Repeating a claim long and loud enough doesn’t make it true. But nowadays, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations apparently prefer advancing fraudulent narratives over pursuing facts. The UN’s latest Commission of Inquiry report targeting Israel offers a revealing example.

It works like this: an obviously partisan NGO propagates a claim that demonizes Israel, citing unfalsifiable generalizations and anonymous sources. Legacy media and the UN parrot the NGO accusation, erasing and sanitizing its original pseudo-sourcing with their own glossy letterhead and implied authority.

This happens often, but rarely so explicitly as with the new June UN Human Rights “Commission of Inquiry” paper on Palestinian children’s welfare. In heavily citing allegations of Israel’s use of quadcopters — remotely operated propeller drones — the Commission exemplifies the violation of basic evidentiary standards that has become commonplace in coverage of Israel.

The report recycles the libel that Israel is “deliberately targeting Palestinian children,” but with a new twist. It claims the IDF targeted a nursing, 10-day-old baby in Gaza with a remote-controlled “sniper rifle mounted on a quadcopter.” The commissioners said they found “reasonable grounds” for this conclusion after reviewing images of the bullet.

The basis for the supposed “reasonable grounds” is hard to ascertain. The UN provides no publicly available forensic analysis, no technical explanation for how photographs of bullets (which may or may not be connected to the incident in question) can establish the weapon used, no operational evidence that rifle-equipped quadcopters were deployed in the manner alleged, and no independent corroboration of deliberate intent. The report names neither the baby, nor the mother, nor the doctor relating the story, nor the hospital that supposedly treated the baby, nor the source of the photo. Nothing is falsifiable or verifiable.

“Trust us,” the report asks. But it has not earned any such trust. For an allegation this specific (and consequential), such a lack of available evidence — replaced by a sloppy appeal to authority — should have given journalists pause.

Instead, the story illustrates an increasingly familiar pattern vis-à-vis reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs: an allegation originates with an activist. An NGO publishes it. Major news organizations cite the NGO. UN investigators build on NGO and media attention. Institutional repetition substitutes for independent verification.

In this case, the apparent origin of the quadcopter narrative is British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, whose testimony has repeatedly misdirected coverage of the Gaza war. The good doctor is perhaps best known for claiming that the October 2023 Al-Ahli hospital explosion was an Israeli strike that killed 500 Palestinians. In reality, the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, a fact confirmed by governmental and media investigations that caused several major outlets to retract their stories. Not so Abu-Sittah (or his sponsor, Doctors Without Borders), who continued repeating the canard in media tours for months following.

Another Abu-Sittah highlight: Long before the Commission’s report, he publicly declared that Israel “fears Palestinian children” and is a “child killer regime.” When a public advocate makes such grave allegations, the bar for journalists trusting them as a source should immediately rise.

That never happened. In November 2023, Abu-Sittah claimed that Israeli forces were operating remote-controlled quadcopters that fired “single bullets” at civilians near hospitals. No forensic or technical evidence accompanied the allegation. No photographs of such weapons were produced. No recovered systems were presented.

That absence of corroboration didn’t seem to bother anyone. Before long, the claim spread.

A fringe NGO called Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor incorporated similar allegations into submissions to UN officials before publishing reports asserting that Israel was systematically using quadcopters to execute civilians. These reports likewise relied almost entirely on anecdotal testimony rather than independently verifiable evidence.

This is the same Euro-Med whose fanciful blood libel that Israeli soldiers used dogs to rape Palestinians was infamously echoed earlier this year by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. It is the same NGO whose senior leadership has been dogged by credible questions regarding ties to Hamas. Yet its claims continue to circulate through international institutions with remarkably little scrutiny.

By late 2024, NPR had devoted a lengthy feature to alleged Israeli “sniper drones,” relying heavily on secondhand or anonymous testimony from medical personnel and repeating many of the same claims that had already circulated through activist and NGO networks. Finally, in summer 2026, those allegations matured into “findings” by a UN Commission.

Notice what did and didn’t change. The number of institutions repeating the allegation increased. The amount of independently verifiable evidence never did.

The problem extends beyond one doctor, one NGO, or one UN report. It is a failure of institutional skepticism. Allegations concerning Israel frequently receive a level of deference that would be unthinkable in almost any other context.

Reporters and political figures should resist this laundering process. A claim’s source does not become more reliable because it has passed through more institutions. If anything, it becomes more opaque. Before accusations of war crimes shape international opinion, journalists should be expected to ask: Where is the evidence?

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Naftali Shavelson is an international spokesperson at the NGO Monitor research institute.

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How The NGO-Media-UN Pipeline Launders Falsehoods When Israel Is Involved