Terror

Apr 04, 2023

The UN Secretary-General publishes a yearly report on "Children and Armed Conflict," (CAAC) which surveys instances of alleged "grave violations" of children's rights around the world. (The six "grave violations" are killing or maiming of children; recruitment or use of children by armed forces or armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other sexual violence against children; abduction of children; denial of humanitarian access.) The CAAC report includes an annex listing "parties to armed conflict" (i.e. armed groups) that perpetrate these "grave violations." Listed parties are then placed under a UN sanctions framework known as a Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism.

As documented by NGO Monitor in several publications, Israel is the target of an on-going multi-year campaign, led by terror-linked and pro-BDS NGOs, that exploit children in advocating for the IDF's inclusion on this blacklist. Many of these NGOs are funded by European governments.

The annex is designed to generate "targeted measures against violators, including the possibility of sanctions" (emphasis added). To date, the annex almost entirely consists of failed states, state-sponsored militias, and terrorist organizations such as ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda.

The Secretary-General's report published in July 2022 and covering 2021, explicitly threatened to include the IDF in the annex in the forthcoming June 2023 report "should the situation repeat itself []without meaningful improvement."

The Secretary-General's report presents allegations of Israeli wrongdoing as fact, asserting "verification" by UN agencies. However, NGO Monitor research shows that such allegations primarily originate from an NGO "working group" that has been campaigning to have the IDF added to the annex and are not verified.

This "working group" includes Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P), designated as a terrorist entity by Israel in October 2021 over its ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization. It also includes other PFLP-linked groups – Al-Mezan and Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) – and NGOs such as B’Tselem that use the "apartheid" libel and lobby governments and international institutions to sanction Israel.

Highlighting the lack of suitability of the UN partners, on May 13, 2023, following the May 2023 conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) during which the Gaza-based terrorist organization launched over 1,200 rockets at Israeli towns and cities, PCHR issued a statement in which it "affirms the right of the Palestinian people to resist the occupation by all available means, including armed struggle."

Notably, information regarding Gazan casualties is often sourced to the Hamas-run local Ministry of Health. In other words, in addition to terror-linked NGOs, the CAAC report relies heavily on unverifiable Hamas-generated material.

Since January 2018, NGO Monitor has identified approximately 90 Palestinian minors killed while engaging in violence against Israelis, including shootings, stabbings, lobbing explosives, Molotov cocktails, and stones, and other violent acts. These include at least 37 teens affiliated with designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, PIJ, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Lions Den, PFLP, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and other factions.

This represents the "grave violation" of recruitment and use of children. According to a draft of the 2023 report, the UN only verified four such instances of recruitment and use by Palestinian terror organizations in 2022, reflecting the inability, or unwillingness, of the agencies involved to conduct effective research.

This widespread phenomenon of Palestinian teens engaging in violence against Israeli civilians and personnel is essential context for understanding Israeli responses, including the use of lethal force and detention of minors. That CAAC reporting consistently ignores these issues reflects a reliance on terror-linked and anti-Israel NGOs, which deliberately seek to minimize and whitewash the extent to which Palestinian teens are recruited by terrorist organizations and engage in violence.

In recent years, corresponding to the NGO-UN campaign to blacklist the IDF, NGO publications and Secretary-General CAAC reports have used criteria that are unique to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not applied by the UN to anywhere else in the world. The double standards should be seen in the context of a concerted campaign, by the NGOs, UN officials and agencies that directly contribute data to the CAAC reporting mechanism, to blacklist the IDF.

According to the UN, the grave violation of "maiming" constitutes "Any action that causes a serious, permanent, disabling injury, scarring or mutilation to a child."

However, the July 2022 CAAC report asserts that approximately 16% of "maiming of children by Israeli forces" was due to tear gas. According to the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), the effects of tear gas are "usually short-lived (15–30 minutes) after the person has been removed from the source and decontaminated (cleaned off)" – in sharp contrast to the "permanent" and "disabling" standards ostensibly applied by CAAC. This is the only mention of tear gas in the entire document, as it is not applied to any other conflict. (This singling out of Israel appeared in the 2019-2020 report as well.)

