room paper that was most recently published from the Commission of Inquiry in June 2026. I’m just going to read a couple of excerpts for where the commission describes these very important and very doctrinal and very central rules of the law of armed conflict that Chris mentioned. Paragraph 180.

The commission has found in its previous report, and it cites to the report from September 2025 that I just referred to, that the Israeli security forces burnt or demolished schools as listed in below in this paragraph, many of which were at the time were empty at the time that such destruction was deliberate and unnecessary and constituted and here we violation of the principles of necessity, distinction, precaution, and proportionality under international humanitarian law. So there’s just a naming of these rules, but without an articulation or formulation of what the rules are.

If we go later to paragraph 284, the commission finds that Israeli security forces intended to target the building in question even though they knew or ought to have known that children were present, violating the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions. And then on the next page, paragraph 298, there’s a violation of the rules of distinction, proportionality in relation to pediatric and neonatal facilities. So they’re words, violation of the distinction rule, violation of the proportionality rule, but no context for what the rules are.

If we were to refer to an information paper that was published by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs very early after October 7th. It was updated, I forget when it was initially published, but it was updated November 2nd, 2023. We find in here articulations of what the rules actually are. Distinction rule. The IDF only targets, that means direct an attack, against persons who are members of organized armed groups or civilians directly participating in hostilities and objects that qualify as military objectives for proportionality.

And this is very similar to the rule that’s found in a treaty that Israel has not ratified but is a matter of customary international law. The proportionality rule. It has not ratified additional protocol one of the 1949 Geneva conventions but this rule is found there. And this is again still from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs information paper. According to the proportionality rule, it is prohibited to carry out an attack when the expected incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects will be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

Now, I should have emphasized the expected incidental loss and the military the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated because the only way you can assess what the expected incidental loss was and what the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated was is to hear from or have direct evidence or at least some conclusive evidence of what the knowledge and intent of the personnel responsible for the attack was at the time. Now that’s how we apply it in doctrine and in practice. And although Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute, apologies, having technical difficulties here with the lapel mic.

Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but its military operations and its military doctrine are substantially similar to the rules, the war crimes that are found in the Rome Statute. Here’s one articulation that’s relevant—of the distinction rule. Intentionally, I’m going to emphasize the word intentionally. We’ll come back to that. Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is objects that are not military objectives. for the pro for the proportionality rule.

Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss… which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. The reason I found it fitting to read from a doctrinal source from Israel, the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, their information paper, and from the Rome Statute, is because these rules have content. And if you don’t include the content, then you’ve lost all context for whether these rules have been complied with if you’d name them.

The commission finds that the Israel security forces intended to target the building even though they knew or ought to have known that children were present, violating the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions. Without articulating what the rule is by extracting the context and the content, then it’s easy to reach that conclusion. That might be how a Commission of Inquiry assesses whether law of armed conflict has been complied with. That might be how NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc. assess the same.

That’s not how we assess it in practice and that’s not how the Israel Defense Force assesses it in practice. We actually apply the rules. And that starts by formulating and articulating the rules, applying the facts to the actual doctrine and reaching conclusions. If you don’t do that, you’re not actually assessing where the law of armed conflict is complied with. You’re just blowing smoke.

Glenn Colitz: Next question is, can you explain the connection between the use of explosive weapons in populated areas by Israel and the finding that Israel has committed genocide? 

Chris Sidoti: That’s a detailed question that I think is at the heart of it, Glenn, and it goes to the issue that I raised a few minutes ago about the strategy that was employed. And this is where these principles of necessity, distinction, proportionality and precaution are most relevant. Because the strategy employed by the Israeli military in Gaza has been a strategy of total destruction. That is just clear from the extent of the destruction that has occurred. And this is precisely the issue about the connection with the question of genocidal purpose. It is a strategy of total destruction. 

Now it may be that it is being done with the goal of destroying Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but the strategy has been from the beginning a strategy of total destruction. So something like 85% of the housing stock of Gaza has been destroyed. More than 90% of schools have been either totally destroyed or require substantial reconstruction to be usable. Hospitals in their entirety have been destroyed and most hospitals now are either operating on a partial basis in rubble or under canvas field hospitals.

This is what the strategy has been. Now, I don’t like making comparisons and I don’t make comparisons with one exception. It’s been mentioned already that I was a commissioner on the Commission of Inquiry. It’s called a fact finding mission, but a Commission of Inquiry on Myanmar. And one of the areas that we considered there was the expulsion or the operation against the Rohingya people in 2017-2018.

And we had to again address the question of genocide in that context. The Rohingya people fled, had the capacity to flee from Myanmar and in excess of 1 million of them did. Probably around about 7 or 800,000 Rohingya fled from Myanmar between August 2017 and the beginning of 2018. They were able to cross the border into Bangladesh and get themselves out of harm’s way. When Russia invaded Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians, I think it was 8 million, crossed the border into Poland and moved elsewhere into Western Europe.

With the fighting going on in Sudan between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Response Army, people have been fleeing into Chad and into other neighboring states, including Egypt. The situation in Gaza is different from all of those situations because the people had nowhere to go. That the fact that Egypt is refusing to admit them is, it is no more relevant than the fact, in fact less relevant than the fact that Israel is refusing to admit them. They had, they were prevented from going into Egypt and they were prevented from going into Israel.

And so unlike the Rohingya and the Ukrainians and the Sudanese and the Syrians who fled in their millions into Turkey, they had nowhere to go. Australia. [Audience member shouts asking if they should be admitted into Australia]. Yeah, we should. And that means that in a policy, a strategy of total destruction, 2.1 million people had no option but to move around within a very small territory. At this stage, at this stage now, those 2.1 million people are squeezed into a territory that is three times the local government area of the city of Melbourne. Three. Three times. 2.1 million people.

That’s the only possibility that they have at the moment in this period of an alleged ceasefire to escape from military force and even then that they are still being killed on a daily basis. So one of the relevant factors in response to your question, one of the significantly relevant factors is the inability of the people to escape from a military strategy of total destruction. And that is directly connected with the issue of genocidal purpose. 

Brian Cox: Thank you, Chris. Might I just please ask from the crowd, I appreciate how passionate everyone is. I am as well and I know Chris is as well. Please let’s maintain decorum.

Even if we disagree with what either Chris or with what I’m saying, please maintain decorum and allow him to speak. Please don’t interrupt. Please don’t Yeah. Yeah. Heckle. Thank you. from the crowd. It’s, this is an important conversation and we can’t hear from Chris and we’re not able to hear from me on the other side. if we are not open to dialogue. So please be respectful.

Thank you. The issue, I agree with Chris the in part, no I typically also avoid comparisons and while I recognize Chris’s comparison between Gaza and Myanmar what I’d like to focus on is the way that the report engages with the use by Israel of explosive weapons because in many ways, and this is something that certainly anyone who’s been in the military understands, has been into combat understands. It’s it’s almost cliche. We say it so often, but it’s so often necessary to say it. The enemy gets a vote. The enemy gets a vote. In many ways, Hamas dictates how Israel must engage in hostilities against it as an insurgent group.

One moment, please. Thank you. And Chris is right that it is extremely populated, an extremely densely populated area in Gaza where the conduct, the hostilities is being carried on even despite the ceasefire to a lesser degree but still the hostilities still exist. But the way that Israel is required to fight against Israel’s required to fight against Hamas is largely dictated via Hamas. If Israel is intent on ending the enduring security threat posed by Hamas, it’s going to do so through peace, diplomacy, and negotiations? Well, we tried. Israel tried that for a long time and they got October 7th.

And so now Hamas could at any time stop the conflict by agreeing to surrender and lay down its arms and end its own security threat posed by itself to Israel. It hasn’t done that. It hasn’t done that. And so it dictates that Israel must, if it’s intent on ending the security threat posed by Hamas, it must use weapons to do that.

And because of the way that Hamas fights underground, hidden deliberately hidden among the civilian population, it would be fantastic if we could just magic the enemy to death or we could wish that they were no longer security whether dead, injured, captured, whatever, out of the fight due to sickness, illness, injury, death or illness. But we can’t. As technologically advanced as Israel’s military is among other militaries, we still require bullets and bombs to destroy the adversary.

And if the adversary hides and fights among the civilian population, those bullets and bombs will be directed against the adversary that it is among the civilian population. That’s a choice from Hamas. and not from Israel because the enemy gets ready. Now, the way that the commission engages with the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. Going to turn the report right side up. This is the June 2025 conference room paper, paragraph 31.

Israeli military operations in Gaza have been marked by the extensive use of explosive weapons and heavy munitions with a wide area destructive capacity in residential areas resulting in complete destruction of residential neighborhoods as Chris suggested. I agree it has but that’s not an indication of genocide. It’s not an indication of war crimes. It’s an indication of fighting in the way that the enemy votes.

Now, what this passage from the commission’s report implicates is a political decor a political declaration that was adopted in 2022 by many countries including the United States but not Israel on explosive weapons in populated areas. Now it’s, the thing to focus on is: one, it’s a political declaration. So as a political declaration it’s not legally binding. It’s just a political declaration right? It’s not a treaty among nations. It’s a declaration.

Section two and the reason is because the United States signed it against, well United States signed it. Section two of this political declaration says we reaffirm this is, the states that have signed it. We reaffirm our obligations under international law. Section 2.5

This is the important part of the EWIPA. So the Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas goes by the acronym very often as EWIPA. While there is no general prohibition against the use of explosive weapons I’m going to say that part again. While there is no general prohibition against the use of explosive weapons, any use of explosive weapons must comply with international humanitarian law. So one of the things about this political declaration is it doesn’t say anything at all. It just says there is no prohibition. Just apply international law. That’s it. That’s what Israel is doing. 

There’s been a concerted movement among the humanitarian activist space led by ICRC international community—Red Cross—to severely restrict the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. And as much as they, as much advocacy that’s gone into it, all they’ve managed is a political declaration and not a treaty. Because the enemy gets a vote. Because countries are not going to agree to refrain from using explosive weapons in populated areas because they might have to fight against an enemy that operates in populated areas. And so by pointing to the use by Israel of explosive weapons in populated areas, all we’re doing is we’re referring to the conduct of hostilities that still has to comply with international law. Period. The use of explosive weapons in populated areas is no indication whatsoever of compliance or failure to comply with international law. 

Now I’ll say one more thing on explosive weapons in populated areas. What the commission fails to do, just like many NGOs who also operate in this space fail to do, is they fail to acknowledge and account for mitigation techniques that can be utilized by militaries that do use explosive weapons in populated areas. When Mark read my brief bio before, one of the things he mentioned is that I was (I was in the military at the time), I was a certified and qualified collateral damage estimation methodology specialist. Because I was qualified to specialize in collateral damage estimation methodology, I understand how weapons are actually used and more importantly how mitigation techniques can be used.

It is not uncommon for Israel, the United States, or other countries to use high yield explosive weapons in populated areas. But what we do very often is we’ll mitigate by what we refer to colloquially as, we bury the bomb or delay the fuse. When we delay the fuse, the munition goes into the ground, there’s a fuse, so it makes contact with the ground, gravity carries the munition further into the ground and then it explodes into the ground into the vehicle into the structure whatever it hits. So it’s on a delay fuse, it makes contact, gravity pulls it down and then it explodes. What that does is the ground, the vehicle, the structure that the munition goes into absorbs most of the blast and fragmentation that munition projects. This is a mitigation technique and it’s very clear especially for someone who has been through CDE methodology certification and qualification. Used to do this in combat. 

It’s very clear from looking at visual evidence that a bomb utilized or munition utilizes a delayed hit [unclear]. The way you can tell is there’s typically a very steep wall and the crater is compact so it doesn’t expand, it’s not like a bowl, it’s more like a cliff all around. That indicates that the munition went into the ground, blew up and launched the blast and fragmentation and ejecta up rather than out. The reason that’s important is, I know this, anyone who is familiar with cloud damage estimation methodology knows this, and when I see media coverage of attacks that are attributed to Israel and Gaza, it’s almost always the case that the visual telltale signs are there that mitigation techniques were used that the they buried the bomb. 

And very often it’s the case that they’re I mean they’re using a 2,000lb bomb cuz that’s the highest yield that we have for conventional weapons typically, and they’re trying to get to a bunker typically, or a tunnel underneath the ground. They delay the fuse and it does two things. It directs the effects of ammunition against the target, but more importantly for our purposes, it mitigates the risk of harm to civilians. I see that in almost every single photo or video that comes out of Gaza. And if you know what you’re looking for, you’ll see it, too. That’s not accounted for in the commission’s treatment of Israel’s use of explosive weapons in populated areas. It’s used as evidence that Israel intends mass destruction of the Gazan or the Palestinian population. When in actuality it’s evidence that Israel is attempting to mitigate harm to civilians, and that is further evidence that the intent is not to destroy the Palestinian population in whole or in part, but to destroy Hamas. [Applause]

Chris Sidoti: I don’t know whether we’re looking at the same photos or not, but we did find instances of precisely the kind of situation that Brian describes, but we also found an enormous quantity of digital material—that is videos and photos that do not show the kind of use of explosive weapons for bunker busting, I think is the common phrase, but rather for total destruction of the the surface buildings and over a wide area. So we may be looking at different photos, we may not. I just don’t know. Can I ask you a question though, Brian what do you say about double tap bombing? because we found enormous eyewitness accounts and video evidence of double taps.

Brian Cox: I say that’s anecdotal. So it’s not uncommon. What we refer to in targeting parlance is achieving the commander’s intent. And if we assess that the commander’s intent was not achieved on the initial strike, we strike again until the commander’s intent has been achieved. What is often referred to in the media and in human rights organizations and activists rhetoric is that it’s a double tap. Well, they don’t know what the commander’s intent was to begin with. And so if there was a double tap then I mean maybe it was “I meant to kill a civilian and I didn’t and so I tried again and killed him the second time”—I guess. But it just as easily could be, and is in my case more likely, in my perspective more likely, that I assessed that my target was a military objective whatever it was and my commander’s intent was not achieved initially. So I conducted battle damage assessment and I authorized a reattack or a reattack or a triple strike or a quadruple strike until the commander’s intent has been achieved, and typically that is the elimination of that target.

Chris Sidoti: Your answer gives rise to I think a much broader difference between the two of us which I think is fundamental to the way in which we write our reports and and the way in which you critique them, and that is the very question of not just commander intent, but intent. In what you’ve written in critiquing the reports and what you’ve said today, quite clearly and rightly you place a very strong emphasis on intent, but there is an implication to me that it is impossible to determine intent without asking the commander or the soldier what was your intent. And that’s something that I just don’t accept if my interpretation is right. 

Our police forces every single day and our courts every single day make findings on the basis of decisions, evidence, yeah, which may either be in the absence of any statement by the accused, because the accused can’t be compelled to answer questions. Or it may be contrary to exactly what the accused says. You know, we’ve got a case going in the courts in New South Wales of a double murder by a police officer at the moment. You’ve probably all seen about it. But the whole purpose of investigation whether it’s in the non-court, non-prosecutorial field of our investigation or even when it goes through to a criminal case is to try to work out what the intent is either in the absence of an opportunity to get a direct and honest answer or any answer at all from the accused, and so we we are forced to make decisions about intent on the basis as I said before circumstantial evidence we call it in our system, inference in the the international system. But it seems to me Brian that in much of what you’ve written and what you’ve said tonight your starting point is that it’s impossible to determine criminality without getting the accused person or the actor to make a statement about what their intent was.

