A bombshell Israeli government report documents in granular detail how UN agencies systematically laundered Hamas propaganda, inflated casualty figures, and manufactured a false narrative that shaped global policy and fueled antisemitism worldwide.
A major Israeli government briefing document released in May presents a meticulous, footnoted case that the United Nations spent two years systematically transforming Hamas terrorist propaganda into a globally accepted fact.
The report, titled “Laundering Propaganda: How UN Actors Manipulated Information in the Gaza War (2023-2025),” was produced by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and is based exclusively on open sources, meaning every finding can be independently verified. It does not target fringe UN bodies already known for anti-Israel bias, such as the UN Commission of Inquiry or Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Instead, it focuses on agencies widely regarded as reliable, such as OCHA, UNICEF, WHO, UNRWA, and UN Women, and the picture that emerges is one of institutional collapse.
The Laundering Machine
At the heart of the report is what its authors call “data-laundering,” a three-step process through which claims originating from Hamas-controlled authorities were transformed into authoritative UN facts. In stage one, a UN agency, most commonly OCHA, reports information attributing it to a Hamas-run body such as the Gaza Ministry of Health, without disclosing that body’s terrorist affiliation. In stage two, other UN reports cite OCHA as the source, erasing all traces of the original Hamas origin. In stage three, the world’s media, governments, and courts cite “the UN,” creating the false impression that a neutral international body either originated or verified the information.
The report notes that this practice stood in stark contrast to UN norms elsewhere: “In other conflicts, UN agencies refrain from republishing running totals of fatalities, let alone ones which originated from a party to the conflict and have not been verified to include only uninvolved civilians.” In Gaza, Hamas casualty figures, presented without distinction between civilians and terrorists, were “repeatedly cited in press briefings, situation reports, and speeches as if they were neutral, verified counts.” Not once did UN agencies attach disclaimers disclosing the Hamas affiliation of their sources.
Al-Ahli: The Lie That Never Died
The report’s most devastating case study concerns the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital compound on October 17, 2023. Within hours, Hamas-controlled Gaza authorities claimed an Israeli airstrike had killed 471 people. UN agencies immediately disseminated the figure, senior UN officials cited it, and it triggered mass protests across the world and was incorporated into diplomatic statements and UN briefings.
Within days, multiple independent investigations reached markedly different conclusions. U.S. and French intelligence agencies, and even Human Rights Watch, an organization with a well-documented record of bias against Israel, found no evidence consistent with a large aerial munition. The overwhelming consensus among independent analyses was that the explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket that struck the hospital’s parking area, leaving the buildings largely intact. A European intelligence source assessed that the actual death toll was likely under 50.
None of that changed a single UN record. The WHO’s Surveillance of Attacks on Healthcare database continues to list the Al-Ahli incident with a death toll of 471 fatalities, with the word “confirmed” displayed above the entry. As the report states, the discredited Hamas figure “continued to circulate in UN publications and statements,” comprising nearly half of all fatalities reported under the category of “health attacks” throughout two years of war. When WHO officials cited this running statistic in briefings to the UN Security Council, implying Israeli responsibility, they concealed the fact that the majority of it rested on a single, largely refuted Hamas claim about an explosion most investigators attributed to a rocket fired from within Gaza.
“Obscene” to Ask for Accuracy
When Israel and others raised questions about methodology, they encountered a wall of institutional hostility. The report highlights a particularly revealing exchange on CBS’s Face the Nation in August 2025, when UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell was asked about data quality. Her response was breathtaking: “To me, it’s kind of obscene that we are having these conversations arguing about whether the methodology works or not. We know children are dying, right? I am tired of a discussion about, well, are we giving the right information or not?”
The report’s authors are unsparing in their assessment of that statement: it “explicitly attempts to reframe the legitimate, and indeed necessary, pursuit of factual accuracy as a distraction from suffering, even as something ‘obscene.'” By portraying basic professional scrutiny as heartless, the posture aimed to render any critical examination of humanitarian reporting illegitimate, and it largely succeeded.