The July 2022 report claims that the UN "verified the detention of 637 Palestinian children for alleged security offences by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, including 557 in East Jerusalem." However, youth detention – a major theme of DCI-P (see above) advocacy – is not considered a grave violation.

Even if it were – the UN data is skewed by conflating West Bank and East Jerusalem incidents. Under Israeli law, all Jerusalem residents are subject to civilian procedures – arrested by civilian police force and tried in domestic courts. As such, 87% of detained minors are irrelevant for a discussion of "Children and Armed Conflict." In addition, this statistic does not reference the percentage of detainees that were involved in or suspected of involvement in terror attacks.

Additionally, since at least 2019, each annual State Department human rights report has recorded a decrease in the number of Palestinian minors detained by Israel, relative to the previous year:

In recent years, UNICEF's NGO "working group" members have invented new, looser standards to allege Israeli violations towards Palestinian students and schools.

The UN's Guidance Note for attacks on schools requires that an incident must bear a "clear link" to education to be considered an attack on a school.1

In an April 2020 publication on education in the West Bank, Save the Children – listed as a member of UNICEF's "working group" – ignores the UN standard and applies a looser "definition" with less need to prove that a specific person or site was targeted due to its relationship to education.

The 2022 CAAC report claimed verification of 1,582 instances of Israeli denial of humanitarian access, asserting "Some 38 per cent of permit applications to Israeli authorities for children to exit through the Erez crossing to access specialized medical treatment outside Gaza were delayed or denied, affecting 1,581 applications."

Scant details or references are provided to verify such claims. Regardless, contrary to the UN's premise, Israel is not obligated to allow residents of Gaza into Israel for medical treatment, much as it has no obligation to allow access within its borders to any other group of non-Israelis living outside of the country. Unlike the other five grave violations, denial of humanitarian access, even if it had occurred in this context, is not a listing violation that triggers inclusion in the annex.

Moreover, data regarding passage between Israel and Gaza through the Erez Crossing strongly suggests that COVID restrictions played a large factor in determining the permit approval policy during the period covered in the Secretary-General's report: Significant increases in approvals coincide with the implementation of Palestinian policies to increase vaccination rates.

Previous CAAC reports have included information about incidents allegedly involving Israeli civilians in the West Bank, without IDF involvement. Such incidents are not under the purview of the CAAC and should not be considered as part of the discussion of listing the IDF.

According to the 2022 CAAC report, "The highest numbers of grave violations were verified in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia, the Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen."

Of these, the most objectively severe grave violations of killing, recruitment and use, and sexual violence represented a miniscule percentage of the grave violations reported in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As described above, violations such as maiming, attacks on schools, and denial of humanitarian access have been manipulated by biased and politicized actors to inflate the supposed wrongdoing of the IDF.

Several foreign governments support the CAAC-related NGO activities. This includes funding explicitly for CAAC-related projects, as well as support for UNICEF, NGO members of its "working group," and others campaigning on this issue:

Pages

Reports

On July 11, the UN Secretary-General released his annual report on Children in Armed Conflict (CAAC), dealing with the violation of children's rights in conflict zones in 2021. This year, the UN again presents misleading statistics and adopts invented standards in order to advance a narrative that the IDF violates the rights of Palestinian minors

Reports

The United Nations Secretary-General published the annual report on "grave violations" in the context of children and armed conflict for 2020 .

Reports

Palestinian and international NGOs – funded by European governments and working in tandem with UNICEF's West Bank and Gaza branch – have built an extensive campaign, using false charges of abuse of Palestinian children in the effort to trigger sanctions against Israel.

Reports

UNICEF spearheads a campaign to have Israel included on a UN blacklist of "grave" vio-lators of children's rights. This political agenda is a primary facet of UNICEF's activities relating to Israel, completely inconsistent with its mandate of "child protection" and from its guidelines for neutrality and impartiality.