Brian Cox: That’s not actually my view on how we assess intent and it’s not just me saying it. So going back to the Rome statute as a template as an example, intentionally directing an attack against civilian population or against a civilian object. It’s possible to infer intent, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to infer what the intent and the knowledge was after an attack, from just looking at the effects of an attack. And so it’s not just me saying it, it’s the international law as it exists in doctrine. If you’re trying to assess based on observations in the battle space after an attack, you can make inferences, but it’s difficult to infer what the knowledge and intent was of the personnel responsible at the time of the attack. If you can do that in whatever way is available to you.

And you’ve mentioned a couple times that Israel has refrained from cooperating. With complete respect, Israel has no obligation to cooperate with you. If I were advising Israel, I would suggest that they probably shouldn’t. Just like I would for the United States. If you are able to look at the battle space and infer what the intent was for each individual attack that you’re assessing, then more power to you, you’ve met the standard. But in practice, we never do that. First, we receive a report of incidental harm and then we reconstruct the facts as we know them and then we go to the person who was involved and say what was your knowledge and intent at the time and then we assess whether they could be lying based on the facts and circumstances that developed. Maybe they’re lying and that’s the conclusion we reach. But a central component is assessing what the intent and knowledge was. And it’s not just me saying it, it’s not just some expert saying it, it’s international law.

Chris Sidoti: But in your case when you were a military prosecutor in the US Army you had access to the actors.

Brian Cox: Absolutely.

Chris Sidoti: In our case we don’t.

Brian Cox: Doesn’t change the standard. 

Chris Sidoti: Doesn’t change the standard, and I acknowledge the difficulty, but the bottom line is that unless it is possible unless, on the basis of the evidence, to draw conclusions about intent then we will never ever ever have a war crimes trial. 

Brian Cox: No, we’ll have a war crimes trial but it’ll be within the military because they have access. It’s not our job on the outside to engage in a war crimes trial. [applause] 

Chris Sidoti: Well, it is the job of the International Criminal Court, but it’s not our job, we’re not a court. And I keep on saying this, we’re not a court. We don’t operate on the basis of criminal standards of evidence and proof, we’re an investigative body. So it’s different. 

But my point is still a valid point that unless conclusions can be drawn on the best available evidence, notwithstanding the principles that you’ve rightly described in international law and notwithstanding the difficulty, we are never going to have a situation where any soldier in the world who is committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly the crimes of genocide will be held accountable. We have to be able to make conclusions. 

Now our commission does not name any individuals, soldiers that we have investigated. We do not name them precisely for the reasons that Brian describes. We do name people who are in positions of senior command responsibility. So military and political leaders because they occupy public positions and the decisions that they make arise under their role as public decisions. So we name them but we do not name individuals precisely because of the difficulty. But we would have a situation of total impunity, a total lack of accountability, unless it’s possible in spite of the difficulty, to apply international law and say on the basis of the best available evidence, this is our conclusion of what has happened.

Brian Cox: I just wanted to pick up very briefly on what Chris has said because I think this gets to a core issue.

Chris Sidoti: Yeah, it’s a core issue.

Brian Cox: The difference in our perspective. From my perspective and I should emphasize first, I understand and I respect his perspective as a UN commissioner but from my perspective there will not be impunity for war crimes in practice if an external agency is not able to assess knowledge and intent. There will be accountability within the military structure where it belongs, where we have access to the evidence, where releasing this evidence to the public isn’t potentially you know assisting our adversary. Accountability and preventing impunity is the role of the military structure, the military organization. 

And, in my time, certainly now since I’ve left active duty and become an international law scholar, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with and train with well, to provide blocks of instruction or briefings, to military advocate general members of the IDF. And I can say just from my perspective that they have just as robust functions and processes in place to assess compliance or lack of compliance with Law of Armed Conflict. Their processes are just as robust as ours in the United States and I would go so far as to say more so. [applause].

And this is just personally, it’s my experience anecdotally, take it for what it’s worth, but from my experience engaging with the MAG core, with the international law department personnel specifically, I’m familiar with their processes and I would adopt their processes for the United States military any day. And accountability and prevention of impunity belongs there, and not on the outside, and I respect Chris’s approach and perspective and I understand where he comes from. Not that you necessarily need my endorsement, but I respect and endorse it, but it’s a fundamental difference. From my personal experience that the prevention of impunity, the accountability for compliance with Law of Armed Conflict belongs within the military and not outside of it. [applause]

Chris Sidoti: And in response. You’re looking front end and we look back end. And I think that again is an important difference. You’re looking at the process that the IDF is employing. We’re looking at what has been the results of accountability through the IDF and we are not satisfied that it is meeting international standards of accountability.

Glenn Colitz: Our time is really tight. I’m going to try some questions I think. I was hoping we get some from – inaudible – more robust than Australia to find my book and my time in Israel. Look, two more questions from me. – Inaudible. I want to talk about the evidentiary standard. The evidentiary standards of which you’re a reasonable ground to believe. Can you just describe the evidentiary standard utilized by the commission? That evidentiary standard? And explain how that standard is met by evidence gathered during the course of your inquiry?

Chris Sidoti: The evidentiary standard is the standard that is in the procedures for all of the UN Human Rights Council investigative body. So it applied in Myanmar there when I did that, it applies now to Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and Iran and Syria. It is reasonable grounds to believe or to conclude. Just small anecdote in our commission and in the me commission that my insistence we use reasonable grounds to conclude because I didn’t believe is something about faith. It’s got nothing to do with faith. It’s about faith, and I believe as a believer, but I conclude as a lawyer. So anyway, it doesn’t have much difference. 

And reasonable grounds, as Brian has rightly said in some of his writings, it’s not a high standard. It’s not beyond reasonable doubt, it’s not the balance of probabilities, although it probably comes close to that—the civil standard in our law here. We are very conscious of the need for serious allegations to have greater evidence. Now, are there Australian lawyers in the room? I don’t know – the Briginshaw test. You know Briginshaw has no relevance in international law and you know Australian lawyers from Australian courts don’t know what it means either. It’s an English decision of about the 1930s I think which says that in civil cases the balance of probabilities is the standard but the balance of probabilities requires more with more serious allegations than with less serious allegations. It’s a strange test but really it’s what we we’re applying as well and it’s the gravity test that the International Court of Justice has also articulated on many occasions back from the Corfu channel case in 1949. 

I think that a more serious allegation requires a stronger conviction on the part of the court. Now, one other thing I disagree with Brian on is that Brian has said that the reasonable grounds to conclude test is a subjective test. I agree with you on that, but so is every other test. Even beyond reasonable doubt is a subjective test. It depends in the end on whether the individual decision maker is convinced beyond reasonable doubt. But there is a test of reasonableness that underlies it beyond reasonable doubt and in our case reasonable grounds to conclude and it’s up to us to establish whether we are being reasonable or not and some people will be satisfied and others will not because ultimately it is subjective.

Brian Cox: I agree with Chris. I think this is the last I want to say it, but it bears mentioning. I do agree with you. Reasonable grounds to conclude, I like that better. Yeah. So the the terms of reference for the UN Commission of Inquiry like other similar commissions establishes the standard of proof of reasonable grounds to believe. I agree with Chris, so it wasn’t the last time I would say it, that reasonable grounds to conclude is more appropriate, more appropriate wording. The specific wording, reasonable grounds to believe from the terms of reference. This means that findings will be included in the reports where the reasonable grounds standard of proof has been met. Namely, and it explains now what that means, where based on a body of verified information, an objective and ordinary prudent observer would have reasonable grounds to conclude the facts took place as described, and where legal conclusions are drawn, that the facts meet all the elements of a violation or abuse, and any individual identified is responsible for the violation or abuse. So that’s reasonable grounds to belief, reasonable prudent person.

Chris Sidoti: Which, honestly, that definition which is in the OCHR manual is gobbledygook. 

Brian Cox: And so, I agree with Chris that it is a generally low standard and that it’ll be up to observers to evaluate whether they’ve met that test because that part is subjective. Not speaking for the commission, but I think it’s fairly accurate to say they wouldn’t put in a report a finding or a conclusion unless they were convinced that they’ve met their standard of proof. But then it’s up to reasonable observers to evaluate whether that standard has been met. And that’s subjective.

Chris Sidoti: Yeah

Brian Cox: As an example, from the June 2026 conference room paper, there’s mentioned several times of casualties that were inflicted on Gazans by sniper rifles mounted on quadcopters. So, here’s one example, in paragraph 59. On the appointed date, 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 the head, hitting the pillow behind her. The baby survived but sustained brain injuries and now suffers from seizures. And then it goes on the next paragraph, the commission viewed evidence demonstrating this. There’s no footnote. There’s no citation. It’s just the commission viewed evidence. And so then it’s up to the observer to evaluate whether that is sufficient to conclude that Israel defense forces were responsible for this attack. Notwithstanding the fact that there’s not established evidence, visual or otherwise, concluding that Israel uses sniper rifles, sniper rifles mounted to quadcopters. 

There’s another example just below that of another uh sniper rifle quadcopter incident. It says the commission viewed images, and this is paragraph 62. The commission viewed images of the bullet and determined that the bullet used was 762 millimeter since the girl was the only one in the family in the tent that was shot and testimonies of the doctor and the parents indicate that they saw the quadcopter that shot the girl. The commission concludes on reasonable grounds that the girl was targeted by a quadcopter mounted with an assault rifle. No footnote. It’s just evidence that was viewed by the commission, including purported images of the bullet. Double hearsay because we’re getting this from a patient who told a doctor who then told the commission in some way, with no footnote. This is suggested to be reasonable grounds to believe. 

Now it’s not my place and it’s not my intent to impugn the commission and its judgment. I have no doubt that it would not have put in this report, this anecdote, if it were not satisfied that the reasonable grounds to conclude standard had been met. But as a reasonable, prudent, external observer, as the UN Commission of Inquiry terms of reference suggest, I don’t buy it. [applause] I want to be very careful about this. Not that I think the commission is lying in this case. I don’t doubt that they reviewed the evidence that they say they viewed. But it’s difficult for me to conclude that because there’s no footnote citing to the evidence. The evidence hasn’t been provided to me in the public. And even their own explanation of the evidence is of an image that was viewed that shows purportedly a bullet that was fired from a quadcopter and a weapon that no one has been able to to actually affirm that Israel has in Gaza as far as I’m aware. And then evidence from the patient and the doctor that it was an Israel Defense Force quadcopter that inflicted that injury. To me as a reasonably prudent observer I do not find that the standard of reasonable grounds to conclude has been met based on this evidence and I suggest that most of the evidence in the report is similar to that. [applause] 

Chris Sidoti: Let let me give you another case and ask whether you think the evidence that we had in this other case met the test. And it’s not a Gaza case. This is one that’s really got to me personally. I’ll tell you that. It’s a West Bank case where a 14-year-old boy left his family home and having left the family home and taken a couple of steps down the steps to the door of the family home, he was shot. There was an Israeli patrol in the area, but there was no fighting going on at the time.The boy was very badly injured, but he was not killed. He, badly injured, he was lying on the ground for 45 minutes. At the beginning he had a cap, he threw his cap towards the soldiers who were still there and they kicked the cap back at him. In the early stages, he waved his arm a couple of times and he was kicked at but there was no assistance provided. The platoon of soldiers surrounded him, they took no notice of him except kicking him a couple of times. They were talking and smoking. Over a period of 45 minutes the child bled to death. At one stage, or more than once or twice I think his mother tried to leave the house to go to him and four shots were fired towards her and landed in the lintel on the door of the house. A Palestinian Red Cross ambulance was called, parked about 100 meters away. Every time the ambulance tried to go forward, it was targeted by the Israeli soldiers. After 45 minutes, the boy died and at that stage the soldiers took notice and took away the body. This was in October, November last year.

Audience member interrupts: Who gave you proof of this?

Chris Sidoti: Excuse me, I’ll come to it. The body was finally returned on the 3rd of September this year. That is about 10 months later, and the family permitted to bury it. We spoke to members of the family. We saw a video of the entire period of, from after the child was shot for the 45 minutes that he lay there bleeding until his body was taken away. We spoke to neighbors and we spoke to the Red Cross ambulance driver. All their stories were consistent and the video evidence indicated or corroborated what they said, including the bullet holes in the door near the mother. Now in that case we had eyewitnesses and you know can I just, no I won’t, we had eyewitnesses, we had video evidence, we had eyewitnesses, some of whom were related, some of whom were not, some of whom were parameds and 45 minutes worth of video. 

Glenn Colitz: Would that be enough to form a reasonable conclusion?

Brian Cox: Potentially. I’d have to actually read the report. 

Chris Sidoti: It’s in the report.

Brian Cox: Yeah, I’d have to read that. It might be enough, but what I will say it’s a compelling anecdote for sure.

Chris Sidoti: But, why is, I will say what I was not going to say. When I talked about…no, I think you talked about you mentioned Brian about the parents of the baby, a couple of people laughed. Is it really the case that the evidence of Palestinian parents about what happened to their kids is of less value than the evidence of Israeli parents as to what happened to their kids on the 7th of October?

Brian Cox: What I think it is, Chris, if I may, is it wasn’t I mean, I don’t, I didn’t, I don’t recall the same laughter, but I don’t doubt that somebody did. I think what it probably involves isn’t necessarily devaluing the incident if it did happen. It was probably incredulity that the incident happened based on the intent [applause]. Based on the evidence that’s presented in report. Now what Chris brought up is a compelling…

Chris Sidoti: Account 

Brian Cox: Account, and if everything that is said is true, now one thing we are missing that’s an important piece is a narrative and an understanding of the IDF personnel who are involved at the time, right? But I don’t doubt that if everything that you say, everything that is in report and that you recounted is accurate and that it amounted to a violation of law of armed conflicts that would be investigated and prosecuted as such. But this is an entire report from September 2025. An entire report from June 2026 that’s full of accounts that are not cited to anything that are based on images that the commission says that they view and based on double hearsay: that a patient told the doctor and that the the commission found out from the doctor which is difficult to establish knowledge and intent of personnel who are responsible for anything let alone that the the incident actually happened and that it’s attributable to the IDF. 

Now I’m not suggesting that there have not been violations that have been committed by the IDF even—there have been violations committed by the United States military. I helped prosecute some and I was aware of others that got reported and investigated and that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute. I don’t doubt that that has happened and that’s not my suggestion. My suggestion is we have entire reports that say that the reasonable grounds to conclude standard has been met when reasonably prudent observers from the outside would suggest otherwise and I’m one of them.

Chris Sidoti: I do need just to clarify one issue and that is that we don’t rely on the evidence of what the parents told the doctor who told us. That the doctor’s evidence is only taken into account as in relation to what the doctor herself or himself saw and did. So, if the bullet was removed, they can talk about the nature of the injury, the nature of the bullet that was removed, whether there was any harm to the rest of the body and this is one of our conclusions about intentional killing is that there was no injury, the doctor said, to the rest of the body except a single wound to the head or the upper torso. That’s relevant. We don’t treat doctors’ hearsay as in any way influencing our decision. We have to have eyewitnesses for things like that.

Brian Cox: It’s difficult for external observers to assess that when the evidence isn’t footnoted, isn’t cited, and is just explained.

Glenn Colitz: This is the very last question. [Inaudible.] in light of the [unclear] the sniper issued, we have to ask this – look I’m not being [unclear] here at all but to do this this sort of inquiry, this sort of investigation into incidents happening in armed conflict particularly when you’re relying on quite technical weaponry issues of weaponry, nothing in the biographies of yourself or any of the commissioners past or present demonstrates any military expertise and military experience. And in fact, there’s only one reference that I’ve seen in any book anywhere really that says a witness told you about something from a military expert. Obviously you agree with me that military expertise is required, how do you ground all of this information without having anybody providing you expertise in the course of the inquiry?

