A United Nations official charged with defending women worldwide just submitted a formal report to the Human Rights Council titled Violence against Mothers — and somehow found no room to mention the Hamas terrorists who burned Israeli mothers alive in their homes, kidnapped nursing mothers with their infants, and spent more than two years psychologically torturing the families of hostages. This is a pattern, and UN Watch has now documented it in devastating detail.
The Torah commands us: “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Devarim 16:20). The word tzedek, justice, repeats twice to emphasize that true justice must be pursued with integrity in both substance and process. What Reem Alsalem delivered to Geneva this month is the precise oppositehttps://x.com/UNWatch/status/2069066797685379215
Alsalem, a Jordanian consultant who has served as UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women since 2021, released her June 2026 report to the Human Rights Council with detailed accusations against Israel and not a single word about October 7. According to the UN Watch analysis authored by legal advisor Dina Rovner, the report makes one-sided accusations based on misleading and incomplete facts, while completely ignoring Hamas’s deliberate targeting of Israeli mothers, children, and families, and the more than two years of psychological torture inflicted on hostage families.
The omission is not careless. A December 2024 report by Israel’s Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children documented how Hamas terrorists killed parents and children in front of each other, kidnapped families including infants, separated mothers and children in captivity, and used social media to broadcast abuses to relatives as a form of psychological torture. This deliberate targeting of family units was so systematic that it gave rise to a new term: kinocide, the targeted destruction of family bonds. Hamas forced hostage Daniella Gilboa to stage her own death for a propaganda video, filmed emaciated hostage Evyatar David digging his own grave, and recorded a visibly weakened Elkana Bokhbot lying on the floor after he allegedly tried to harm himself. In March 2025, the UN’s own Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, published a report recognizing hostage families as victims of Hamas psychological torture.
Alsalem ignored all of it.
This is not a surprise from someone who, as recently as April 2026, dismissed documented Hamas sexual crimes against Israelis as “misinformation” used to “justify the genocide against Palestinians.” In November 2025, she publicly declared that “no independent investigation found that rape took place on October 7” — a flat falsehood directly contradicted by the March 2024 UN report that found reasonable grounds to believe conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the attack. At the same time, she issued a joint statement with the notoriously anti-Israel Francesca Albanese, accusing Israeli soldiers of sexual abuse, based on unsubstantiated claims from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The NGO’s board chair is Richard Falk, an anti-Israel conspiracist who has previously claimed Israel was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, and whose organization was cited as the source for the claim that Israel trained dogs to rape Palestinians.
The report’s distortions go further. Alsalem portrays the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that imprisons women for violating compulsory hijab laws, as a champion of women’s rights, lamenting that American and Israeli strikes in 2026 might reverse Iran’s gains in girls’ education and maternal health. Prominent Iranian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad saw things differently. She publicly supported the strikes and urged President Trump to “finish the job,” describing women blinded by Iranian security forces taking to the streets “dancing and saying… even with one eye, we’re able to see justice.”
As for Alsalem’s claims of Israeli “reproductive violence” and genocide, her sole evidence for “genocidal language” targeting Palestinian mothers is a single article from the openly anti-Israel Mondoweiss website. The article quotes a retired IDF officer who has no role in government policy.
And now comes the detail that completes the entire exercise: UN Watch separately revealed this week that Alsalem’s office received $70,000 from Saudi Arabia in 2024 and $100,000 from the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE, in 2025. That is $170,000 from governments that imprison women for demanding equal rights, flowing into the office of the UN’s top defender of women’s rights. Confronted with this, Alsalem released her first-ever funding disclosure statement and never once mentioned Saudi Arabia by name.
UN Watch put it plainly: independence is not established by declaration. It must be demonstrated. A rapporteur who takes money from Saudi Arabia, erases the mother kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from her children’s bedroom, and then files a formal UN report on violence against mothers, has not demonstrated anything except the depth of the rot inside the UN human rights system.
The Jewish people have always understood that silence in the face of injustice is itself a moral choice. The UN’s silence on Israeli mothers, written into an official report, stamped with a UN letterhead, funded by Gulf petrodollars, is a choice. And the world should see it for exactly what it is.
