“According to our findings, this lack of evidence is due to the fact that no such cases took place in 2022 and that the claims are false.”
By World Israel News Staff
The United Nations has accused Israel of enlisting Palestinian minors as combatants and human shields and Israeli “settlers” of abducting a Palestinian minor in the preliminary draft of a new report deemed “baseless” by the Jewish state’s embassy to the global body.
Israel’s mission to the UN issued an official response calling the UN Children and Armed Conflict report for 2023, which covers incidents from 2022, as “false” and called on the UN to remove “baseless claims from the final report.”
“These claims are not supported by any evidence that could be examined by the Israeli authorities,” the Israeli Embassy wrote.
“According to our findings, this lack of evidence is due to the fact that no such cases took place in 2022 and that the claims are false.”
The UN provided no information about the alleged abduction by Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria – or “settlers” as per the report – of a Palestinian minor, even after Israel requested details from the global body. Both the IDF and Israel Police have no records of such an event occurring.
“We believe that a case with such extreme and unusual allegations merits a serious and thorough verification before being included in the report, thus the [Israeli government] expects the mentioning of this unverified [incident] should be removed,” the embassy wrote.
The report charged Israel with killing and wounding Palestinian minors but stops short of adding context, which include teenagers killed while carrying out terrorist attacks, children used as human shields and misfired rockets on the part of Gaza-based terror groups.
The report, which purports to be neutral, also neglected to mention over 1,000 rockets launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad into Israeli population centers in the previous year and their own impact on Israeli minors.
Palestinian terror attacks injured 23 Israeli minors in 2022, but the report only mentioned seven of these incidents.
The Israeli Embassy pointed out that most of the Palestinian minors allegedly killed by Israel in airstrikes were the result of misfired rockets by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group within Gaza. The remaining minors killed in Israeli airstrikes were directly connected to the Palestinian use of minors as human shields. Israel emphasized that its strikes targeted military facilities and infrastructure belonging to PIJ to prevent ongoing rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, including minors. However, these targets were often located in densely populated civilian areas.
The UN report also failed to report on Hamas and PIJ’s use of schools and hospitals as bases for terrorist activities and the construction of attack tunnels targeting civilian sites.
Throughout the year covered by the report, Israeli fatalities from terrorist attacks increased by 55%, a fact omitted in the report, while the number of wounded Palestinian minors decreased by 53% in the same period.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, and Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Maj.-Gen. Ghassan Alian, met with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to submit Israel’s response to the allegations.
“We presented the secretary-general with clear data proving that the majority of Palestinian minors killed in the past year were involved in acts of violence and terrorism,” Erdan was cited by the Jerusalem Post as saying.
“This information was omitted from the UN data, along with the fact that terrorist organizations use Palestinian children as human shields and fire missiles and rockets from densely populated areas,” he added.
A final draft is slated for release in late June or early July.