Chris Sidoti: We have a full-time military expert on our staff who has, I think around about 20 years of active military service in an armed force, before working in the international courts in the Hague, before coming to us.

Brian Cox: Who is that?

Chris Sidoti: We do not give out the names of any of our staff for obvious reasons. 

Brian Cox: All right.

Chris Sidoti: I’m responsible. The other commissioners are responsible. And we will not expose our staff to risk including from your government.

Brian Cox: I don’t know. I don’t know the identity of the military expert. I don’t know what sort of person has  served in somebody’s military. I have no idea what type of experience they have, what type of biases they have, what gaps in knowledge they have because I don’t know who it is. You know who I am. [applause] If I’m sitting on the stage before you and I explain what my personal experience is. No one that I know, this is completely anecdotal, I’ll speak for myself, no one that I know, certainly myself, would rely on political statements as genocidal intent without looking at the holistic statement to to determine that genocide has been committed. No one that I know that’s an actual expert would determine or would suggest that the UN or the International Court of Justice provisional measures have determined that there’s a plausible genocide. No one and no expert that I know would formulate articulations of international law based on a word alone. No expert that I know and certainly not myself would look at the use of explosive weapons in populated areas as evidence to destroy an entire population in whole or apart as such. No expert that I know would suggest that I have reasonable grounds to conclude that an incident has happened unless I have actual evidence from the incident that I can attribute to the person responsible for the attack. 

As a military expert, as someone who has spent my entire adult life in military service before retiring, becoming an international law scholar, an academic and professor, I identify very little credibility in the UN Commission’s work. Now, that’s relevant because I can assure you they will not ask me to be a military expert. They will not ask John Spencer, Andrew Fox, or more broadly speaking, Natasha Hausdorf. They will not ask these experts, these specialists to be experts advising the commission. And I’m going to stop there because the next thing I was going to say would attribute intent to the commission that I think if maybe isn’t fair, but they won’t ask someone like me or John Spencer or Andrew Fox to be a military expert. If they were to do so, the advice that they receive and potentially the conclusions that come out in the reports would be fundamentally different. But [applause] but we can’t tell precisely how the military expert influences the commission’s work because we have no idea who he or she is.

Mark Holtz: Please avail yourselves of the CAMERA report on the story that sad anecdote about the 14-year-old. None of which is actually true. Israel dispatched a military ambulance. They tried to save him. The kid wrote a suicide note before he went out. It’s on the internet. The story is not as per told. I’ve studied the research. 

This is one of the four areas of genocide that they ping Israel on. And it was a fertility clinic in the middle of a battle. And the commission makes the claim that 5,000 embryos were destroyed because Israel specifically sent a tank to shoot a shell through a window or through a building to hit the one tank that was remaining and destroy the embryos. Commissioner Sidoti, your own witness, Professor Parrin from the Chicago Law School said the nitrogen had already failed and that 2,000 specimens were sacrificed in other words, thrown away before the staff abandoned the building in the middle of November. She told you this, it’s on the internet. Chris deposed her. So we’ve now got an abandoned building in an absolute battlezone. Nobody disputes to a [unclear] tank shooting outside and a duo tank which is what they store embryos in, nobody was topping up with liquid nitrogen which is an expected requirement. 

So your experts, when professor Parrin, when she said that they have no firm evidence it was an Israeli tank shell. She said they’ve not been in here. They’ve got no evidence. They’ve got nothing to run to. You didn’t go there. So why is the tank strike meant to prevent births and that’s the genocide claim more likely than either of those? In other words, running out of nitrogen or an abandoned building in a war zone gets taken over by Hamas and Israel conducting a war, shoots a shell at somebody shooting at it. Maybe they shot a shell. And especially since you yourself in a press conference said that you’ve got no evidence that the tank crew knew it was a fertility clinic. So how did your commission confirm that an Israeli tank was responsible?

Audience member interrupts: Report says 5000 not 2000 embryos

Mark Holtz: We’ve already researched this. You claim that 5,000 embryos were wasted and births were prevented in Gaza. And it’s very sad, but your own expert told you that the director of the hospital had destroyed 2,000 embryos himself because they’d run out of nitrogen. So you’ve got running out of nitrogen. The place has been taken over by raging terrorists. We know that. Or Israel sent a tank to line up the one shot? This is the only reasonable explanation you found? So how did you confirm that the Israeli tank was responsible?

Chris Sidoti: Firstly, let me say I cannot give you a detailed response because I’ve not looked at this now for two years that one on the 5,000 or or whatever

Mark Holtz: You you’ve said Israel committed genocide. You should know your facts. [applause]

Chris Sidoti: I know my facts, Mark. But I don’t necessarily sit here without notice being able to go through the information on every single case. But I can tell you that it was a tank shell. Hamas doesn’t have tanks. 

Mark Holtz: But they’ve got Kornet missiles. They’ve got RPGs. They have multiple.

Chris Sidoti: It was a tank shell. It was a tank shell. 

Mark Holtz: Why are there no burn marks in the building? If it was an Israeli tank, and you’re battle damage assessment experts and I’ve asked a few people, you wouldn’t have the coffee cup still sitting on the table, the papers on the desk, and the glass window not broken in your own pictures. Because if it was an Israeli tank shell, there’d be shit everywhere.

Chris Sidoti: Okay. I don’t know about that. I mean, I haven’t looked at that. There were no buildings surrounding it that were damaged at the time that this was done. There was no fighting going on at the time that the shell was fired. The building was marked as a fertility clinic in Arabic, but with also an international symbol that it was a medical facility.

Mark Holtz: No, no, there was no I’ve got the picture. It wasn’t. 

Chris Sidoti: It was

Mark Holtz: And you said at a press conference that you have no evidence and you actually believe the tank driver or shooter who didn’t know it wasn’t. 

Chris Sidoti: Now, that I can respond to. I said that. Yes.

Mark Holtz: Good. 

Chris Sidoti: But I also said that it was quite clear to us that the targeting authorities that those who were responsible for targeting would have known that it was a medical facility and what the medical facility was used for. It was the largest by far fertility clinic in Gaza and was well known as such. And are you saying that the Israeli intelligence didn’t know that a medical facility providing fertility services was a medical facility providing fertility services? So, I said that the tank crew didn’t know and we don’t know what the tank crew knew.

Mark Holtz: Why did you intentionally not listen, your own expert said they can’t say it was an Israeli tank. The evidence is online. You interviewed the lady. Her name is Professor Parrin. She came from Chicago to Geneva. You deposed her. The evidence is online. I’ve got the transcript. I’ve watched the evidence. But what she said that there weren’t 5,000 embryos. So, there were either 3,000 embryos or no embryos. But you’ve got that, you just ignored it.

Chris Sidoti: Look I’m stumbling and I know that I shouldn’t be stumbling in front of this particular audience, but I don’t want to answer the question unless I’ve gone back and looked at it again.

Brian Cox: If I may, unless you have more.I mean, I don’t I don’t mean to cut you off.

Chris Sidoti: No, I mean I don’t have more because without notice I need to go back and look at all this all the stuff that you have actually said. The one thing that I would add though is that the finding of genocidal act was not dependent solely on the attack on the fertility clinic. Rather, we said that the attack on the facility clinic combined with what appeared to us, we concluded, to be deliberately targeting maternity facilities in hospitals generally, indicated that there was an attempt to prevent births.

Mark Holtz: Excuse indulgence, but I want to ask you one more question. When you reported to the General Assembly, you said that Israel blew it up with a bomb from an aeroplane. 

Chris Sidoti: I didn’t.

Mark Holtz: Yes, you did. I’ll read to you. To the general assembly on September the 11th 2024 paragraph 30—the clinic was the direct target of an air strike and in December 2023, 3,000 embryos were destroyed which is actually the number your expert gave. 

Chris Sidoti: Yeah, I thought it was 3000.

Mark Holtz: However, CRP 6 on the 13th of March 2025 footnoted copied back to your own report CRP 3 of the 16th of September with a genocide claim, you changed it to a tank shell and 4,000 embryos plus a thousand other specimen lost in its entirety when the sperm bank was attacked in early December. And by the way, you can’t date it from the 2nd of December to the 2nd of January. You have no visibility in that period. You don’t know which week it happened. So I’m saying to you, was your report wrong to the General Assembly or was your report wrong to the Human Rights Council? Same attack, two methods. 

Chris Sidoti: I have no…It was a tank. I have no recollection of saying. Show me it to me, Mark. I have no recollection of ever saying it to them.

Mark Holtz: Well, it’s your report. You write them. You get paid for it.

Chris Sidoti: I don’t get paid for it. I do my job for nothing.

Mark Holtz: Okay. Me, too. So just Yeah. Okay.

Brian Cox: If I may, um I’d just like to point out that the time for this event has expired and so if you do need to leave, please feel free. No disrespect at all whatsoever. But perhaps we can carry on for another couple minutes just to address some questions from the floor. What I’ll just say very briefly in response to the fertility clinic issue is even if it was an Israeli tank shell that damaged the fertility clinic either involved a street fight, house to house street to street, in order for this evidence that Israel intends to prevent births in Gaza and is therefore destroying a fertility clinic, we would need to know that the tank driver or in this case the gun operator on the tank was aware there was a fertility clinic fired the tank shell with the intent to destroy the nitrogen system and destroy the embryos that were there. If we don’t have that, for me as someone who has been involved in literally street to street, house to house fighting, all we have is a case of a tank shell hitting a building. And we have no idea the context of what that person intended at the time, whether it was intending to attack a Hamas fighter who was in this building or maybe to destroy the embryos that were there. And that could be evidence of genocidal intent. But I would suggest if our standard is reasonable grounds to believe, reasonable grounds to conclude, we have not met that standard based on the available evidence.

Chris Sidoti: There you’ll notice. I need to go back and have a look at our report. 

Audience Member (Alexa?): I’d just like to ask—your report says that [unclear] Israeli intelligence identified 8,900 dead or probably dead Hamas and PIJ militants out of roughly 53,000 fatalities. That means 83% were civilians. Did the commission independently establish that the remaining approximately 44,000 people were civilians?

Chris Sidoti: No we didn’t because we don’t have that information. Nor did we establish that the numbers that the IDF claimed were militants were accurate as well. So we literally do not know nor does anybody else know including the IDF how many militants were there. But the IDF is claiming that there were 17,000, 17% Sorry.

Audience Member: It’s a short sharp question. We talked about in the beginning that Israel didn’t really participate, so as lawyers you can’t draw a negative inference by a person’s silence. So, therefore, the fact that Israel didn’t participate cannot be used against them. The second part of that equation we talked about what’s called Mens Rea which is the mental state of mind and then Actus Reus which is the acting of itself. In order to prove a crime you need both the mental element; the intent to do something together with the act itself. When you’re going through your dialogue with Brian tonight what came out to me was the lens which Chris yourself is looking at an incident and the lens through which Brian is looking about it are from two different points. You’re looking at the effect, the dead child. What Brian is looking at is the mental element, whether there was an intent to kill that child but not in military [inaudible]. 

Many years ago there was a case in Melbourne people would recall Benjamin Veniamin who was shot and killed in the La Porcella restaurant. Standing over his body was Mick Gatto. Everyone knows that Mick Gatto is a crook. Mick Gatto’s got the gun. Benji’s dead. If we take Chris’s approach and correct me if I’m wrong, the presumption is that Mick killed and intentionally killed Benji Veniamin because that is the evidence or the conclusion upon which you drew your findings. But what we know from that case is the court found there wasn’t a murder. There wasn’t the Mens Rea, it was self-defense. And so this comes back to the overarching premise, the question is was the intent to kill the civilian or was there a genuine military goal? 

In the absence of being able to get into the mind of the Israeli military, the tank driver or anyone else, how can you come to that conclusion? And I’ll just add to that the accusation of being a war criminal or committing genocide is probably the most vile and egregious accusation one can make against an individual. And I would suggest that it should only be done when it is absolute beyond reasonable doubt. And if you can’t meet that standard, we shouldn’t use it. Do you believe beyond reasonable doubt in your heart of hearts, we’ve heard an example of Benjamin Veniamin, you cannot find that Israel did not intend in each and every one of those cases a military objective.

Chris Sidoti: The short answer is no. I cannot say that unless I can be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that I form a conclusion. No, I don’t accept that. The standard beyond reasonable doubt is a criminal law standard. If we were to apply that standard, we will be establishing ourselves as a court. We are not a court. We are not a court. We’re not even prosecutors. We are an investigative body and we produce the conclusions of our investigation based on the standard of reasonable grounds to conclude. Now I agree with you on your first point about not drawing inferences from the silence of Israel. I agree with that and we don’t draw inferences from the silence of Israel. What I’m saying is that we cannot get the total picture. The Israeli authorities side of the story is unknown to us except from their public statements and we take their public statements and we examine them and this one of the things that Brian was critical of is the way we use their public statements. But that’s all we have. But we can’t draw any conclusions from that um any more than the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine can draw conclusions against Russia. It does so on the basis of the evidence that it collects, but it doesn’t infer anything arising from the silence. But we’re not a court and we do not apply the standard beyond reasonable doubt. We do gather the evidence and we form our conclusions. We are not working. I mean, you have adversaries. I don’t. I have people that we investigate.

[Inaudible comments from audience]

Chris Sidoti: I haven’t killed 25,000 kids in Gaza. I haven’t injured 44,000 kids in Gaza. And I didn’t kill 1,200 people on the 7th of October and the 8th of October in southern Israel. The people who are responsible.

Glenn Colitz: We need to stop this one down. We get the point. I think Chris, we have to shut yours down…

Chris Sidoti: What I’m saying is that I’m not delegitimizing the State of Israel.

Glenn Colitz: Question from David Schulberg. David, where is he? Sorry.

Chris Sidoti: Hey, he’s a media person. Are we having media here?

Question from David Schulberg: On the 2nd of May 2025, Mahmud Abbas condemned the looting and theft carried out by criminal gangs targeting warehouses and storage facilities of humanitarian aid designated for the people of Gaza and The Palestinian Authority held Hamas affiliated gangs primarily responsible, adding that Palestinians will not forgive these disgraceful acts. The commission’s hunger finding says Israel imposed starvation. It does not cite the statement. What is the basis for determining that Israel deliberately starved the population of Gaza?

Chris Sidoti: We have indicated that there was theft of humanitarian aid not only by Hamas but also by, it has to be admitted, some of the militias that were being supported by the IDF. The fact is however that in most periods most of the aid has got through, I mean since um around about March, no no it was later June or July last year the amount of aid that was being looted was around 1%. At  one stage it was up to, I think for a couple of weeks, it was up in excess of 50%. So it was happening. But the fact still remains that the amount of food that was going in and even now is still going in is less than the requirements for the maintenance of a minimum standard of living in Gaza.

Audience interrupts: Not true.

Chris Sidoti: The commitment made in the Trump plan from last October was 600 trucks a day.

Audience interrupts: And that’s what’s going in.

Chris Sidoti: It is not going in. The average number of trucks going in I think for the last four months I don’t think it goes back beyond that, is about 170, it’s less than a third..

Audience interrupts: Do you also have all the camera footage of that?

Chris Sidoti: No, we’ve got the people that are providing it telling us how many trucks are going through.

