This briefing note argues that, since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, key UN agencies and officials have played a central role in shaping international perceptions of the Gaza war through reports, statements, statistics, and public messaging. According to the document, the UN’s humanitarian information ecosystem repeatedly failed to meet standards of accuracy, neutrality, and impartiality by disseminating unverified Hamas-linked data, presenting misleading statistics, omitting Hamas’s role in civilian harm, and issuing sensational claims unsupported by evidence. The report contends that these practices distorted public understanding, fueled political and legal action against Israel, and contributed to hostility toward Jewish communities worldwide.
The following is an executive summary of the report. For the full report, click here.
Since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the United Nations (UN) has been the primary source of information shaping perceptions in the international arena on the conduct of the war and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. Thousands of reports, bulletins, briefings, and online posts by UN agencies and officials have generated a continuous stream of statistics, statements and viral headlines which resonated globally. This body of information was used to promote unprecedented political and legal steps against Israel and Israelis and is likely to continue being used for that purpose in the future.
An analytical review of that material shows that key UN agencies and officials exhibited a systemic breakdown of core professional standards and of the principles of neutrality and impartiality in their public statements and reporting on the war in Gaza, resulting in significant factual distortions and consistent bias against Israel and in favor of Hamas.
This phenomenon has taken several recurring and mutually reinforcing forms:
Data-laundering: the wholesale dissemination of unverified information from Hamas-controlled authorities as authoritative UN data;
Publishing misleading statistics: knowingly presenting partial information as if it were complete thereby creating a highly distorted picture of humanitarian realities;
Complete disregard of Hamas' role: presenting humanitarian outcomes without the relevant operational and military context necessary to understand their causes;
Baseless sensationalism: making hyperbolic claims unsupported by evidence.
By repeating these practices numerous times, the UN's reports and statements transformed the genuinely complex and tragic realities of the war into a defamatory, one-sided narrative depicting an alleged Israeli atrocity. Their distortions and omissions turned reality on its head: Hamas, which launched a genocidal attack on October 7 and since then deliberately tried to maximize harm to civilians on both sides, was exempted from any scrutiny, while Israel, which abides by the laws of war and took unprecedented steps to minimize harm to civilians, was portrayed as a cruel aggressor.
Hamas' barbaric attack and its tactic of using civilians as human shields indeed brought suffering, displacement, and hardship upon Gaza's population, despite Israel's unprecedented efforts to reduce harm to civilians. For Hamas, those outcomes were part of a strategy which aims to invoke international outrage against Israel. Key UN and other humanitarian actors failed to call out this cynical tactic and, knowingly or not, encouraged its continuation.
The breakdown of reporting standards in the UN had another critical consequence. Distorted legal and humanitarian narratives, distributed under the UN insignia, helped legitimize and intensify hostility, harassment, and violence directed at Jewish communities across multiple countries.
Taken together, the evidence presented here points not to good-faith mistakes or inaccuracies resulting from operational constraints, but to a systematic institutional failure within the UN’s humanitarian information ecosystem.
To remedy this unacceptable reality, the UN must take the following steps:
- Set the record straight: issuing appropriate corrections and disclaimers addressing the flaws in UN reports and statements since October 7 to ensure they do not continue to misinform the public, academic, political and legal discussions on the war for years to come.
- Going forward, ensure accurate, objective, neutral and impartial UN reporting: this includes setting clear and transparent reporting guidelines as well as effective oversight and accountability mechanisms.
The analysis below is based exclusively on open sources therefore its findings can be verified independently using the links in the footnotes.
This document is not intended to discredit the UN and all its agencies operating in Gaza. There are many capable humanitarians among them who are genuinely dedicated to providing aid in accordance with the mandatory humanitarian principles. However, their ability to work and coordinate effectively with Israeli authorities has been increasingly undermined by a relatively small number of UN agencies and senior officials who consistently deviated from those principles in their public reporting and communications. Those officials, in a stark departure from the UN's norms and best practice elsewhere, have turned humanitarian advocacy into a one-sided political campaign of defamation and lies against Israel.
Source: “Laundering Propaganda: How UN actors manipulated information in the Gaza War (2023-2025),” govextra.gov.il, (May 2026).