Investigation: The UN Gaza Genocide Report, Hamas’s Charter and the Blood Libel

In September 2025 a three-member United Nations commission announced that Israel “has committed genocide” in Gaza. Almost every headline treated it as a verdict. It is not one. It is a report by three appointed experts, written without Israel’s cooperation, using a standard of proof lower than a court would. This investigation reads the report against its own text, sets out why we think its central conclusion is weak, and puts the other half of the story back in the frame: what Hamas has said it wants, and the long history of false accusations against Jews that Israel says the genocide charge echoes.

What we found, in brief

• The report’s own standard is “reasonable grounds to conclude,” not proof. Paragraph 7 says so. A court needs far more.
• It was built without Israeli access or cooperation, and it says almost nothing about the 7 October 2023 attack that started the war.
• Its central finding, intent, is inferred. Legal scholars who do not oppose the commission still describe its handling of the standard of proof as confused.
• Hamas’s founding charter quotes, in its own words, a call to kill Jews, and Hamas leaders have said they would repeat 7 October. That is documented intent to destroy, by the party that started the war.
• The accusation that Jews deliberately kill children is a modern form of the blood libel, in the view of Israel and a number of scholars. That is a contested framing, and we explain it fairly below.

1. What the report actually says, and what standard it uses

The commission found that Israeli authorities committed four of the five acts listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention: killing, causing serious harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group, and imposing measures to prevent births. On intent, it said it applied the ICJ’s “only reasonable inference” test, analyzed statements by Israeli authorities and concluded that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the pattern of conduct (UN press release).

The key sentence, though, is in paragraph 7 of the report: the commission “applies the same methodology and standard of proof previously adopted for its investigations, that is, ‘reasonable grounds to conclude’” (UN report). That is an investigative threshold. It is not the standard in a courtroom, where genocide must be established by fully convincing evidence and intent must be the only reasonable inference. In a court, a conclusion that rests on “reasonable grounds” would not be enough to convict anyone or find a state responsible.

Even sympathetic lawyers noticed. Marko Milanovic, a professor of international law, wrote at EJIL: Talk! that the report shows “conceptual confusion” about evidence: it announces a “reasonable grounds” standard in paragraph 7, then quotes the ICJ’s stricter standard in paragraph 156 and says in paragraph 220 that “on the basis of fully conclusive evidence” Israeli statements are direct evidence of intent (EJIL: Talk!). A second EJIL analysis said the commission applied the inference test “somewhat confusingly” (EJIL: Talk!). Milanovic’s own view was that a lower standard was legitimate for a fact-finding body. That is exactly the point: this was fact-finding, and headlines presented it as a judgment.

2. A record built without one side

Israel refused to cooperate with the commission and did not allow it into Israel or Gaza (Times of Israel). The commission, as a result, could not examine Israeli military records, targeting decisions or the intelligence behind strikes. Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the report “relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others,” called the authors “Hamas proxies,” and demanded the commission be abolished (Times of Israel; CNN). That is Israel’s allegation, and the commission rejects it. Channel 4’s fact check notes the commission has previously accused Hamas and other armed groups of war crimes, including attacks on civilians and hostage-taking (Channel 4 News).

What the commission did not do is examine 7 October as part of this report. Its own text says the report “only examines the violations committed in Gaza” and does not foreclose future analysis of the 7–8 October attack on southern Israel (UN report). The Times of Israel noted the report made only a “fleeting reference” to the attack that began the war. In our view, a genocide analysis that leaves out the other side’s stated intent and the event that triggered the war cannot be called complete.

3. Would these incidents stand up in court?

No court has tested them, and we cannot claim to know how a judge would rule. Our argument is narrower: the report’s case has features that a court would examine hard.

• Intent must exclude the alternative. Israel says it is fighting Hamas, an armed force that, by Israel’s count, killed about 1,200 people on 7 October and took about 251 hostages (Congressional Research Service). A court would have to rule out a military purpose as an explanation for conduct the commission reads as genocidal.
• Civilian harm is not intent. Gaza’s Health Ministry publishes totals without separating fighters from civilians, and Israel disputes the figures (Reuters). Even if the numbers are broadly right, death tolls alone prove scale, not purpose.
• Quotations need context. The report relies on statements by Israeli officials as direct evidence. Courts weigh who said it, in what role, whether it became policy, and whether other officials said the opposite. A single remark by a minister is not necessarily state policy. The commission says the statements show intent; Israel says they do not reflect the conduct of its forces, which it says follow evacuation warnings and legal review.
• The evidence base is mostly second-hand. Without access, the commission leaned on witness accounts, NGO and UN reports, media and open sources. Courts can accept such material, but they test it by cross-examination, which has not happened here.

The ICJ has not decided whether genocide occurred. Its case between South Africa and Israel is still in the written phase (ICJ order, via UN). Until it does, the commission’s finding is an opinion about what the evidence shows, not a legal fact.