Brian Cox:I want to make sure that we don’t get out of hand. Anything more Chris?

Closing Remarks

Glenn Colitz: I’ve been told to wrap it up. So, let’s go to closing addresses.

Chris Sidoti: I’m not sure how I close. I close with a prayer from the prophet Ezekiel. I pray that the Lord will break our hearts of stone. All of us, the Palestinians, the Israelis, those outside. May the Lord break our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh, human hearts. [applause]

Brian Cox: I agree with Chris. [laughter] What I will just say is what we’ve witnessed here is a complete difference in perspectives and approach, engaging with international law as it relates to Israel’s conduct of hostilities in Gaza. That’s what we brought together. Chris and his Commission of Inquiry have one approach and one perspective. I have a completely different approach and completely different perspective. I agree with Chris when he said at the beginning that it’s unlikely that he will change my mind or that I will change his mind. And that hasn’t really been the point, I think, for either one of us. But as he suggested, this is a conversation. It’s a dialogue. And those forces who are disruptive socially and politically that try to shut down conversations like this that so much effort went into to ensure that that would not happen. In this instance, they want to avoid conversations like this where there are competing perspectives, where there’s a respectful engagement. 

But I applaud first of all Chris for being here for, as Sharon said at the beginning, you command the attention [applause] on the world stage. You travelled here. You traveled here from Sydney just to agree to be here on this stage and have this conversation, this dialogue, this respectful conversation. And I applaud you and I respect you immensely for doing that. I also applaud and respect the group that is here that has by and large sat and listened to competing perspectives even if you very strongly disagree with one or the other. But it’s a real testament to this group that we were able to have this exchange and this conversation that wasn’t disrupted. 

And the last thing I’ll say is a big sincere heartfelt thank you to Mark and Sharon. [applause] They found my work a long time ago and they contacted me and asked if I could have a conversation with Chris and David Schulberg facilitated that on his program, his radio program on J Air 88 FM back in August on Israel connection and this is a continuation of that discussion. The first discussion wouldn’t have happened without Mark and Sharon. And this much more complicated discussion that we’ve had here today because it’s live in person would not have happened without their tireless work to make it happen. So, thank you [applause] from the bottom of my heart. Thanks. Thank you as well for moderating. It was fantastic. [applause] And that’s all I’ve got. I’ll turn it over to Sharon for perhaps any closing remarks.

Sharon Kuper: Thank you so much to the three of you panelists for coming today. I know that while you didn’t come from the furthest distance, Chris, you have certainly crossed the greatest divide to be here today with our community who are deeply appreciative. [applause] 

While very few of us agree with your findings, we appreciate that you have come to face us. And it did take courage, whether you deny it or not, to come into and face a community and a population so deeply affected by what’s gone on since the 7th of October. And the open, emboldened Jew hatred that has taken over the globe that we now live with. And we have a life before the 7th of October and we have a life since the 7th of October. And our lives are nothing like what the rest of Australians live like. Maybe you saw the security that we live with. The fact that all of those security guards and my son’s done it too have been through intense training and they give up so much of their time standing outside venues and synagogues in the rain, in the cold, coming for hours before the event to do bomb sweeps. You have absolutely no idea how many hours Mark and I spent in addition to CSG and other community members who helped us vetting everybody who got here today. Many of you might have had phone calls from me and Mark asking you if you were like new in town and you weren’t already on our database, you know, what’s bringing you here tonight, who do you know in the community, what school do you go to? Nobody else has to do what we do because there are people out to get us. And it’s not just paranoia, although because you can be paranoid, that people are still out to get you. And people are out to get us. And this is how we live now. But we do thank you really for being here today to face us. 

Of course, you will never face any physical harm or threats from our community and everybody knows that. But yes, we will disagree and maybe we will call out because we are deeply affected by these findings. The fact that we walk down the street and we can expect to be called genocidal baby killers and we have been called genocidal baby killers. It affects us. It’s personal. It’s not just a report to us. So I thank you for being here. I truly truly do and I hope that we can do it again. And while I’ve got you on the spot, Mark Kelly was wondering if he’d like to do it in Sydney. He’d like to volunteer to also have a respectful discussion with you. So perhaps that’s something we can talk about in the future. 

Brian, I need to convey to you [applause] the personal sacrifice, the air fare and mostly, you know, I hope to give him a lot of what we earned tonight and thank you all. Um but a lot of it will be self-funded by Brian. So he has really put his money where his mouth is. [applause]. And Glenn, who I would regard as a friend who I met for the first time yesterday. Glenn and I have been in contact for three years and I really am a great admirer of his work and his intellect and his defense and his sacrifice for our country. also. So, thank you [applause].

The post Chris Sidoti v. Brian Cox Debate Transcript appeared first on UN Watch.

Sidoti is one of three members of the UN’s Commission of Inquiry established in May 2021 to investigate Israel. He previously served as Australian Human Rights Commissioner from 1995 to 2000 and has held various human rights roles at the United Nations.

Cox served in the U.S. Army for 22 years, including as a military prosecutor and Chief of International and Operational Law for Regional Command-East. He also taught international law at Cornell Law School from 2019 to 2026.

Below are key excerpts from their debate, addressing the legal standard for genocide, the Commission’s investigative methods, military operations in Gaza and the evidence underlying its conclusions.

CLICK HERE FOR FULL TRANSCRIPT

The Standard for Establishing Genocidal Intent 

Sidoti: “The test of inference [to establish genocidal intent] is a very, very high test. According to the International Court of Justice, to form a conclusion that the purpose is genocidal on the basis of inference requires that inference be the only reasonable inference available. That’s a really high test. It’s a test, in fact, that in my opinion is higher than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.”

Sidoti: “If we accept that the goal of the Israeli authorities in Gaza has been the destruction of Hamas, that does not preclude the possibility of genocide being the strategy by which that goal is going to be attained, and that is an issue. The fighting, the strategy, can be undertaken in such a way, in our view of the law, that it can coexist with the goal of eliminating Hamas.”

Sidoti: “The evidentiary standard is the standard that is in the procedures for all of the UN Human Rights Council investigative bodies… It is reasonable grounds to believe or to conclude… as Brian has rightly said in some of his writings, it’s not a high standard. It’s not beyond reasonable doubt. It’s not the balance of probabilities, although it probably comes close to that… [The standard of proof of reasonable grounds in the Commission’s terms of reference] honestly, that definition, which is in the OHCHR manual, is gobbledygook.”

Commission Infers Intent Solely from the Results of Attacks

Cox: “Going back to the Rome Statute as a template, as an example, intentionally directing an attack against civilian population or against a civilian object, it’s possible to infer intent, but it’s almost it is extraordinarily difficult to infer what the intent and the knowledge was after an attack from just looking at the effects of an attack.”

Sidoti: “It is a strategy of total destruction. Now, it may be that it is being done with the goal of destroying Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but the strategy has been from the beginning a strategy of total destruction… Hospitals, in their entirety, have been destroyed.”

Sidoti: Israel’s Non-Cooperation Increased Commission’s Reliance on Inference 

Sidoti: “Israeli authorities do not cooperate with our commission in any way… it does make the job more difficult, and it pushes us back to relying more on inference than on other factors.” 

Sidoti: “We Are Not a Court”

Sidoti: “We Are Not a Court”

Sidoti: “We are not a court. We are not a court. We’re not even prosecutors. We are an investigative body, and we produce the conclusions of our investigation based on the standard of reasonable grounds to conclude.”

Sidoti: “We’re not a court, and I keep on saying this: we’re not a court. We don’t operate on the basis of criminal standards, of evidence and proof. We’re an investigative body, so it’s different.”

The Commission’s Unnamed Military Expert 

Sidoti: “We have a full-time military expert on our staff who has, I think, around about 20 years of active military service in an armed force before working in the international courts in The Hague before coming to us… We do not give out the names of any of our staff for obvious reasons. I’m responsible. I’m responsible. The other commissioners are responsible, and we will not expose our staff to risk, including from your government.”

Cox: “So, the person has served in a military, somebody’s military. I have no idea what type of experience they have, what type of biases they have, what gaps in knowledge they have… we can’t tell precisely how the military expert influences the commission’s work because we have no idea who he or she is.”

Cox: Selective Use of Israeli Leaders’ Statements 

Cox: “[The Commission has] taken snippets of statements from elected officials to support the inference that the goal of the combat military operations is to destroy the Palestinian population in whole or in part, as such, while ignoring the actual stated intent that has been consistent since the very beginning: to repatriate all hostages and to end the enduring security threat posed by Hamas. That is not genocide. That is war.”

Sidoti: “We did, in fact, provide context for one of the most serious of Netanyahu’s comments and talked about how he qualified what he said later in the same statement. But it seemed to us that his qualification was not convincing, shall we say, in relation to the statement that preceded it, because the actions of the Israeli military was very much in relation to the first one.”

Sidoti: Commission Did Not Independently Establish Civilian Death Toll   

Sidoti: “No, we didn’t [independently establish the number of civilians killed], because we don’t have that information, nor did we establish that the numbers that the IDF claimed were militants were accurate as well. So we literally do not know, nor does anybody else know, including the IDF, how many militants were there.”

Sidoti: Gazans Had Nowhere to Flee; Israel Should Have Taken Them In

Sidoti: “The situation in Gaza is different from all of those situations [like Russian-Ukraine] because the people had nowhere to go. The fact that Egypt is refusing to admit them, it is no more relevant than the fact. In fact, less relevant than the fact that Israel is refusing to admit them. They had, they were prevented from going into Egypt, and they were prevented from going into Israel, and so unlike the Rohingya and the Ukrainians and the Sudanese and the Syrians who fled in their millions into Turkey, they had nowhere to go.”

Sidoti: “One of the significantly relevant factors is the inability of the people to escape from a military strategy of total destruction, and that is directly connected with the issue of genocidal purpose.”

Cox: The Military Rationale for 2,000-Pound Bombs 

Cox: “What the Commission fails to do, just like many NGOs who also operate in the space fail to do, is they fail to acknowledge and account for mitigation techniques that can be utilized by militaries that do use explosive weapons in populated areas… they’re using a 2000 pound bomb because that’s the highest yield that we have for conventional weapons, typically, and they’re trying to get to a bunker, typically, or a tunnel underneath the ground. They delay the fuse. And it does two things: it directs the effects of ammunition against the target, but more importantly, for our purposes, it mitigates the risk of harm to civilians. I see that in almost every single photo or video that comes out of Gaza, and if you know what you’re looking for, you’ll see it too.”

Cox: Commission Fails to Properly Apply International Humanitarian Law  

Cox: “what I find as I read the UN Commission of Inquiry’s work is that it fails to articulate an identifiable formulation of specific rules of the law of armed conflict…” 

Cox: “These rules have content, and if you don’t include the content, then you’ve lost all context for whether these rules have been complied with … that starts by formulating and articulating the rules, applying the facts to the actual doctrine and reaching conclusions. If you don’t do that, you’re not actually assessing where the law of armed conflict is complied with. You’re just blowing smoke.” 

Sidoti Struggles to Explain Commission’s Fertility Clinic Finding 

Sidoti: “I can’t give you [a] detailed response because I’ve not looked at this now for two years, that one on the 5000 or whatever… So I said that the tank crew didn’t know [it was a fertility clinic], and we don’t know what the tank crew knew… I’m stumbling, and I know that I shouldn’t be stumbling in front of this particular audience…”

Audience member: “why was your report wrong to the General Assembly, or was your report wrong to the Human Rights Council? Same attack, two methods.” 

Sidoti: “I have no recollection of saying. Well, I have no recollection… I have no recollection of ever saying it to them.”

For reference, the Commission’s report to the UNGA in September 2024 attributed the destruction of the Basmah clinic to an Israeli air strike, while Sidoti stated at a UNHRC press conference in March 2025 that it was caused by an Israeli tank shell.

Report to the GA (A/79/232) (September 11, 2024): “The Basmah in vitro fertilization centre, the largest fertility clinic in Gaza, was the direct target of air strikes in December 2023 that reportedly resulted in the destruction of approximately 3,000 embryos.”

Sidoti at HRC Press Conference (March 13, 2025): “There is a question about whether those who were firing the tank shell, because our conclusion is that it was destroyed by a tank shell, knew at the time that it was a fertility clinic”

The post UN Commission of Inquiry Member Chris Sidoti Challenged on Gaza Genocide Findings in Melbourne Debate appeared first on UN Watch.

This Conference Room Paper appears to be presented under the Commission’s mandate to “collect, consolidate and analyse evidence” in order to “maximize the possibility of its admissibility in legal proceedings,” such as before the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) or the International Court Justice (“ICJ”). The UN Guidance and Practice for fact-finding missions provides that evidence must be evaluated for its “reliability” and “truthfulness,” that investigations must be conducted with “integrity,” meaning “without any bias,” and that factual findings must be “adequately corroborated” by at least two other “independent and reliable” sources.

Yet, as detailed below, the Commission relies on a one-sided evidentiary record and repeatedly draws conclusions regarding intent, knowledge, and targeting decisions from witness testimony that is often impossible to independently verify. It further builds its findings on layers of inference and assumption that are presented as established fact, despite lacking sufficient evidentiary support. At the same time, it disregards key facts that contradict its conclusions, including evidence that Hamas operated from civilian areas and recruited and used children in hostilities. This selective treatment of the evidence raises serious questions regarding the impartiality and integrity of the investigation.

These shortcomings would be troubling in any fact-finding exercise. They are particularly concerning here because the Commission’s findings are intended to inform international legal proceedings, including before the ICC and the ICJ. Findings of this nature—particularly those purporting to establish intent and criminal responsibility—would ordinarily require rigorous testing and corroboration before being relied upon in judicial proceedings. Yet international courts have an established practice of relying on UN reports as evidence. This report therefore undermines not only the integrity of international fact-finding, but also the application of international law and confidence in the UN system as a whole.

A summary of UN Watch’s detailed legal rebuttal follows.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL LEGAL REBUTTAL

By Salo Aizenberg

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (“COI”), issued a 94-page report (the “Report”) alleging that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children, with a particular focus on the war in Gaza. These are among the gravest accusations possible under international law, carrying implications of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Yet despite the extraordinary nature of these allegations, the Report fails to provide even a single verified example demonstrating that Israel Defense Forces (“IDF”) personnel identified an individual as a civilian child and deliberately selected that child for death for no purpose other than killing the child. Instead, the report repeatedly substitutes the tragic fact that children died during the war for proof of deliberate targeting.

The Report’s conclusions are built on layers of speculation and inference unsupported by direct evidence at every stage of the analysis. In each incident recounted, the COI cannot conclusively determine whether Israeli forces fired the shot, whether militants were present, whether combat was occurring nearby, whether any threat existed, or what battlefield circumstances surrounded the incident. Yet despite these uncertainties, it repeatedly reaches definitive conclusions regarding Israeli responsibility and intent. In each case, the COI constructs an entire narrative of intentional killing through stacked assumptions rather than verified facts, transforming uncorroborated allegations into definitive findings of criminal conduct.

At the same time, the COI systematically removes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (“PIJ”) from the battlefield narrative, portraying the Gaza conflict as though the IDF, acting under orders from Israeli political and military leadership, was engaged solely in the deliberate killing of civilians, particularly children. Across 94 pages, the Report never acknowledges that the IDF was fighting a heavily armed force of tens of thousands of Hamas and PIJ operatives who constructed hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, embedded military infrastructure throughout civilian areas, and routinely operated from homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and displacement zones.[1] The result is a fictionalized account of the conflict in which there is no armed opposition, no complex urban battlefield, and no armed actors in Gaza other than the IDF. Combined with the erasure of militant activity in the West Bank, this distortion enables the COI to advance the fabricated narrative that Israeli forces were trained, directed, and deployed to deliberately target children as a matter of policy.