14,000 Babies, 48 Hours
Among the report’s most striking examples of what it calls “baseless sensationalism” is the claim made in May 2025 by newly appointed UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, who warned the world that “14,000 babies in Gaza will die in the next 48 hours unless aid reaches them.” The statement dominated global headlines.
What Fletcher had actually done was catastrophically misrepresent an IPC projection that approximately 14,100 cases of severe acute malnutrition were expected to occur among children aged six to 59 months over the course of an entire year, between April 2025 and March 2026. Reaching his headline required recasting projected malnutrition cases as certain deaths, children under five as “babies,” and a twelve-month analytical window into a 48-hour emergency. Several days later, after the claim was widely condemned as a “grotesque inaccuracy” and denounced by Israel’s Foreign Ministry as a “blood libel,” Fletcher expressed “regret.” His retraction, the report notes dryly, “did not receive even a fraction of the international exposure and attention that his initial statement received.” It remains the only UN retraction of false information issued during the entire war.
The Amputee Narrative: Outdoing Hamas
In one of the report’s most astonishing findings, UN agencies were shown to have disseminated casualty statistics that exceeded even Hamas’s own propaganda. In December 2023, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder claimed that approximately 1,000 children had undergone limb amputations “over the past weeks,” without naming any source, at a time when Gaza’s own Ministry of Health had published no such figure. An NGO then converted that total into a daily rate: “more than 10 children per day, on average, have lost one or both of their legs.” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini subsequently cited that figure in a speech as if it reflected the ongoing situation, and by October 2024, it had become official UN policy, cited in an OCHA briefing to the UN Security Council.
When Gaza’s Ministry of Health finally published an official figure in January 2025, it reported that approximately 800 children had undergone amputations across the entire duration of the war to that point, a daily average of 1.7. The UN’s repeated figure implied a rate more than six times higher. As the report states plainly, “the collective of UN agencies pushing this narrative outdid even a key Hamas propaganda arm.”
The Starvation Deception
The report also dismantles the UN’s central claim that Israel was deliberately starving Gaza through aid restrictions. In May 2024, during the IDF’s Rafah operation, UN agencies and global media declared that aid deliveries into Gaza had “fallen by two-thirds,” a claim used to support the International Criminal Court’s move toward arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for allegedly using starvation as a method of war.
OCHA’s real-time reporting at the time counted 2,713 trucks entering Gaza that month. Yet OCHA’s own dashboard later quietly revised that figure upward to 4,202, a 55 percent increase, without any public announcement or explanation. Meanwhile, COGAT, Israel’s unit coordinating humanitarian entry, recorded 6,297 trucks entering in May 2024, representing a marginal 7 percent decline from April, not two-thirds. May 2024 was, in fact, the second-highest month for aid deliveries since the war began. The report calculates that between May and September 2024, the actual volume of aid entering Gaza was 135 percent greater than the world believed based on OCHA’s real-time reporting. That discrepancy was never corrected or publicly acknowledged.
A Reckoning Long Overdue
The report’s conclusion is unflinching: “The UN’s public record of the post-7-October Gaza war is significantly distorted, misleading, and biased against Israel and in favor of Hamas. It continues, however, to feed public discourse, policy debates, and legal proceedings related to this war with manipulated information which fails to meet the most basic standard of factual accuracy and objectivity.”
The authors call on the UN to issue formal corrections and disclaimers for its reporting since October 7, to establish transparent reporting guidelines with real accountability mechanisms, and for member-state donors to condition their funding on genuine compliance with humanitarian principles. They also recommend that AI companies lower the reliability ranking of UN sources on Israel-related matters, a remarkable suggestion that speaks volumes about how thoroughly the institution has forfeited its claim to neutrality.
The blood of October 7 had barely dried when the UN’s information machinery began working not to illuminate the truth but to bury it, and in doing so, gave Hamas precisely the international cover its murderous strategy required.
