A rebuttal of the UN's new report accusing Israel of genocide, from UN Watch – Legal Analysis of Pillay Commission’s September 2025 Report to Human Rights Council:
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.” 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….
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