I want to come at it from the opposite end. Taking a single statistic in a report that has hundreds, I plan to show that the UN "experts" that wrote this report deliberately chose whatever supported their predetermined verdict and ignored everything else.
Paragraph 27 says: "Some 5,160 children are estimated by Save the Children to be buried under the rubble."
That figure is false, and the way it got into the report is the report in miniature. There were four separate points at which the Commission could have checked it. At each one, it either failed to look or looked and printed the number anyway.
The first check was the Commission's own arithmetic. Save the Children built the 5,160 estimate on the assumption that children make up 43 percent of Gaza's casualties and there were 12,000 people missing under the rubble. It is a guess made up out of multiplying two statistics, one from the Gaza Ministry of Health and the other from Hamas police.
Yet the Commission's own paragraph 26 puts the child share of the dead at 30%, not 43%. And the UN at the time it wrote its report claimed 10,000 buried under the rubble, not 12,000. If the commission would use Save the Children's methods, there would have been 3,000 presumed dead under the rubble in 2024, not the 5,160 Save the Children estimated then. That is over 2,000 supposedly dead children who disappear if the UN commission would have trusted its own accusation of 30% casualties being children.
That's a large number of dead children to make up.
The second check was the date on the citation. Save the Children page came up with its estimate in June 2024. The Commission published in June 2026. It reached back two years, past a war whose reported toll had since nearly doubled, to retrieve an estimate made when the conflict was only nine monhs old. Save the Children itself had moved on: by September 2025, its recap of Gaza's child casualties had dropped the specific number and reduced the claim to a vague "thousands more are missing or presumed buried under rubble." The source downgraded from a figure to a gesture, and the Commission reinstated the figure. A body searching for accuracy reaches for the most recent estimate. This one reached for the largest, and the largest happened to be the oldest, because the passage of time had only shrunk it.
The third check was the parent number's provenance. The 5,160 is a fraction of the "missing under the rubble" figure that circulated in 2024, reported anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 and traceable to Hamas's Civil Defence. OCHA used the 10,000 figure in its weekly Gaza snapshots, repeating it without caveat the way it repeated most figures the Gaza authorities supplied. The Commission could have asked whether that base number still stood. It did not stand. OCHA's February 4, 2025 snapshot carried the missing-under-rubble figure as it always had. Its February 11 snapshot, one week later, dropped it — no retraction, no correction, the number simply gone. Even the academic researchers who argue Gaza's dead are undercounted excluded the rubble population from their models precisely because it could not be substantiated. The figure the Commission resurrected is the one that everyone closer to the data had already quietly discarded.
The fourth check was the recovery data, the most direct test of all. The "thousands under the rubble" premise predicts that once the rubble could be cleared, thousands of bodies would emerge. The January 2025 ceasefire created exactly that condition: weeks with no airstrikes impeding recovery, no operations sealing off neighborhoods. The bodies did not emerge. According to Gaza's own Health Ministry, the daily recovery counts fell week over week, down to two bodies recovered on one day in February — a rate that cannot be reconciled with 9,500 still to be found. That is why OCHA dropped the figure the moment the ceasefire made it checkable: it had been checked, by reality, and it failed. The recovery data is Gaza's own. The Commission did not have to trust Israel or anyone else to consult it. It consulted nothing, and printed 5,160.
Internal arithmetic, citation date, source provenance, recovery data — four levels at which the figure could have been tested, four levels at which it collapses, and the Commission cleared all four to deliver the number to print. The pattern is not that the Commission made an error. An error is random; it points in no particular direction. This points in one direction at every step: toward the stale figure over the current one, the abandoned base over the corrected one, the largest available number over the verifiable one. A single buried statistic, traced to the floor, shows an institution that did not weigh its evidence and arrive at a conclusion. It arrived at the conclusion and went looking for the largest numbers that would dress it.
This is the Commission's methodology. That is one paragraph, one number, in a report that runs to three hundred and sixty-six of them. The Commission asks the world to accept the other three hundred and sixty-five on trust.
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