4. The record of the people and the institution

• Miloon Kothari, a commission member, said in 2022 that social media was “controlled largely by, whether it is the Jewish lobby or it is specific NGOs.” He later apologized, calling the wording “incorrect, inappropriate, and insensitive” (JTA).
• Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, wrote in February 2024 that those killed on 7 October “were not murdered because of their Judaism, but in reaction to Israel’s oppression” (Euronews). We do not repeat the widely shared “common enemy of humanity” clip, because UN experts and fact-checkers say it was edited (France 24).
• UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in October 2023 that the 7 October attacks “did not happen in a vacuum.” He also condemned them, but Israel demanded his resignation, and in October 2024 declared him persona non grata (BBC; AP; New York Times).
• UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency. A UN internal investigation found evidence indicating nine staff members may have been involved in the 7 October attacks, and those nine were fired. It also said it could not independently authenticate much of the evidence Israel supplied (AP; UN News).

A note on a claim we checked and are not repeating: a claim has circulated that the head of the UN has close ties to Muammar Gaddafi, whom some describe as the founder of the Palestinian movement. We found no evidence of any personal or political relationship between Guterres and Gaddafi, and Gaddafi did not found the Palestinian national movement. He was a funder of several Palestinian armed groups in the 1970s, and relations with Yasser Arafat were strained (Wikipedia summary of Gaddafi’s Palestinian policy). Without a source, we will not print it.

5. Hamas, in its own words

The commission’s report is about whether Israel intended to destroy a group. A fair investigation asks the same question of the party that started the war. Hamas’s founding document, the 1988 Covenant, is public, and it answers it in writing (Avalon Project).

• Preamble, quoting Hassan al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
• Article 7, citing a hadith: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
• Article 13: “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement” and “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”
• Article 11: Palestine is “an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day,” which no leader or organization may give up.

To be fair: in 2017 Hamas issued a new “Document of General Principles and Policies” that dropped much of the Covenant’s language about Jews, and distinguished between Judaism and Zionism. It did not repeal the 1988 charter, and it still rejects recognition of Israel and calls Israel’s creation illegal (Wilson Center; Counter Extremism Project). The Atlantic’s analysis of the charter after 7 October is titled “Hamas’s Genocidal Intentions Were Never a Secret” (The Atlantic).

Statements after 7 October fit. On 24 October 2023, Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese channel LBC that Hamas would repeat the attacks “again and again.” Asked if that meant Israel’s annihilation, he answered “Yes, of course” (Times of Israel). Our view is that a genocide analysis that quotes Israeli ministers at length and ignores this is lopsided.

6. The blood libel: what it is and why it comes up

The blood libel is the false claim that Jews murder non-Jewish children, usually Christian, to use their blood in religious rituals. Its first known medieval case was William of Norwich, England, in 1144, when the Jews of Norwich were blamed for a boy’s murder (Holocaust Encyclopedia; YIVO).

• It was false. The crime was never solved. Jewish law forbids consuming blood altogether (Leviticus 17:10–14), which is why the charge was absurd on its face.
• It killed people. Across the Middle Ages and after, it led to trials, expulsions, massacres and pogroms. In the Kielce pogrom in Poland in 1946, over forty Jewish survivors were killed after a child claimed he had been kidnapped by Jews (Springer, Blood Libel/Child Murder).
• The Nazis used it. Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer ran ritual-murder imagery as propaganda (Holocaust Encyclopedia).
• The Catholic Church repudiated it and removed Simon of Trent, a supposed victim, from its list of saints in 1965, yet the myth persists into the 21st century, including in Middle Eastern television series.

Why does it come up in the Gaza debate? Israel called the commission’s genocide accusation an antisemitic “blood libel” (AP). Some scholars say the accusation that Israel routinely and deliberately kills children as a central aim is an updated form of the old libel, because it casts Jews as cold-blooded child-killers (Springer). That is a contested framing, not settled history. Other scholars and rights groups say criticizing Israel’s conduct, or counting the dead children of a war, is not antisemitism, and that the genocide question is a legal one. We note both. Our own view is narrower: the label is fair when someone claims Jews or Israelis kill children for pleasure or ritual, and unfair when it is applied to every figure or argument about civilian harm.

7. What a fair standard would require

• A balanced record, including Israeli military evidence and the 7 October attack.
• Evidence tested in court, not asserted in a press conference.
• Intent shown as the only reasonable explanation, with the military-purpose alternative genuinely ruled out.
• Investigators with no documented bias. Remarks like the ones above, from members of the body, are a problem for credibility, whatever the defense.
• Equal scrutiny of Hamas’s stated aims, its use of civilian areas and its treatment of hostages.

Bottom line

The UN commission’s report is serious, long and documented. It is also an investigative finding made on a “reasonable grounds” standard, without Israeli access, with a record on Hamas that is thin by comparison, and by people whose past remarks have damaged confidence in their impartiality. In our view, that is not strong enough to carry the word genocide, and a court would likely demand much more. Meanwhile the party that wrote “killing the Jews” into its founding charter and has promised to repeat 7 October has received comparatively little scrutiny from the same system. Whatever one concludes about Israel’s conduct, which remains subject to real war-crimes questions, genocide is a legal finding that belongs to a court that hears both sides.

Related: our earlier opinion on the UN Gaza genocide report, the Gaza and Lebanon news hub, the Investigations hub and our Contact page for corrections.