In their latest bout of groupthink, CNN, Reuters, The New York Times, and NBC published nearly identical articles on the June 23, 2026, U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) report that accused Israel of targeting Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank.
United Nations General Assembly hall in New York City. (credit: Patrick Gruban, cropped and downsampled by Pine, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
The NBC video article was published on June 25, CNN’s article on June 24, and both the Reuters and The Times on June 23. Each parrot off the findings of the report as if blindly copying off the same press release. None included unique insights or criticism of the report itself or the U.N. commission that composed it, although numerous international law experts and organizations critiqued the report within 24 hours of its release. This practice, dubbed as “churnalism” has been widely derided by numerous journalists.
The Commission of Inquiry Report and Critiques
Titled “‘The essence of childhood has been destroyed’: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October, 2023,” the report levies some of the most severe accusations possible under international law.
Part of the actions a state committing genocide takes, according to the legal term’s definition, is “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” – an act the COI report accused Israel of doing. The COI report stated that birth rates in Gaza in the first half of 2025 were 41 percent less than in the same period in 2022, while also noting soaring maternal mortality rates. To tie these tragedies to deliberate targeting, the U.N. highlights horrific instances of children being harmed, yet the report makes an illogical leap. As Salo Aizenberg from U.N. Watch rebutted: “The report repeatedly substitutes the tragic fact that children died during the war for proof of deliberate targeting.”
The report wholly blames Israel for any harm to Gazan children, despite Hamas starting the war by invading Israel, killing and kidnapping whole families (including Israeli children) and holding hostages in Gaza through October 2025, despite numerous opportunities to release the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire.
According to international law expert Dr. Brian Cox, the text suffers from critical omissions of tactical context, completely ignoring standard military mitigation techniques that actively counter any claim of genocidal intent. For instance, the IDF frequently deploys delayed fuses in populated areas, so the ground absorbs the blast, significantly reducing fragmentation. Before building strikes, it issues warnings via phone calls, texts, and voice messages, while utilizing Arabic leaflets and social media to route civilians away from combat zones. The military also employs “roof knocking,” dropping a non-lethal, low-explosive munition on a target’s roof as a final evacuation warning before lethal ammunition is used.
Dr. Cox further argued that the commission’s findings lack concrete proof. Under international law, proving a war crime strictly requires evidence of an operator’s knowledge and intent at the exact time of an attack. Instead of meeting this legal threshold, the COI relies on unverified sources (like doctors) who could not possibly know the operator’s mindset to claim children were deliberately targeted.
This baseline failure to understand battlefield reality extends to the broader narrative; the report wholly ignores the unprecedented measures the IDF has taken to mitigate civilian casualties, extensively documented by military law experts Prof. Geoffrey Corn and Prof. John Spencer, while completely erasing Hamas’s operational strategy of embedding its military assets within civilian infrastructure.
The commissioners who composed the report have also illustrated their own anti-Israel biases, severely undermining their credibility.
For example, an Oct. 24, 2023, COI Commissioners’ statement dedicated a single sentence condemning actions Hamas took against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, out of the statement’s 19 paragraphs on violence in the region. Despite the COI publishing its official statement just three days after the Oct. 7 attacks, before Israeli troops even entered Gaza, the Oct. 10, 2023, statement still “all-lives-mattered” the Hamas attacks by equating Israel’s subsequent targeting of terrorists in Gaza with Hamas’ targeting of civilians in Israel. Even the COI’s June 12, 2024, specific probe into the Oct. 7, 2023, attack was just over one-third the length of its report on Israeli attacks in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” and still managed to have room to blame the Jewish state for the Hamas attack, despite Hamas’ specific, repeatedly iterated aim to wipe Israel off the map and to kill Jews. The Times, Reuters, and CNN all failed to critique this hypocrisy, instead giving the commission legitimacy through how they deliberately structured their articles.
The not-so-truth sandwich
The lead sentence for all three reports was some variation of: Israeli forces are deliberately killing children as part of their ongoing genocide against Palestinians, an independent U.N. Commission of Inquiry has found. Then, after each article included a quote or two from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, or Israel’s U.N. ambassador, or Israel’s mission in Geneva in the middle, all of them continued to discuss how many children in Gaza Israeli forces killed.
This strategic “sandwiching” model reflects other reports by those same news outlets on news items related to the U.N. For example, in January 2026 reports about Israel demolishing buildings in UNRWA’s east Jerusalem compound, Reuters, CNN, The Times, and NBC all used the same manipulative article structure. There has been extensive research that has found readers remember information presented first and last better than any information presented in the middle.
In the articles on the U.N. COI report, readers would only see the reaction of Israeli officials as a bid to deny the contents of the report, without learning of the credible corruption accusations numerous Jewish and non-Jewish organizations have levied at specifically the COI and its members, but also at the U.N. as a whole.
Treating the U.N. as infallible when it comes to Israel
Even prominent legacy organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have historically criticized the U.N. for failing to properly address human rights abuses in China and Russia due to geopolitical block-voting. Yet, when it comes to the world’s sole Jewish nation, mainstream media treats the U.N. as an infallible, uncriticizable entity.
However, the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias has been glaring and well-documented. For example, from 2015 through 2024, the U.N. General Assembly adopted 173 resolutions against Israel alone and 80 against all other countries combined. 2025’s record continued the trend.
More troubling is the broader societal fallout of this echo-chamber journalism: this uncritical reporting conditions global audiences to view these massive bureaucracies as infallible paragons of virtue. This journalistic erasure directly silences the valid grievances of global minorities, including Jewish communities, who frequently experience institutional bias firsthand.
By amplifying U.N. declarations at face value, the media actively warps public opinion, democratic elections, and international policy. Readers have a fundamental right to know the structural flaws and political biases of this powerful organizations, and international news outlets have an uncompromising obligation to deliver honest, independent journalism, regardless of a reporter’s personal politics.
For the Hebrew version of this article, see CAMERA Hebrew.