Tuesday, September 16, 2025
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In today’s New York Times, Navi Pillay, chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Gaza, announced what she calls a stark truth: Israel is committing genocide.
When we look closely at the evidence her Commission cites, and compare it to independent assessments like the BESA Center’s September 2025 study Debunking the Genocide Allegations, a more troubling picture emerges—not of Israel’s intent, but of the Commission’s method.
Starvation as a Weapon—or a Narrative?
Pillay claims that Israel has “used starvation as a weapon of war,” pointing to trucks of aid blocked at the border and shortages of infant formula. The Commission’s report went further, calling denial of baby milk “powerful evidence” of genocidal intent. Yet the footnotes don’t show an Israeli ban on formula. They cite UNICEF on malnutrition and a doctor who said unsafe water made formula impossible to prepare. These are tragic effects, but they are not proof of deliberate denial.
On aid flows, the Commission’s baseline is 500 trucks a day. BESA shows this is misleading: prewar, only about 73 of those trucks carried food, and that number was based on working days. By early 2025, food inflows often matched or exceeded that baseline. UNRWA eventually corrected its own earlier “collapse” claims. Pillay does not mention these corrections.
But the UN report also engages in false claims that it launders through footnotes. It admits that some food is stolen in Gaza (in fact virtually all food aid is stolen), but then claims that Israel is still heavily restricting aid:
By 22 June 2025, OCHA reported that nearly 9,000 metric tonnes of wheat flour were brought into Gaza since 19 May, most of it was taken by people in need of aid en-route, and in some cases by armed elements, before reaching its final destinations. (430) Since then, humanitarian aid has been extremely restricted by Israeli authorities and requests for humanitarian access have been repeatedly denied.(431)
Footnote 431 is an IPC report that says:
Humanitarian aid remains extremely restricted due to requests for humanitarian access being repeatedly denied and frequent security incidents.(6)
In turn, that footnote 6 refers to an OCHA report from July 23 - which does not say at all that Israel is denying aid.
Its July 16 report is the most specific: "Between 9 and 15 July, out of 66 attempts to coordinate planned aid movements across the Gaza Strip, nearly 17 per cent were denied by Israeli authorities. "
A 17% denial rate is not evidence of an Israeli policy to deny aid. It means that specific requests would be in danger from IDF activities, and most of them are approved. Framing this as "repeated denials" is knowingly deceptive. The truth is the opposite from how the UNHRC portrays it. Moreover, even when other UN agencies do give Israel's reasons for denials of some shipments, the UNHRC report treats all of those collectively as proof of a policy to starve Gazans and assume Israel's explanations are all lies.
Safe Zones, Hamas, and Civilian Harm
The op-ed treats Israel’s evacuation orders and designated safe zones as a sham, citing civilians killed even there. But data show fatalities in these areas were a small fraction—around 2 to 3.5 percent—of the total. That doesn’t make them safe in absolute terms, but it suggests they were safer than surrounding areas.
What Pillay does not acknowledge is evidence that Hamas itself operated inside or alongside some of these zones, exploiting them as cover. That matters legally: if militants were using evacuation corridors, civilian deaths there may point less to genocidal design than to Hamas’s tactics combined with the fog of war.
Intent: Words vs. Deeds
Pillay rests much of the Commission’s case for genocidal intent on rhetoric. Gallant’s “human animals” remark, Herzog’s statement that the “entire nation” was responsible, Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek—all of these are cited as direct evidence of dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy a people.
But the Commission discounts Israel’s actions that cut against this narrative. Warnings issued, corridors opened, and aid allowed through are reinterpreted as sinister: proof of knowledge rather than mitigation, a façade rather than an attempt to minimize harm. This asymmetry is striking: harsh words are taken literally, while deeds that contradict the genocide charge are explained away as window dressing.
In other words, the only Israeli statements or actions that are considered evidence are the ones that fit with the report's pre-determined conclusions.
The Problem of “Only Reasonable Inference”
In her op-ed, Pillay insists that genocide is not just one inference but the only reasonable one. Yet that is exactly what is in dispute. BESA shows how famine projections failed to materialize, how UNRWA itself corrected undercounts, how safe zones did save lives at scale, and how infant formula shortages are not the same as a deliberate ban. These facts show that alternatives to the genocide narrative - legitimate military objectives, Hamas’s embedding, and real mistakes of war reinterpreted as policy - remain very much on the table.
When genocide is declared the only explanation, despite contested evidence, the "law" becomes advocacy.
Conclusion: A Higher Standard
Navi Pillay’s experience as a judge in Rwanda gives her words moral weight. But invoking Rwanda is not a substitute for evidence that meets the same standard. In Rwanda, génocidaires were convicted on proof of intent beyond reasonable doubt. In Gaza, the UN Commission uses a lower bar—“reasonable grounds”—and then extrapolates the gravest charge from sources that are themselves disputed, corrected or falsified.
That does not mean Gaza’s suffering is imagined. It does mean the genocide finding, as presented, is not the impartial legal conclusion it is claimed to be. It is a narrative, built on selective sourcing and asymmetrical treatment of evidence.
Worse, the report is guilty of what it accuses Israel of: it claims that Israeli actions that contradict the genocide narrative are public relations moves and not real, but in reality its own cherry picking of evidence are the PR to reach its own foregone conclusion.
In the end, the report reads less like a balanced forensic audit and more like a prosecutorial brief. That matters. Because if genocide is to remain a legal concept rather than a political weapon, its proof must rest on evidence weighed fairly, not selectively. Otherwise, the law itself risks being seen as advocacy in disguise.
This was largely written by AI and edited by me, based on my asking my "Audita" fact checking GPT to compare the UNHRC report with the recent BESA report that debunks the genocide narrative. The GPT itself cannot handle the layered self-referencing ecosystem of UN reports pointing to other UN or NGO reports that all have the same bias and ultimately use Hamas figures, which is what makes this so difficult to do without huge amounts of time.
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