Such deficiencies strip the Report of legal credibility and render it indistinguishable from advocacy framed as serious analysis. The Report’s extreme length is intended to create the impression of rigorous evidentiary and forensic review, yet it still cannot mask the fundamental absence of reliable proof for its central allegations. An accusation that Israeli soldiers deliberately identified and killed children cannot rest on speculative reconstructions of battlefield events while systematically excluding military context and contradictory evidence. This rebuttal examines the central defects of the Report and demonstrates why the evidence presented cannot sustain a finding that Israel deliberately targeted children. A summary of the Report’s principal deficiencies is as follows:

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.

[1] Hamas’ use of human shield in Gaza, NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (June 6, 2019), https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/hybrid-threats-hamas-use-of-human-shields-in-gaza/87.

[2] How Hamas is Fighting in Gaza: Tunnels, Traps, and Ambushes, New York Times (July 13, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/world/middleeast/hamas-gaza-israel-fighting.html; The Tunnels of Gaza: How the subterranean maze below the Gasa Strip works, New York Times (November 10, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/10/world/europe/hamas-gaza-tunnels.html.

[3] Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas, Wall Street Journal (June 10, 2024), https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-chiefs-brutal-calculation-civilian-bloodshed-will-help-hamas-626720e7.

[4] Hamas’s Human Shield Strategy in Gaza, Henry Jackson Society (April 2025),  https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/HJS-Hamass-Human-Shield-Strategy-in-Gaza-Report-WEB.pdf.

[5] Here’s what a Hamas training camp for teens looks like, The Washington Post (January 29, 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/heres-what-a-hamas-training-camp-for-teens-looks-like/2015/01/29/ef0b4092-a33f-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html.

[6] The Child Soldiers of Gaza, @Aizenberg55 X (February 17, 2026, 5:35 PM), https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/2023783492446789844.

The post UN Watch Legal Rebuttal: Disproving the Pillay Commission’s Charge That Israel Deliberately Targets Palestinian Children appeared first on UN Watch.

By Dina Rovner, Legal Advisor at UN Watch

The Human Rights Council’s Pillay Commission on Israel, now headed by Srinivasan Muralidhar of India, just released a new report focusing on violations by “non-State actors,” specifically “settlers” and “Palestinian armed groups” in the West Bank and Gaza. Despite the Commission’s formal reconstitution following the resignation of Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti—with Sidoti subsequently re-appointed and Florence Mumba joining the panel—its reporting continues to reflect a persistent bias against Israel. 

In an apparent effort to project even-handedness, the report addresses violations by both Israeli and Palestinian non-State actors. Yet the distribution of attention tells a different story. More than half of the report focuses on Israeli violations against Palestinians, while only approximately 9% addresses Palestinian attacks against Israelis. Another 34% examines Hamas abuses against Palestinians in Gaza. Even in those latter sections, however, the Commission repeatedly contextualizes or shifts blame to Israel, attributing lawlessness, repression, and social collapse primarily to Israeli actions rather than Hamas governance, effectively minimizing Hamas’s responsibility for its own crimes. The report also applies markedly different accountability standards to Israel and Palestinian actors. 

At the heart of the report is a false moral equivalence between Israeli civilians residing in the West Bank and jihadi terrorist organizations. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, approximately 482,000 Israelis currently live in communities in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), home to areas of profound Jewish historical and religious significance, including the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, and Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus. While the overwhelming majority are peaceful civilians, a small minority of Jewish extremists—estimated by Israeli defense officials at roughly 300 individuals, many of whom are not residents of the area—have repeatedly engaged in violence against Palestinians, including property damage, assaults, and, in some cases, killings. 

The issue of extremist Israeli violence is real and should be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Israeli authorities themselves have acknowledged this as a serious problem and have taken actions to curb the phenomenon, ranging from issuing restraining orders to arrest and prosecution, as detailed in Section 3 below. Condemnation of such violence has come from the highest levels of government. As recently as May 21, 2024, Israeli President Isaac Herzog lambasted acts of violence by Jewish extremists, saying that they “defile and violate every basic moral, legal, and Jewish norm.” He noted that “There are elements on the fringes of our society that have normalized violence, and, sadly, some go even further — celebrating it and taking pride in it.”   

However, the existence of a small number of violent Jewish extremists does not warrant the collective stigmatization of hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians. Using the term “settler violence” to characterize all Israeli residents of the West Bank through the actions of a small extremist minority is misleading and irresponsible and risks stigmatizing innocent civilians due to their status as “settlers.” The report then draws a false moral equivalence by placing them in the same analytical category as designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—groups openly committed to Israel’s destruction and the murder of Jews. By the same logic, one could describe Hamas terrorism as “Gazan violence.” Such terminology would be widely rejected because it conflates the actions of violent actors with those of the broader population. 

The report’s treatment of Israeli victims illustrates the consequences of this framing. In paragraph 68, the Commission notes that of 42 Israelis killed in terrorist attacks in the West Bank between 2023 and 2025, 36 were “settlers.” By contrast, when discussing Palestinian fatalities, the report does not distinguish between uninvolved civilians, members of armed groups, or Palestinians killed while carrying out terrorist attacks. Instead, it categorizes Palestinian victims only by sex and age. The Commission’s deliberate emphasis on the “settler” status of Israeli victims—while withholding comparable contextual information regarding Palestinian fatalities—creates the unmistakable impression that attacks against these Israelis are somehow more understandable or less morally troubling.   

Moreover, a close examination of the report reveals that many of its factual and legal conclusions rest on an incomplete and methodologically flawed evidentiary record. The report relies on unidentified witnesses, NGOs, open-source material, and prior UN reports—including the Commission’s own reports—which often suffer from the same methodological flaws. The lack of transparency regarding sources makes many factual assertions impossible to independently verify. Moreover, the report repeatedly omits or disregards material that undermines its narrative of Israeli violations, yet reaches sweeping legal conclusions on the basis of an incomplete and selective factual record. This is most evident in the Commission’s transformation of the criminal conduct of a small extremist minority into sweeping and unsupported allegations of Israeli state policy, culminating in the claim that settler violence functions “as a means of implementing” that policy (para. 73).    

The Commission relies almost exclusively on OCHA statistics for deaths and injuries involving both Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank (paras. 7–8, 68). However, a detailed April 2025 incident-level analysis of OCHA’s data conducted by the Israeli NGO Regavim—corroborated in part by academic and other independent analyses—identified serious methodological deficiencies. 

According to the study, approximately 12% of reported incidents (roughly 1,000 out of 8,333) relied on only a single source. More significantly, under the rubric of “settler violence,” OCHA counted Palestinians killed or injured in attacks they themselves initiated, while simultaneously undercounting Palestinian attacks and resulting Israeli casualties compared to official Israeli government data. OCHA also classified as “violent events” incidents that involved no violence at all, including Jewish visits to the Temple Mount, visits to archaeological sites, and even traffic accidents. Approximately 20% of recorded incidents occurred in Jerusalem rather than the West Bank, most involving Temple Mount visits or clashes between Israeli police and Muslim rioters. Another 19% involved alleged “trespassing” by Israeli tourists and hikers in the West Bank without violence, physical assault, or property damage. 

After excluding incidents that did not involve physical violence initiated by Israeli civilians against Palestinians or their property, the study concluded that OCHA overstated the scope of “settler violence” by approximately 90%, identifying an average of only 9.4 allegations of Jewish nationalist physical violence per month—roughly 110 annually. By comparison, official Shin Bet data recorded more than 2,000 Palestinian attacks against Israelis per year, an average of 167 per month. A June 2025 editorial in the Wall Street Journal endorsed many of Regavim’s findings, while a 2026 study by senior IDF officials reached similar conclusions. Hebrew University criminology researcher Dr. Michael Wolfowicz also identified methodological flaws in UN reporting, including double counting. For example, if a Palestinian terrorist was shot while carrying out an attack and died the following day, the incident could be recorded twice as “settler violence”—once for the shooting and again for the death. Palestinians killed in clashes with IDF soldiers were also at times included within the broader “settler violence” rubric. Indeed, in March 2026, OCHA reported that 26 Palestinians had been “killed by Israeli forces or settlers” since the beginning of the year. This included Khattab Mohammad Daragmeh, who was killed while attacking IDF soldiers and later mourned by Hamas as one of its shahids. Notably, while the Commission accuses Israel of “mischaracterizing settler-initiated assaults as Palestinian attacks” (para. 28), the OCHA methodology on which the report relies repeatedly classifies Palestinian-initiated attacks as “settler violence.” 

The Commission’s conclusions regarding alleged settler violence rest on deeply flawed and inflated data, substantially undermining the reliability of many of its factual and legal findings. Its central charge that settler violence functions “as a means of implementing” Israeli state policy (para. 73) is therefore unsupported. 

These methodological deficiencies are compounded by a series of additional factual, legal, and analytical flaws throughout the report, including the following:

1. Selective Evidence and Unverifiable Sources

The Commission states that it “consulted multiple sources of information, collected hundreds of open-source items, conducted remote interviews with victims and witnesses, and received information through an open call for submissions” (para. 3). Yet much of the report relies on anonymous interviews, unattributed allegations, and undisclosed materials, while the underlying evidence remains “on file with the Commission” and unavailable for independent scrutiny (paras. 3–4). As a result, many factual assertions cannot be independently verified. This concern is heightened by the Commission’s past reliance on highly politicized NGOs, which advance one-sided narratives demonizing Israel and minimizing or omitting Palestinian culpability. The result is a report built on unverifiable claims and selective sourcing that presents an incomplete factual record.  

2. Recycles Biased UN Reports

Aside from its reliance on biased OCHA data, the report cites remarkably few sources for its factual findings—mostly other UN reports, including previous reports of the Commission itself—and none at all for its legal conclusions. Rather than independently substantiating its claims, the Commission largely recycles prior UN reporting, much of it based on the same questionable and politicized sources. Repetition does not make contested allegations credible, nor does citing prior UN reports remedy underlying evidentiary deficiencies.  

3. Insufficient Support for Claims of State Policy

The Commission claims that “settler violence has been carried out in collaboration with Israeli military authorities,” relying only on biased UN reports (para. 10). It further alleges that Israeli authorities promote “structural conditions that enable [settler violence],” citing outdated Knesset reports from 1982 and 1994 (para. 11). Without citing evidence, it asserts that “Israeli Army units have operated alongside settlers in numerous incidents,” that authorities treat settler attacks as “riots” or “confrontations” between “two ostensibly equal sides,” and that when Palestinians respond by throwing stones, they mischaracterize “settler-initiated assaults as Palestinian attacks” (Para. 28). On this basis, the Commission concludes that there has been a “de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers” (para. 28), and that settler violence functions “as a means of implementing” Israeli state policy (para. 73). 

The factual record does not support these sweeping claims. Attacks by Jews against Palestinians in the West Bank are perpetrated by a small minority of extremists who do not represent most settlers and in no way reflect Israeli “state policy” or its “implementation,” as the Commission claims (para. 73). The Commission itself acknowledges that some of those involved are not settlers at all, but at-risk youth from Israel (para. 24). Its reliance on the most extreme figures in this movement, including Elisha Yered and Meir Ettinger—both of whom have faced criminal proceedings in Israel—only confirms that this is not a mainstream phenomenon. Nor is it directed only at Palestinians: some of those responsible have also attacked IDF soldiers. 

More can and should be done to curb Jewish extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. But the claim that such violence reflects Israeli state policy is contradicted by repeated condemnations from Prime Minister Netanyahu, including when violence was directed against Palestinians and against the IDF, as well as by President Isaac Herzog, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, and others—an inconvenient fact the Commission quickly dismisses (para. 73). Settlement leaders have also condemned such violence. 

Recent studies published in 2025 and 2026 reviewing Israeli police data further undermine the Commission’s narrative of systemic impunity. While complaints against Jewish offenders in the West Bank were significantly higher than elsewhere in Israel, many allegations were ultimately dismissed as false or unsupported. One February 2026 case illustrates the problem: Palestinian sources accused settlers of deliberately setting fire to a sheep pen in the southern West Bank, killing dozens of sheep. An Israeli police investigation found that the fire was electrical, not a “criminal or nationalistically motivated act.” 

Israeli authorities have also taken coercive measures against extremist settlers, including administrative detention. In 2025, leaked Shin Bet recordings reportedly exposed the head of the agency’s Jewish Division pressing the Judea and Samaria police chief to intensify arrests and interrogations of extremist settlers, stating: “We always want to arrest them for interrogation, as much as possible.” Far from demonstrating official indifference or acquiescence, these actions directly undermine the Commission’s claim that settler violence functions “as a means of implementing” Israeli state policy (para. 73). 

4. Dismisses Evidence of Israeli Action Against Settler Violence

The Commission repeatedly discounts or minimizes Israeli efforts to address extremist violence by Jewish Israelis in the West Bank. It criticizes Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, for describing perpetrators as “a small group of unruly youth” that “do not represent settlers as a whole” (para. 23), despite the Commission itself acknowledging that some perpetrators are not settlers at all, but at-risk youth from Israel (para. 24). Likewise, while acknowledging that Israeli authorities have issued removal orders against violent settlers and dismantled certain outposts described as “exporters of Jewish terror,” the Commission dismisses these measures as merely “symbolic” and “limited in scope” (para. 27). 

The Commission similarly discounts repeated public condemnations of settler violence by senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, and military leadership as “periodic government statements,” and asserts that Israeli authorities have taken “no meaningful or sustained measures” to curb such attacks (para. 73). Yet this conclusion disregards administrative detention, arrests, removal orders, police investigations, and other coercive measures undertaken against extremist offenders.

The Commission also appears willing to infer institutional failure from incomplete legal processes. In discussing a March 2026 case in which Israeli police arrested seven individuals, it emphasizes that it was “not aware of any investigative or judicial outcomes,” implying a deficiency in accountability even though the legal process had not yet run its course. The absence of immediate judicial outcomes is not evidence of impunity, particularly where arrests and investigations were already underway.

5. False Distinction Between Hamas’s Political and Military Wings

The Commission attempts to distinguish between Hamas’s “military wing” and Hamas governing institutions, criticizing Israel for targeting “civilian Hamas officials, including police, and internal security forces” (para. 46) while treating them as separate from Hamas military operations. Yet the Commission itself found that crimes against Palestinians in Gaza were committed by “a plain-clothed paramilitary force created in March 2024 by the Ministry of Interior in Gaza” (para. 37)—a Hamas government ministry.

In reality, Hamas does not recognize a meaningful distinction between its political, governing, and military structures. Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin explicitly rejected such separation, stating: “We cannot separate the wing from the body. If we do so, the body will not be able to fly. Hamas is one body.” Reflecting this reality, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the European Union, and others designate Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist organization, rather than distinguishing between political and military branches.

6. Minimizes Violent Stone-Throwing

The Commission minimizes the seriousness of Palestinian stone-throwing, criticizing Israel for referring to Palestinian stone-throwers as “terrorists” over what it characterizes as “some stone throwing” (paras. 29, 75). It further portrays stone-throwing as an act of self-defense, referring to “Palestinians who throw stones to defend themselves, their property and land in the face of settler attacks” (para. 75). 

