The UN Human Rights Office has declared that Israel’s pursuit of the terrorists who carried out the October 7 massacre may amount to a war crime. In a statement responding to Israel’s continued operations against the perpetrators, the office known as OHCHR said “the targeted killing of persons on the basis of allegations of criminal conduct amounts to extrajudicial executions and a war crime,” and warned that “anyone ordering, soliciting or encouraging such acts is criminally liable under international law.” The office demanded that Israel address the terrorists of October 7 “through independent, impartial, and lawful processes that fully respect due process guarantees and the presumption of innocence.”
OHCHR issued that statement after IDF Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir stood in the Gaza Strip and said what Israelis have known since the morning of October 7, 2023: the men who carried out the massacre have nowhere left to hide. “The pursuit of the October 7 terrorists continues,” Zamir said. “Anyone who took part in the massacre will live under pursuit until they are eliminated.” OHCHR, which describes itself as the body “internationally mandated to monitor and report on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” answered him not with silence, not with caution, but with an accusation of war crimes.
Israel’s dossier on October 7 did not stop at Hamas’s own ranks. Israeli intelligence identified twelve UNRWA employees it said took part directly in the October 7 massacre, including one who allegedly helped kidnap a woman from the Nova music festival and another who reportedly stored weapons in his UNRWA-run home. The UN’s own internal review, conducted by its Office of Internal Oversight Services, found the allegations against nine of those employees “credible enough to warrant termination,” and UNRWA dismissed them. A separate independent review, commissioned by the UN itself, found that UNRWA had failed for years to enforce its own neutrality standards, allowing staff affiliated with Hamas to remain on its payroll. This is the same UN agency that has spent decades operating inside Gaza, and it could not keep its own employees from participating in a massacre — yet its parent institution now presumes to instruct Israel on due process for the terrorists those employees allegedly assisted.
Due process. Presumption of innocence. These are the words OHCHR chose for the men who broke into homes in Kfar Aza and Be’eri, who murdered babies, who dragged women through the streets of Gaza to be spat on and beaten, who are still holding hostages more than two years later. The victims of October 7 received no due process. They received no presumption of innocence. They received bullets, fire, and rope. What standard does the United Nations believe those murderers are owed that they refused to their victims?
What does the Bible say a nation must do when justice demands pursuit?
The Bible does not command Israel to wait. It commands Israel to act. “Justice, justice you shall pursue, that you may live and inherit the land that the LORD your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 16:20). The Hebrew is tzedek, tzedek tirdof — the word tirdof, “you shall pursue,” is not a suggestion or an ideal. It is a command, doubled for emphasis, aimed at a nation living in its own land under its own law.
The Sages built an entire body of law around the concept of the rodef — the pursuer, one who chases another with intent to kill. Jewish law does not instruct bystanders to file a complaint and wait for a tribunal. It obligates them to stop the rodef, by lethal force if necessary, precisely because the alternative is a corpse. A terrorist who murdered on October 7 and remains armed, organized, and committed to doing it again is not a defendant awaiting arraignment. He is a rodef. The law that protects him is not international human rights law. It is the law that protects everyone else from him.
Zamir’s own words describe exactly this kind of ongoing threat, not a list of private citizens marked for punishment. “We will continue to act to weaken [Israel’s enemies] in an offensive manner and systematically,” he said. “We will not allow terror infrastructure to become established.” The IDF has justified its strikes during the ceasefire by identifying targets that “posed an immediate threat” — language that tracks the actual legal standard for the use of force in an active conflict. Even the Board of Peace, the body actually responsible for overseeing ceasefire compliance, framed its objection in far narrower terms than OHCHR did, stating only that “military action cannot extend beyond responding to genuine and imminent threats.” The Board of Peace did not accuse Israel of war crimes. It raised an operational question about scope. OHCHR reached past that question entirely and arrived at “extrajudicial execution.”
The institutional pattern here did not begin with this statement. Hamas has never been placed on the UN Security Council’s own list of designated terrorist organizations, even after October 7, even as the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Israel all classify it as one. And in June 2024, a UN Commission of Inquiry released a report finding that “Palestinian armed groups and Israeli authorities have both committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the attack on 7 October and the subsequent military operations” — language that placed the massacre and Israel’s defensive response in the same sentence, as though they carried equal moral weight. Secretary-General António Guterres managed something similar in October 2023, when he condemned the attack and then added: “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Strip away the diplomatic phrasing and this is victim blaming, delivered from the highest office in the UN. “Did not happen in a vacuum” is the language reserved for excusing the inexcusable — the same reflex that asks what a woman was wearing or what a robbery victim did to provoke the attack. No context, no grievance, explains dragging a grandmother’s body through Gaza on a motorcycle or burning a family alive in their safe room. Guterres went on to say the grievances of the Palestinian people “cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” and that those attacks “cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” The disclaimer does not erase the framing that came before it. Collective punishment is not a loose phrase, either. It is a specific violation under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and Guterres invoked it against Israel in the same statement where he had just supplied Hamas with an excuse.
This is the same UN, speaking with one voice across its Secretary-General, its Commission of Inquiry, and its Human Rights Office. It finds context for Hamas and war crimes for Israel. It withholds a terrorist designation from an organization the UN’s own investigators say committed crimes against humanity, and then instructs the victims of that organization on the legal limits of pursuing the men responsible.
Israel does not need the United Nations’ permission to pursue the murderers of its people. It needed the Bible’s command, given at Sinai and repeated in the plains of Moab: pursue justice. The men who massacred families on October 7 are not owed a courtroom by the nation whose children they slaughtered. They are owed exactly what Lt. Gen. Zamir promised them — pursuit, without end, until it is finished.
