On June 24, 2026, podcaster Natali Morris posted a claim on social media that Israeli soldiers use Arab boys as target practice — rotating which body part they shoot based on the day of the week.
“Israeli soldiers use young boys for ‘target practice,'” she tweeted. “As in, Mondays, we shoot the stomach, Tuesdays, the knees, etc.”
Morris said the claim was backed by a BBC article and corroborated by a recent United Nations report. Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene retweeted the post and called Israelis “child killers.”
There’s just one problem: the UN report itself contains no actual evidence for the claim.
The entire basis for the allegation is a single quote from an unnamed doctor who “visited Gaza on a medical mission.” Here is the full entry from the report:
“Based on the clustering of injuries and the targeted body parts, I assess that the Israeli soldiers have been deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice – a different body part being targeted on different days… There is a very clear pattern that suggest this is a deliberate aiming of different body parts [of children].”
That’s it. One anonymous source, offering a personal assessment — no corroborating witnesses, no footage, no forensic documentation.
A Report That Can’t Prove Its Own Headline
The report’s central charge — that IDF soldiers deliberately identified civilian children and killed them for no reason other than killing them — is never actually demonstrated. Not once. The report cannot produce a single verified example.
Consider the report’s own marquee case. Paragraphs 59–60 describe a ten-day-old baby allegedly shot through the head by an Israeli drone while breastfeeding inside a tent in the Nuseirat camp in April 2024. The Commission’s conclusion that this was deliberate rests entirely on one inference: because it happened in daylight, the drone operator “would have been able to see inside the tent.”
Think about what that theory actually requires. A drone would have had to hover at ground level, see through canvas, identify a 35-centimeter infant’s head, and fire a precision shot — all of this concluded from a photograph of a bullet, with no chain of custody, no ballistics analysis, and no witness who claims to have seen a drone.
The same formula repeats throughout: a family’s account, a doctor’s guess about what caused a wound, and a conclusion of premeditated killing. Nothing connecting the dots.
The One Case That Sounds More Credible — And What It Actually Shows
There is one incident in the report that initially seems more substantive, because it draws on a soldier’s own account, sourced from a December 2024 Haaretz investigation. A Palestinian teenager was shot near a restricted corridor in Gaza. The Commission cites it as evidence of a military culture that deliberately targets children.
But the soldier’s testimony says something quite different. His unit was operating under a blanket order: anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians. They opened fire before anyone could see who the boy was. Only afterward, when they retrieved his phone from the body, did they learn he was unarmed — “just a boy, maybe 16.”
That is not evidence of a policy to kill children because they are children. It is a military operating under extreme rules of engagement in an environment where that distinction had become nearly impossible to make in real time.
Why? Because Hamas has routinely used fighters as young as 16, almost always dressed in civilian clothes rather than uniforms, and has sent operatives unarmed to collect weapons cached at their destination. That tactic was deliberately designed to make combatants indistinguishable from civilians.
Israel drew lines, issued warnings, and told soldiers that anyone crossing them was a threat. The result, in some cases, was the death of people who weren’t. Rules of engagement are not a policy of murdering children for being children.
The Witnesses Can’t Know What They’re Claiming to Know
The report leans heavily on anonymous doctors. But a physician trained to treat gunshot wounds is not equipped to identify which weapon fired a bullet, from what position, or why. They are not eyewitnesses to attacks. They cannot verify what patients or interpreters tell them.
The same problem applies to family testimony, which the Commission uses to determine how children were killed and whether they were deliberately targeted. Family members cannot realistically know the full battlefield environment surrounding a strike — IDF positions, militant movements, the geometry of a 360-degree urban combat zone. Yet the Commission treats their accounts as authoritative and their conclusions as certain.
When the report does invoke physical evidence, it doesn’t hold up either. Photographs of bullets or fragments are repeatedly cited as proof of IDF responsibility, with no chain of custody, no independent forensic analysis, and no explanation of how the munitions were authenticated. Islamic terror groups in Gaza use a wide range of ammunition, including captured Israeli weaponry. Without verified forensics, you cannot reliably determine who fired a shot, let alone conclude it was intentional.
The Enemy Disappears from the Page
Perhaps the report’s most glaring failure is what it leaves out entirely. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — tens of thousands of terrorists who spent seventeen years burying weapons, tunnels, and command posts beneath homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals — are almost entirely absent from the analysis.
Strip the enemy out of a war and every dead child looks like a deliberate execution. What you don’t see is what war actually is: chaotic, lethal, and fought in environments that armed groups deliberately engineered to maximize civilian exposure.
The Commission also quietly invents a new standard of international law. It treats any Israeli strike on a position embedded with civilians as proof of intent to kill those civilians. That directly contradicts the established Law of Armed Conflict, which permits strikes on military objectives even when civilian casualties are foreseeable — provided the rules of distinction, proportionality, and precaution are met.
Under the Commission’s invented framework, any military objective placed inside a civilian structure becomes permanently immune from attack, and any resulting deaths become evidence of genocide. No army on earth has ever been held to that standard, and it exists in no recognized body of law.
The report also conspicuously ignores the use of child soldiers by Palestinian armed groups. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have operated military training camps for minors for years, celebrated teenage fighters as martyrs, and recruited children as young as twelve into combat roles.
The Structural Problem
The credibility problem doesn’t stop with methodology. The UN’s own human rights expert on Palestine is formally mandated to investigate only Israel’s violations of international law — not violations committed by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. The investigative body that produced this report is structurally prohibited from examining the other side.
And the report was published by the UN Human Rights Council — a body whose current membership includes China, Cuba, Pakistan, and Qatar.
The Reality
The report charges Israel with deliberately targeting children while ignoring a documented reality that cuts directly against that claim: the IDF has gone to extraordinary — often operationally costly — lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
Before strikes, Israel routinely warns civilians through phone calls, text messages, radio broadcasts, and leaflet drops. It also employs “roof knocking” — firing small, non-lethal munitions onto a building before striking it, giving occupants time to evacuate. These are measures that sacrifice tactical surprise and put Israeli forces at greater risk, in order to protect civilian lives.
No army fighting an enemy that deliberately hides behind civilians — using homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals as military infrastructure — is legally or practically required to do any of this. Israel does it anyway. A commission serious about the truth would have to grapple with that. This one doesn’t mention it.
Bottom Line
Natali Morris and Marjorie Taylor Greene swallowed and amplified a modern blood libel with zero shame.
On the flimsiest garbage — a single unnamed doctor’s conspiratorial hunch buried in a biased UN report — Morris rushed to declare that Israeli soldiers use Palestinian boys for rotating “target practice,” shooting stomachs on Mondays and knees on Tuesdays, while MTG gleefully retweeted it calling Israelis “child killers.” Neither bothered to notice the report offered no evidence, no verified incidents, no forensics, and no witnesses, only Palestinian testimonies and speculative guesses.
Sources
X, UN OHCHR, The Spectator, UN Watch, UN Watch, UN HRC, Israel Truth Network