This characterization obscures the violent nature of such attacks. Stone-throwing attacks are often carried out by organized groups and frequently target Jewish vehicles on West Bank roads. Israeli authorities have repeatedly documented incidents in which rocks thrown at moving vehicles resulted in severe injuries and fatalities. 

7. Shifts Responsibility for Palestinian Terrorism Against Israelis onto Israel

While the Commission includes a section on Palestinian crimes against Israelis, apparently in an effort to appear even-handed, it is the shortest section in the report and addresses the issue only superficially. Moreover, approximately one-quarter of the text is devoted not to Palestinian abuses themselves, but to criticizing Israeli security measures designed to protect civilians and prevent attacks. Without citing sources, the Commission claims that such measures contribute to further Palestinian violence “as a measure of resistance and revenge” (para. 72). By characterizing attacks as acts of “resistance and revenge,” the Commission implicitly legitimizes violence against Israelis while shifting focus from Palestinian responsibility to criticism of Israeli security measures.  

8. Ignores Official Palestinian Support for Terrorism

While the report concludes that “settler violence functions not as a deviation from state policy but as a means of implementing it” (para. 73), it ignores evidence of official Palestinian Authority support for terrorism. Beyond longstanding concerns regarding incitement on official PA television and in PA educational materials, Palestinian terrorists and their families continue to receive state payments. 

Although Mahmoud Abbas announced in February 2025 that the payment system would be reformed, he made clear that financial support would continue through a different mechanism. At the time, Abbas declared: “Even if we have [only] one penny left, it is for the prisoners and Martyrs. I will not agree, and you will not agree, to reduce any obligation, any interest, or any penny given to them. They must receive everything, as it was in the past, and they are more precious than all of us!” The U.S. confirmed, based on open-source reporting, that, as of February 2026, the payments continued. 

Moreover, a February 2026 report by Palestinian Media Watch found that since 2021, the Palestinian Authority had concealed substantial payments to terrorists by categorizing them as civil servant salaries and pension payments. Following the report, PA Finance Minister Estephan Salameh stated that the Palestinian Authority had “not abandoned” any terrorist, “whether they are prisoners or families of Martyrs and wounded,” and reaffirmed the PA’s commitment to these payments despite “great, almost impossible difficulty,” describing the issue as a “clear, fundamental national issue.” 

9. Selective Analysis of Nasser Hospital

The Commission detailed multiple Hamas violations against Palestinians at Nasser Hospital, including interrogations, mistreatment, and violent punishment carried out on hospital premises, thereby demonstrating Hamas’s operational use of the facility (paras. 55–61). However, it omitted any discussion of Hamas’s use of Nasser Hospital for military operations against Israel. The IDF has stated, based on intelligence, that Nasser Hospital served as a Hamas headquarters and that hostages were held there. This is corroborated by returned hostage Sharon Aloni Cunio, who told CNN in January 2024 that tens of hostages were held captive at Nasser Hospital. Military experts such as John Spencer and Andrew Fox, both of whom have conducted field visits to Gaza and analyzed these issues, have similarly concluded that Hamas used Nasser Hospital for military purposes in its war against Israel. Under Article 19 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, hospitals lose protection when they “are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.” Yet despite documenting only Hamas’s operational use of the facility against Gazans—while omitting evidence regarding Hamas’s military use against Israel—the Commission finds that these documented crimes do not amount to “acts harmful to the enemy” and makes the sweeping legal conclusion that such conduct “does not result in the loss of special protection of the hospital against attacks under international humanitarian law.” (paras. 61, 87). Given the selective factual record, the Commission cannot credibly reach such a sweeping legal conclusion. 

10. Shifts Responsibility for Hamas Abuses Against Gazans onto Israel

In discussing Hamas violations against Palestinians in Gaza, the Commission frames Israeli actions—not Hamas rule—as the primary driver of abuses. In its “Background” section, it reiterates its prior claim that Israel “committed genocide in Gaza” after October 7 (para. 46), before faulting Israel for creating a power vacuum by targeting “civilian Hamas officials, including police, and internal security forces,” while distinguishing them from Hamas’s “military wing,” and by destroying “essential infrastructure.” According to the Commission, the resulting “lawlessness, killings, lootings, theft and social chaos were the direct results of this vacuum and Israeli attacks” (para. 46). 

The Commission similarly links increased risks of “sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment” to the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, attributing them to Israel’s alleged “destruction of the international aid delivery system” (paras. 46–47). In its legal conclusions, the Commission again situates Hamas violations “in a context where the genocide inflicted by Israel has devastated Gaza’s infrastructure, eliminated civil policing and administrative structures, and helped to create a deep power and security vacuum in which no functioning, accountable law-enforcement or judicial system protects civilians” (para. 81).

This framing obscures the role of Hamas itself. By suggesting that abuses primarily stemmed from the collapse of governance structures, the Commission implicitly portrays Hamas-run policing and governance as institutions that previously protected civilians. Yet Hamas police and security forces have long been implicated in abuses against Palestinians in Gaza, including executions, shootings at aid sites, arbitrary detention, and torture. In its August 2022 concluding observations, the Committee Against Torture expressed concern regarding “allegations of widespread torture” by the security and intelligence services of both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Likewise, in its August 2023 concluding observations, the Human Rights Committee expressed concern regarding the use of the death penalty in Gaza, the prosecution of civilians in military courts, the lack of judicial guarantees, and the absence of judicial independence. Video footage recovered in Gaza and published in November 2024 appeared to show Hamas members torturing Gazans between 2020 and 2022, visually reinforcing longstanding reports of abuse by Hamas authorities. The Commission did not address this evidence. 

11. Minimizes Hamas Abuse of Israeli Hostages

The Commission gives only cursory treatment to Hamas torture and sexual abuse of Israeli hostages. Its finding that hostages were merely “mistreated in captivity” (para. 69) fails to convey the severity of the reported abuse. This is the Commission’s first report since the release of the final Israeli hostages in October 2025 and its fifth report since the January 2025 hostage releases. Yet, it has never meaningfully addressed the consistent testimony of returning hostages describing repeated physical and psychological torture, sexual abuse and assault, deliberate starvation, and severe deprivation of hygiene and medical care.  

Likewise, while the Commission addressed sexual crimes committed on October 7 in its June 2024 report, its findings were limited. It stated that it could not attribute the crimes to Hamas due to insufficient information regarding perpetrators and made no findings regarding the deliberate or systematic nature of the abuse. The Commission has not revisited the issue in any meaningful detail despite extensive open-source material, including testimony from witnesses, survivors, and former hostages. 

For example, the May 2026 report of Israel’s Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children concluded that Hamas sexual crimes were “deliberate,” “widespread,” “systematic,” and “integral” to the October 7 attack. The study documented its findings based on “430 formal and informal interviews, testimonies, and meetings with survivors, witnesses, former hostages, experts, and family members,” “more than 10,000 photographs and video segments,” and visits to affected communities. The Commission does not mention this report, nor does it engage with earlier Israeli studies, including the June 2025 report of The Dinah Project and the February 2024 report of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. 

12. Double Standards on Israeli and Palestinian Children

The report discusses the impact of settler violence on both Palestinian and Israeli children (paras. 77–78; 90). Regarding Israeli children, it portrays them as both “perpetrators and victims,” exposed to “constant indoctrination and radicalisation” amounting to “child abuse and exploitation.” Yet while the report briefly notes harm suffered by Palestinian children directly exposed to Hamas violence (para. 84), it entirely omits the longstanding indoctrination and radicalization of Palestinian children by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, including through school curricula, glorification of “martyrs,” antisemitic narratives, media messaging, and the recruitment and use of minors by Palestinian armed groups. Numerous studies of Palestinian Authority textbooks, including those used in UNRWA schools, have documented such content. Whatever indoctrination may occur among some Israeli children, the Commission ignores a far more extensive, institutionalized and officially-sponsored system of indoctrination affecting Palestinian children. If indoctrination, radicalization, and the exploitation of minors constitute a child-rights concern amounting to “child abuse and exploitation,” the Commission cannot selectively apply that standard only to Israeli children while disregarding longstanding abuses affecting Palestinian children.  

13. Omits Gender-Based Violence Against Palestinian Women

While the report discusses sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated by Hamas against Palestinian males, including forced stripping, sexual humiliation, and threats of castration (paras. 64–67; 86), it entirely omits allegations of sexual violence against Palestinian women by Hamas, particularly in Gaza. An April 2026 exposé by the Daily Mail reported disturbing accounts by Gazan women who alleged that Hamas operatives sexually assaulted and raped women in exchange for humanitarian aid. The report’s complete omission of these allegations, despite its detailed treatment of sexual and gender-based violence against Gazan males, reflects a selective approach to documenting abuses committed by Palestinian actors. 

14. Unequal Standards for Palestinian Accountability

While the Commission treats Israel harshly, issuing a series of one-sided demands, it adopts a markedly more lenient approach toward the Palestinian Authority. Rather than demanding an immediate end to violations and meaningful accountability, as it does with Israel, the Commission merely calls on the Palestinian Authority to investigate and prosecute crimes “to the extent possible,” to take “all possible” measures to prevent future attacks, and to ensure that the judicial system complies with international law (para. 91). Notably, the Commission’s recommendations to Hamas relate only to violations against Palestinians, not Israelis. 

Likewise, the Commission’s recommendations to Member States are directed primarily at Israeli settlements and settlers, calling for criminal prosecutions and sanctions against those “sustaining” the “settlement enterprise” (para. 93(e)). Although the Commission also calls for a cessation of assistance and support to “all non-State actors,” including “settlers and Palestinian armed groups” (para. 93(d)), this framing creates a false moral equivalency between violent Palestinian armed groups and Israeli civilians living in the West Bank, while failing to distinguish between violent extremists and the overwhelming majority of settlers who are not involved in violence.

The post Legal Analysis of the Pillay Commission’s June 2026 Report to the Human Rights Council appeared first on UN Watch.

For over four years, from 2021 until several months ago, Kothari was a member of the UN Human Rights Council’s infamous Pillay Commission — the perpetual inquiry targeting Israel.

Most famously, Kothari and the other two members of the commission issued a report accusing Israel of “genocide” — a baseless conclusion that continues to be cited worldwide.

During his tenure, in July 2022, Kothari gave an interview where he ranted about the “Jewish lobby” controlling social media. Thanks to UN Watch, he was condemned for antisemitism by 17 countries, and even by the UN itself.

In June 2023, Kothari gave a speech at the UNHRC complaining that the media was too pro-Israel. He cited “biased reporting of the BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, and there are many others almost verging towards fake news.”

This summer, after the U.S. imposed sanctions on UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the entire membership of the Pillay inquiry announced their resignations.

Kothari’s Deal To Exchange Posts

However, in his resignation letter, Kothari cited an “understanding” reached with the UN. Apparently, in exchange for his departure from the inquiry, he was promised a new UN role.

Indeed, in January, a Turkish-chaired UNHRC panel selected Kothari as its top candidate to become the next UN expert on poverty, despite his clear lack of any relevant experience.

In nearly all cases, those chosen by the vetting panel are then appointed by the Council. However, UN Watch caught wind of the scheme and sounded the alarm. UN Watch urged democracies to intervene and end Kothari’s UN tenure once and for all.

Beyond his bias, argued UN Watch, Kothari exemplifies a pattern of UN cronyism, having rotated through multiple unrelated positions over more than a decade.

UN Watch also recalled the incident in 2002, while Kothari was serving as the UN’s special rapporteur on housing. He had requested a visa to visit Israel in a  strictly personal capacity — only to later submit an official report against Israel as a result of that supposedly “personal” visit. Kothari’s conduct violated the working methods of the UNHRC’s mechanisms, and raised serious legal and ethical issues.

Pressure Mounts — Kothari Rejected

In wake of UN Watch’s campaign against Kothari’s bid for reappointment, pressure mounted. On March 2nd, the new UNHRC president took the rare step of rejecting the panel’s recommendation of Kothari.

The denial of Kothari’s application was made official yesterday when the 47-member Council elected an alternative candidate by acclamation.

This outcome marks a rare but important victory for accountability at the United Nations. A backroom arrangement was exposed, pressure was applied, and the system was forced to correct itself.

It sends a clear signal: those who promote antisemitism and abuse UN mandates can be challenged — and stopped.

GOOD NEWS: Miloon Kothari—the former UN investigator who was condemned for antisemitism by 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇨🇿🇩🇪🇳🇱🇫🇷🇮🇹🇦🇹🇧🇪🇨🇭🇸🇪🇳🇴🇩🇰🇧🇷🇭🇺 —has just been blocked from his bid to become a UN Special Rapporteur for the next 6 years. UN Watch led a campaign exposing Kothari's bigotry and bias. https://t.co/c6jU2xi0Ql

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) March 31, 2026

The post Success: UN Official Who Ranted About “The Jewish Lobby” Loses Reappointment appeared first on UN Watch.

By Dina Rovner, Legal Advisor at UN Watch

The Pillay Commission, established in May 2021 under Resolution S-30/1, was designed to isolate Israel internationally, increase sanctions, and build criminal cases against Israeli officials. True to that mission, its latest report accuses Israel of “genocide,” institutional “discrimination” (a euphemism for apartheid), and other grave crimes. It urges states to impose sweeping boycotts and sanctions and even names specific Israeli officials as targets for prosecution in international courts.

The report centers on housing policy in Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel’s sovereign territory. Its factual analysis and legal conclusions are entirely one-sided, omitting critical context and assigning sole blame to Israel for Palestinian suffering. It ignores Palestinian rejectionism, terrorism, and ongoing warfare — erasing the reality of decades of Palestinian violence and incitement.

While demanding that Israel “recognize and ensure the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” the Commission simultaneously denies the Jewish people that same right, demonizing Jewish settlement even within sovereign Israeli territory. Given the Commissioners’ well-documented record of anti-Israel activism and their repeated dismissal of antisemitism, such bias is predictable. But it underscores why this report has no legitimacy, no legal authority, and deserves to be categorically rejected.

As with its previous publications, the Pillay Commission’s latest report is deeply flawed. Key deficiencies are outlined below. The false genocide allegation, already thoroughly refuted, is not addressed here.

1. Bias Evident From Outset

The Commission’s bias is evident from the outset. In its opening paragraph, it declares that from the beginning it viewed October 7th as a “watershed moment” — not for revealing Palestinian rejectionism and commitment to jihadi terrorism, but for portraying Israel as seeking to “solidify and expand the occupation” (Para. 1). In doing so, the Commission perversely transformed the October 7th mass atrocity against Israel into a “watershed moment” to demonize the Jewish state. With this preconceived narrative, the Commission proceeds to manipulate facts to support its foregone conclusion that Israel has “deepened the occupation” since October 7th.

2. Ignores Hamas and Terrorism

The Commission entirely ignores Hamas. The word “Hamas” appears only once in the report (Para. 23), and even then, merely in reference to a quote attributed to Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir. The Commission itself makes no substantive reference to Hamas, nor does it hold the terrorist organization accountable for any violations, particularly its systematic exploitation of civilian infrastructure in Gaza for military purposes — the primary cause of the extensive damage to civilian property discussed in the report.

Likewise, the report completely ignores the issue of Palestinian terrorism targeting Jews and Israelis. The words “terrorism,” “terror,” and “terrorist” each appear only once, and only when quoted from Israeli officials.

3. Ignores Israeli Hostages

The Commission’s indifference to Israeli suffering is equally apparent in its treatment of the hostages. Apart from a token reference buried in a recommendation to the Palestinian government calling to “immediately release all hostages” (Para. 88), the report entirely ignores the plight of the Israelis — cruelly starved, chained, and tortured by Hamas for two years and deliberately deprived of their most basic human needs.

The Commission makes no mention of their rights to humane treatment, sanitary conditions, or visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Moreover, despite testimony from released hostages confirming they were held in civilian homes, hospitals, UN shelters, and designated humanitarian zones — acts that endangered Palestinian civilians and violated international law — the report refuses to address these violations. In omitting these facts, the Commission shields Hamas from accountability and distorts the causes of civilian suffering and destruction in Gaza.

4. Ignores Hamas Tunnels

The report mentions Hamas’s vast tunnel network only once (Para. 16) — not to hold Hamas accountable for diverting millions of dollars in international aid to build terror infrastructure instead of civilian infrastructure, nor for constructing an estimated 350-mile network of tunnels beneath Gaza that endangered all civilian structures above. Instead, the Commission refers to the tunnels solely to criticize Israel for citing them as a justification for establishing security corridors and buffer zones in Gaza. Once again, the Commission absolves Hamas of responsibility while condemning Israel for its legitimate security measures.

5. Erases the War

One of the Commission’s central claims is that after October 7th, Israel “systematically destroyed civilian objects across Gaza and repeatedly forcibly transferred the population” (Para. 13). This framing suggests that Israel invaded and devastated Gaza without provocation.

It erases the Hamas atrocities of October 7th — the massacre of Israeli families and the abduction of some 250 hostages — and ignores the broader war context, including Hamas’s deliberate strategy of embedding its fighters, weapons, and command centers within civilian infrastructure to maximize casualties, property damage, and international outrage.

The Commission later notes that property destruction increased significantly between October 2023 and February 2024 (Para. 20), which coincided with one of the most intense phases of combat between the Israeli army and Hamas. This context demonstrates that the destruction was an unfortunate consequence of urban warfare, not evidence of a genocidal Israeli policy as the Commission claims. By blaming Israel alone for the devastation in Gaza while omitting this essential context, the Commission amplifies Hamas propaganda and effectively serves as an advocate for the terrorist organization.

6. Circular Logic: Citing Itself as “Evidence”

The Commission attempts to lend legal legitimacy to its claims by citing the July 19, 2024 ICJ Advisory Opinion on the effects of Israeli policy on “the exercise by the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination” (Para 5). Yet in doing so, it is effectively citing itself.

The 2024 Advisory Opinion relied heavily on the Commission’s own September 2022 report to the UN General Assembly (A/77/328), which concluded — without considering a range of perspectives or authorities — that Israeli policy violated the Palestinian right to self-determination. That report relied almost exclusively on partisan, pro-Palestinian NGOs and recommended that the General Assembly request an ICJ Advisory Opinion on “Israel’s refusal to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination,” effectively prejudging Israel.

The resulting General Assembly Resolution (A/RES/77/247) echoed this presumption, asking “what are the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” The ICJ’s Advisory Opinion then cited extensively to the Commission’s 2022 report. By invoking the ICJ’s conclusions, the Commission here relies on its own unsourced and partisan assertions as supposed legal authority — creating a circular reference rather than providing independent validation. For more on this see Timeline: How the Pillay Commission Instigated the ICJ Assault on Israel.

7. Erases Palestinian Agency

The report deliberately frames Israel’s housing policies through the Palestinian victim narrative, referring to the 1948 war as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) (Section II, Background). In doing so, the Commission infantilizes Palestinians, strips them of agency, and absolves them of responsibility for their own fate.

The report presents a selective, ahistorical account claiming that 700,000 Palestinians were “forced to leave their homes,” while ignoring critical context: Arab states rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, launched a war of annihilation against the nascent Jewish state, encouraged Palestinians to flee, and ethnically cleansed areas that came under their control of Jews — including the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and the entire West Bank, home to Judaism’s holiest sites. This selective framing shields Palestinians from accountability while demonizing Israel.

8. Rewrites History to Vilify Israel

Citing no sources, the report claims that the Arabs who remained in Israel after the 1948 war were “forced to concentrate principally in two large geographical areas, the Negev and Galilee,” implying that Israel forcibly relocated them to these regions (Para. 7). In reality, Arabs were already concentrated in these areas and remained there naturally following the war.

9. Falsely Claims Israel Occupies Gaza

While the Commission acknowledges that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it falsely asserts that Israel has continued to occupy the territory by virtue of its control over “the airspace, water and territorial borders of Gaza, as well as civilian infrastructure, including water and electricity, and key governmental functions” (Para. 17). In reality, although Israel has maintained a lawful naval blockade since 2007 — after Hamas violently seized control of the territory — it has had no physical presence in Gaza and no authority over its internal governance after the 2005 disengagement.

As a matter of international law, occupation requires effective control over the territory, which Israel clearly does not exercise. Indeed, Hamas’s ability to launch thousands of rockets into Israel, construct a vast underground terror network, and orchestrate the October 7th massacre from within Gaza demonstrates that Israel does not control the territory’s internal affairs.

10. Unsupported and Speculative Findings

The Commission’s conclusions rest on conjecture, not evidence. The Commission claims it “could not find reasonable military justification for the consistent and extensive expansion of the two corridors” (Para. 19). Yet it concedes “creating security zones” and “establishing military bases” can serve legitimate military purposes (Para. 72). The report cites no military experts, provides no independent analysis, and relies on unverified information. It also has no access to IDF operational data, internal military protocols, or on-the-ground observations. Despite this absence of expertise or evidence, the Commission expects readers to accept its unverified conclusions at face value.

11. Israel’s Own Oversight Mechanisms Address Discrimination—No Need for a Biased UN Commission

The Commission cites a 2024 State Comptroller report (Para. 52) highlighting Arab Israeli housing challenges. That report includes concrete recommendations — some directed at local municipalities — demonstrating that local elected authorities share responsibility for housing issues. The very existence of this report shows that these issues are actively addressed by the Israeli Knesset, demonstrating Israel’s democratic institutions already implement oversight and reform. There is therefore no justification for interference by a biased UN Commission.

12. Denies Jewish Right to Live in Their Homeland While Demonizing Growth of Jewish Communities

Although Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, the Commission denies Jews the right to live anywhere within that homeland — whether in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), home to many Jewish holy sites, or within Israel’s sovereign borders. The Commission harshly criticizes the expansion of Jewish communities inside sovereign Israeli territory, labeling it “Judaization.” Depicting Jewish settlement in Israel as illegitimate constitutes a denial of the Jewish right to self-determination and is inherently antisemitic.

At the same time, the Commission misrepresents separate Jewish and Arab communities as “segregation,” ignoring that residential patterns reflect social, cultural, and safety preferences. Mixed cities exist, and there have been recent trends of Arab Israelis moving to Jewish-majority cities for safer environments. The Commission ignores this context entirely.

The post Legal Analysis of the Pillay Commission’s September 2025 Report to the General Assembly appeared first on UN Watch.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL LEGAL REBUTTAL

By Salo Aizenberg

Accusations of genocide are among the most serious charges that can be made against a state. They evoke the darkest episodes of modern history, such as the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Srebrenica, and they carry immense legal consequences as well as profound moral weight. For this reason, the Genocide Convention of 1948 sets a deliberately high bar: genocide requires specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group “as such.”[1] Genocidal intent is established only when there is no other reasonable inference. Evidence of widespread civilian casualties, extensive destruction, or inflammatory rhetoric does not suffice; what is required is proof that deaths and suffering were the result of a deliberate policy to exterminate a people. Establishing such intent is among the most difficult elements in international law, and the genocide allegation against Israel fails at this threshold even before considering the Report’s distortions of its conduct in Gaza.

The UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry’s report is fatally deficient: its reasoning is deeply flawed, its evidentiary base unreliable, and its methodology unsound. It selectively misinterprets statements by Israeli leaders, accepts unverified Hamas casualty figures, disregards Hamas’s systematic use of human shields, relies on unverified media reports (such as by Al-Jazeera), and assumes that civilian deaths in Gaza are only the result of deliberate targeting by Israel. Its omissions are equally striking. The report erases Hamas as an active belligerent; across its 72 pages, it never acknowledges that the IDF is engaged with a 30,000-strong fighting force that constructed a battlefield fortified with 500 kilometers of tunnels. Such deficiencies strip the document of legal credibility and render it indistinguishable from propaganda dressed in legal language.

This rebuttal examines the central defects of the UN report (the “Report”) issued by the Commission of Inquiry (the “Commission”). It shows why the evidence presented cannot sustain a finding of genocide under international law. A summary of its main deficiencies are as follows:

1. Failure to prove dolus specialis: The specific intent to destroy a protected group is the central and extremely high bar in any genocide case. The Commission’s claim of genocidal intent fails on this threshold alone, relying on tortured parsing of statements, selective quotations, and conjecture rather than unambiguous evidence.

2. Erasure of Hamas as a belligerent: The report never acknowledges that the IDF is engaged in combat with an estimated 30,000-strong Hamas force in Gaza as well as thousands of fighters from other militant groups. A reader would come away believing the war has the IDF deployed against only women and children, with Hamas erased from the narrative. The Commission makes no attempt to analyze the war itself, because in its alternative version of reality, there is none.

3. Silence on Hamas’s military infrastructure: There is no mention of Hamas’s 17-year military buildup in Gaza, including its vast tunnel network, booby-trapped buildings, and massive arms buildup. By ignoring this reality, the report strips the conflict of its military context and recasts lawful military targets as evidence of genocide.

4. Erasure of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure: The Commission ignores Hamas’s openly acknowledged human shield strategy,[2] including its use of mosques, schools, residential buildings, and hospitals to conceal tunnels and weapons. Instead, damage to these sites is consistently portrayed as deliberate targeting of civilians by Israel.

5. No recognition of the hostage crisis: The report omits the fact that Hamas took Israeli hostages and continues to hold them, starve them,[3] and rape them.[4] This omission is consistent with the broader erasure of Hamas as an active actor in Gaza, removing essential context from the Commission’s narrative.

6. Reliance on Hamas-supplied fatality data: Despite Hamas’s long record of exaggerating civilian deaths and its status as a US and EU-designated terrorist organization, its figures are treated as fact while IDF data on combatants killed is ignored.

7. Civilian deaths distorted as evidence of genocide: The report presents civilian casualties as prima facie proof of genocidal intent rather than as tragic and unavoidable consequences of urban warfare, exacerbated by Hamas’s human shield strategy. The Report cites numerous incidents where civilians were killed as intentional and targeted acts by Israel without evidence.

8. Normal wartime consequences treated as crimes: Regular and expected wartime impacts on civilians, such as mental health impacts, difficulty accessing medical care and displacement, are depicted as evidence of genocide rather than inevitable outcomes of urban conflict.

9. Urban devastation portrayed as extermination: Large-scale damage is cited as proof of genocide, ignoring that urban combat inherently produces extensive destruction, particularly when military forces are embedded within civilian areas.

The Commission also ignores the obvious: the suffering of Gazans could be significantly reduced or even ended if Hamas released all hostages and relinquished control of Gaza. The idea that the population experiencing the claimed genocide has the power to stop it but refuses to is unprecedented in the history of actual genocides and exposes a deliberate blind spot in the Report. This omission mirrors the Commission’s broader erasure of Hamas as an active party in the conflict, a group with agency and responsibility, leaving readers with the false impression that all suffering in Gaza is solely Israel’s responsibility.

The Report is riddled with factual errors and assertions made with no credible evidence. A complete catalog of these mistakes and their corrections would be longer than the Report itself. This rebuttal highlights key factual errors and significant omissions that the Commission relies on to underpin its thesis of genocide.

[1] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 78 U.N.T.S. 277 (adopted December 9, 1948, entered into force January 12, 1951), https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf.

[2] How Hamas is fighting in Gaza: tunnels, traps and ambushes, NYT (July 13, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/world/middleeast/hamas-gaza-israel-fighting.html.

[3] World leaders condemn videos of emaciated Israeli hostages in Gaza as Red Cross calls for access, BBC (August 4, 2025), https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crr2dwn7q40o.

[4] Hostages released from Gaza detail sexual violence as Israeli report concludes Hamas used it as ‘weapon of war’ on October 7, CNN (July 8, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/08/middleeast/hostages-gaza-sexual-violence-report-hamas-latam-intl; A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond, The Dinah Project (June 2025), https://thedinahproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/The-Dinah-Project-full-report-A4-pages_web.pdf; Mission report Official visit of the Office of the SRSG-SVC to Israel and the occupied West Bank 29 January – 14 February 2024, UN (March 4, 2024),  https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/report/mission-report-official-visit-of-the-office-of-the-srsg-svc-to-israel-and-the-occupied-west-bank-29-january-14-february-2024/20240304-Israel-oWB-CRSV-report.pdf.

The post UN Watch Legal Rebuttal: Disproving the Pillay Commission’s False “Genocide” Accusation Against Israel appeared first on UN Watch.

✅  Convened World Experts at UN to Fight Pillay Report: In June 2022, at a conference held in Geneva on the sidelines of the Human Rights Council, UN Watch convened renowned experts and activists—including Colonel Richard Kemp, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Corn, Einat Wilf, Olga Meshoe, and Yoseph Haddad—to refute the lies in the Pillay Commission’s inaugural report.

✅  Video Documentary: In August 2022, UN Watch produced an animated video explaining the biased mandate and composition of the Commission of Inquiry, and why it needs to be terminated.

✅  Original Cartoons: UN Watch commissioned an artist to draw powerful cartoons on the Pillay Commission, illustrating how it serves as a Kangaroo court, its history of antisemitism, and lack of impartiality.

✅  Testimony at United Nations: UN Watch repeatedly took the floor at the UN to take on the Commission of Inquiry:
• March 2022: Hillel Neuer exposed Navi Pillay’s gross bias
• June 2022: Col. Kemp spoke for UN Watch, saying, “This report incites hatred of Jews around the world, and cruelly betrays the Palestinian people”
• June 2023: Neuer called out member Miloon Kothari’s remarks about “the Jewish Lobby” controlling social media. An hour later, Navi Pillay was caught on hot mic laughing with her colleagues on how they ran out the clock to avoid answering Neuer’s questions about their bigotry.

✅  Legal Submissions: When the UN named Israel-hater Navi Pillay to head the inquiry, UN Watch submitted a 30-page legal brief demanding she be disqualified on grounds of bias. This was reported by Agence France Presse, putting the UNHRC president on the defensive. UN Watch then put forward a draft resolution to terminate the Commission altogether.

✅  Exposing Kothari’s Antisemitism: UN Watch exposed Miloon Kothari’s antisemitic remarks that social media is controlled largely by “the Jewish lobby,” leading to an unprecedented 18 countries denouncing him for antisemitism, including the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Brazil and Hungary.

✅  Launched Petition: UN Watch launched a petition to urge the United States to take action to remove the biased members, and to terminate the mandate of the Commission of Inquiry, garnering over 10,000 signatures.

Click here to view UN Watch’s dedicated webpage on the Pillay Commission.

3 years ago, UN commissioner Miloon Kothari ranted about the “Jewish lobby” controlling social media. 17 nations condemned him—but he kept his UN post.

Now, after the US sanctioned Francesca Albanese, Kothari resigned in fear.

The UN’s culture of impunity is starting to crack. pic.twitter.com/jnC5sWzSh7

— UN Watch (@UNWatch) July 25, 2025

BREAKING: Navi Pillay is resigning from the UN's permanent commission of inquiry on Israel, citing “age, medical issues and other commitments.” Her two colleagues are also resigning. Pillay was chosen for the post because of her visceral hate for Israel: https://t.co/jMTkNFEXrP

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) July 14, 2025

Meet the UN's impartial Pillay Inquiry:
✅ Navi Pillay — lobbies to “Sanction Apartheid Israel”
✅ Miloon Kothari — rants about “The Jewish Lobby”
✅ Chris Sidoti — says Jews “throw around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding”

More: https://t.co/Lbkei65XMt https://t.co/sOmMeM9a87 pic.twitter.com/SBGXVAGP9F

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) March 13, 2025

⚡ Caught on Hot Mic: Navi Pillay and Chris Sidoti, members of the UN's anti-Israel inquisition, unaware their conversation before today's press conference was being recorded, laugh about how they ran out the clock to avoid answering our questions about their bigotry and bias. https://t.co/i2YDVwO5Fd pic.twitter.com/7QQ9uWScAb

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) June 20, 2023

ICC Prosecutor Nazhat Khan hosted the UN Commission of Inquiry on Israel, whom she appointed:
Miloon Kothari—rants about “The Jewish Lobby”
Navi Pillay—lobbies to “Sanction Apartheid Israel”
Chris Sidoti—says Jews “throw around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding” https://t.co/6rscqu0q4c pic.twitter.com/mWXHmrOg8K

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) May 19, 2025

3/ Commissioner Chris Sidoti, who says Jews “throw around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding,” also announced his resignation—effective Nov. 3, like Pillay. However, he told the chair: “I am willing to accept reappointment to the Commission should you so wish…” pic.twitter.com/H3wQSftiqw

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) July 14, 2025

The post UN Watch Led Campaign Against Pro-Hamas Pillay Commission — All Now Resigning appeared first on UN Watch.

“This week, the dominoes are falling,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. “First, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the historic decision to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN’s pro-Hamas rapporteur, in wake of a massive campaign led by UN Watch. Now the architects of the UN’s anti-Israel inquisition are fleeing the ship. The tide is turning.”

Thank you, 🇺🇸@SecRubio. You just made the historic decision to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN's pro-Hamas rapporteur. Now the dominoes are falling. Frightened of also being sanctioned, architects of the UN’s anti-Israel inquisition are fleeing the ship. The tide is turning. https://t.co/QZlGt0EdV6

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) July 14, 2025

Navi Pillay, chair of the Commission of Inquiry (COI), announced her resignation citing “age, medical issues, and the weight of several other commitments.” However, Neuer said she seemed to be motivated by the sanctions.

Her colleagues, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, also submitted resignation letters, with Kothari referencing an “understanding” reached during a private meeting with the council president, suggesting that he was pushed out, likely for having been condemned by 18 states for antisemitism.

“The resignation of all three commissioners is long overdue,” said Neuer. “This was a commission born in prejudice — designed to target Israel, while ignoring Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority. Its members were selected precisely for their hostility to the Jewish state.”

Neuer noted that the resignations follow mounting international criticism:

• In 2022, Miloon Kothari questioned Israel’s right to UN membership and evoked antisemitic tropes about Jewish control of the media—remarks condemned by 18 nations including the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France.

• Chris Sidoti trivialized the issue of antisemitism, claiming that Jews “throw around accusations like rice at a wedding.”

• Navi Pillay, chosen in July 2021 after she had lobbied government to “sanction apartheid Israel,” led a commission that generally turned a blind eye to Hamas terrorism and incitement, even after the October 7 massacre.

“This trio never should have been appointed,” said Neuer. “As documented by UN Watch, their legacy is one of distortion, demonization, and dishonor. Their departure is not reform, it’s damage control.”

UN Watch drew a direct line between the latest resignations and the political shockwaves from the U.S. decision to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur who has justified terrorism and been denounced for Holocaust inversion.

“Thanks to Secretary Rubio and the United States, the UN’s culture of impunity is starting to crack,” said Neuer. “Francesca Albanese was the tip of the spear in the UN’s war on Israel. Now that she’s been sanctioned, others are looking over their shoulders. The fear of accountability is finally setting in.”

UN Watch urged the UN Human Rights Council not to replace the three commissioners, but to terminate the COI altogether.

“Replacing one biased trio with another won’t solve the problem,” said Neuer. “This commission is irredeemably flawed—both in mandate and in execution. It must be dismantled. It’s not an inquiry, but an inquisition.”

UN Watch Campaigned to Sanction Albanese

UN Watch hailed the sanctioning of Albanese as a major victory for justice and the rule of law. The move comes after UN Watch led a sustained campaign demanding sanctions for Albanese, with letters to Secretary Rubio, UN chief Antonio Guterres and other officials, news interviews, social media, massive outdoor projections on billboards, and the support of more than 120,000 people who signed its petition calling on the United States to take action.

Meet the UN's impartial Pillay Inquiry:
✅ Navi Pillay — lobbies to “Sanction Apartheid Israel”
✅ Miloon Kothari — rants about “The Jewish Lobby”
✅ Chris Sidoti — says Jews “throw around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding”

More: https://t.co/Lbkei65XMt https://t.co/sOmMeM9a87 pic.twitter.com/SBGXVAGP9F

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) March 13, 2025

The post UN Watch Hails Resignation of Entire UN’s Anti-Israel Inquiry: “This is All Due to U.S. Sanctions on Albanese, Dominoes Are Falling” appeared first on UN Watch.

By Dina Rovner, Legal Advisor at UN Watch

In this report, the Pillay makes one-sided condemnations of Israel for attacks on Palestinian “educational facilities and religious and cultural sites.” While the Commission finds Israel guilty of a host of war crimes and the crime against humanity of “extermination” in relation to attacks on schools and mosques that caused civilian harm, it largely exonerates Hamas for its role in inflating civilian harm with its human shield strategy.

A senior IDF commander recently described the extent of the use of IEDs and booby traps in Gaza, saying: “We see that they simply booby-trap anything they can, and they have no barrier or any moral limit in this aspect. We’ve seen booby-trapped kindergartens, also with tunnel shafts; we’ve seen schools; we’ve seen sites that are supposed to be used for humanitarian aid – in every such place, we encountered IEDs, we encountered tunnel shafts,” he stated. Hamas’s human shield strategy has been extensively, documented by the IDF and other military experts, and was admitted by October 7th mastermind Yahya Sinwar.

Like past Pillay Commission reports, this report contains major flaws that render its factual findings and legal conclusions completely unreliable, including the following:

1. Unbalanced

The report claims to look at “attacks on educational facilities and religious and cultural sites” in both “the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.” However, the report almost exclusively condemns Israel for violations against Palestinians with only a few short paragraphs addressing Palestinian violations against Israelis, equivalent to less than half a page in 17 pages of text (< 3%). Moreover, even these short paragraphs ultimately blame Israel for harm caused by Palestinian terrorists. For example:

• Instead of condemning Hamas and PIJ for indiscriminate rocket fire on civilian areas, the report blames Israel for “acute lack of bomb shelters” in “Bedouin villages in the Negev.” (Para 40).

• Rather than condemning Hamas for causing mass displacement of children in Israel, the report focuses on criticizing the fact that Israeli schools serving displaced children lacked “the capacity to provide for psychological trauma.” (Para 41). Notably, the report ignores the severe trauma inflicted on all Israeli children due to the October 7^th Hamas attack and sustained rocket and missile fire by Hamaz, PIJ, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran regularly sending Israeli children to bomb shelters.

2. Selective reporting

The report states that it focused on the period after October 7, 2023, but included some incidents from before that date to show “patterns of violations over time.” Notably, the Commission cites only pre-October 7, 2023 incidents that it deems show patterns of violations by Israel, for example “provocations” on the Temple Mount or alleged Israeli displacement of Palestinians to protect archaeological sites (Para 65, 71). However, it omits pre-October 7^th incidents that show patterns of violations by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups, such as embedding military infrastructure in schools and mosques and attacking Jewish holy sites in Judea and Samaria.

3. Ignores Hamas violations against Israelis and Palestinians

For example, the report:

• Largely ignores widespread embedding of military activities in civilian infrastructure, which has been documented by the IDF and others. Although the report refers to one instance of Hamas operating from a school and includes a recommendation to “the de facto authorities in Gaza” to “cease using civilian objects for military purposes,” by ignoring the extent of this Hamas war crime and blaming all the damage in Gaza on Israel, the Commission effectively absolves Hamas of responsibility.

• Omits discussion of Hamas abuse of Palestinian children by indoctrinating them to jihad at school and recruiting them as child soldiers.

• Disregards Palestinian attacks on Jewish religious and cultural sites in Judea and Samaria, such as Joseph’s Tomb and Joshua’s Tomb.

4. Fails to Condemn terrorist incitement in Palestinian education

The word “incitement” appears only three times in the report, each time to criticize Israel for what the Commission views as overbroad application of its anti-terror laws. The Commission completely ignores the well-documented incitement of children to jihadi terrorism in Palestinian schools, including UNRWA schools, which is a violation of Palestinian children’s right to education that should have been addressed.

5. Defends support for Hamas October 7 Attacks

The report accuses Israel of “targeting educational personnel and students” for expressing “concern or opinions” about the Hamas October 7^th attacks. (Para 85). This includes an order by Israel’s Ministry of Education to “suspend any student or employee who expressed support for actions taken by armed groups on 7 October 2023, labelling such support as incitement to terrorism” (para 36). Thus, the Commission appears to defend educators’ expressions of support for October 7^th.

6. Deems Hamas more credible than IDF

The Commission relies uncritically on Hamas casualty data for the number of children killed, even though this data has been proven to be unreliable and cannot be independently verified. The Commission also fails to acknowledge that these numbers include children who were either directly killed by Hamas or killed due to their involvement in the hostilities as child soldiers for Hamas. The Hamas data itself shows that 65% of the teens aged 13-17 who were killed were male, strongly suggesting they were child combatants. At the same time, the Commission is dismissive towards IDF claims that its attacks on schools and cultural sites were targeting Hamas, noting the claims were “contested” and stating that it was “unable to independently verify” these IDF claims (Para 22, 50, 56), effectively absolving Hamas of responsibility for its war crimes.

7. Relies on cases already addressed by Israeli authorities

Several examples brought by the Commission to implicate Israel in violations involve incidents where Israel’s democratic institutions took some kind of remedial action. Therefore, these cases cannot support findings of specific violations or patterns of violations. For example:

• Disciplinary proceedings – IDF commander “received a disciplinary note for ordering the demolition without the proper approval.” (Para 16).

• Opening investigations – “The Israeli Security Agency and the police reportedly announced an investigation into” alleged vandalism of mosque by Israel settlers. (Para 57).

• Civilian legal proceedings – Israeli teacher dismissed for social media post criticizing Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza was reinstated after “a Tel Aviv court ruled that his dismissal was unlawful.” (Para 38).

• Arrests – “Five settlers, including two minors, were reportedly arrested and indicted for the attack on the school” near Jericho. (Para 35).

8. Promotes false narrative on Israeli archaeology

The report presents a highly politicized and false narrative arguing that Israeli archaeological excavations in Judea and Samaria exclusively preserve Jewish heritage while erasing all other cultures. However, according to Israeli sources, the opposite is the case. It is the Palestinians who destroy Jewishly significant archaeological sites. The Commission’s report completely omits this perspective, including all reports about damage to such sites, for example: a May 2020 report that the Palestinian Authority paved a road over the ancient Jewish Hasmonean fortress of Tel Aroma; a May 2023 report that the Palestinian Authority paved a new road through an archaeological site in Sebastia, the capital of the biblical Kingdom of Israel; and a March 2024 report that Palestinians vandalized the Second Temple period site of Umma-Rihan. Likewise, Palestinian excavations at the Temple Mount have sought to erase Jewish historical ties to the site by destroying artifacts. Notably, Israeli archeologists have said they would like to conduct joint research with Palestinian colleagues but that the Palestinians fear they will be labeled traitors if they participate.

9. Protects Muslim worship, denies Jewish prayer rights

The Commission criticizes Israeli security measures limiting Palestinian access to the site on the Temple Mount as (Para 72, 95) as “severe restrictions on freedom of religion.” At the same time, it deems Jewish prayer at the site—the holiest site in Judaism—to be a “provocation” (Para 72). In fact, only Israel guarantees freedom of religion and access to holy sites for all religions. When the area was controlled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967, Jewish religious sites were destroyed and Jews were denied access to their holy sites.

10. Blames Israel for violence, ignores Palestinian incitement

The Commission wholly adopts the Palestinian narrative that Israeli actions on the Temple Mount triggered “wider escalation of hostilities,” while completely ignoring the role of Palestinian incitement in inflaming the tensions. For example, the Commission asserts that Ariel Sharon’s October 2000 visit to the Temple Mount triggered the second intifada (Para 71). To the contrary, the evidence—including, statements by a PA official at the time and a Fatah official years later and an admission by Yasser Arafat’s widow—points to Arafat having planned and instigated the second intifada in response to the failure of the Camp David negotiations. Likewise, the April-May 2021 violence on the Temple Mount was directly incited by Palestinian leaders on all sides vying to prove their legitimacy as the next Palestinian leader in the context of the PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s cancellation of elections.

11. Factual findings not supported

The Commission’s broad conclusions are not supported by the facts and are often made subject to qualification using terms like “may have.” In many instances, the Commission did not conclusively determine who was behind the attack or consider the possibility that Hamas actions exacerbated the damage. For example:

• In Paragraph 14, the Commission states that it “could not identify any military objective for the demolitions of educational facilities.” However, in the previous paragraph, the Commission itself explained that Israel destroyed all buildings, including educational facilities, to create military buffer zones on the eastern border and separating the north and south of the Gaza Strip. (Para 13). Likewise, despite the overwhelming evidence of a pattern of Hamas use of Gaza schools for military purposes, the Commission dismissed all such claims as unverified (Para 16, 22) with one exception (Para 23). Even UNRWA has admitted widespread Hamas use of its educational facilities.

• In another case, the Commission said that “satellite imagery analysis showing cars parked at the site” confirmed that “there was no significant threat to Israeli security forces in the area and therefore no military necessity to demolish the university buildings” (Para 18). Considering that the Commission admitted to receiving no reply from Israel to its request for information (Para 3) and that it did not have access to classified IDF intelligence supporting its targeting decisions, that conclusion is completely unfounded. At best, the Commission could have said that it was unable to assess the military necessity due to insufficient evidence. We note that the Commission also stated that it received no response to its request for information from the State of Palestine.

• In a section titled “Attacks on religious and cultural sites,” the Commission claimed it “documented allegations of possible looting” by IDF personnel (Para 45). Despite the Commission’s later admission that it hadn’t been able to verify the allegations and that Israel denied them, the Commission still included this unverified claim as proof that Israel “caused damage to cultural and religious sites in Gaza.”

12. Legal conclusions not supported

The Commission’s legal conclusions about necessity, distinction, precautions, proportionality, intent, reasonableness, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are drawn from an incomplete factual record and therefore have no credibility. As noted, the Commission itself admits it received no information from the Israeli government. Likewise, the Commission acknowledges that it did not credit IDF material in the public record. The Commission also did not take into consideration findings about Israeli compliance with International Humanitarian Law by military experts who visited the war zone and interviewed relevant officials including JINSA, the High Level Military Group, John Spencer, Andrew Fox, and others. Therefore, its legal conclusions that Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity should not be credited.

The post Legal Analysis of Pillay Commission’s June 2025 Report to the Human Rights Council appeared first on UN Watch.