UNmuted bias: How UN keeps getting Israel wrong

Some institutions age into wisdom. The United Nations, on the question of Israel, has aged into parody.

In a swift one-two punch, the UN first delivered Antonio Guterres’s denunciation of Israel’s humanitarian aid plan, accusing the Israeli government of politicizing relief efforts and compromising the UN’s neutrality, followed by a second round from Ravina Shamdasani, who condemned Israel’s establishment of a buffer zone in Gaza as a war crime, further fueling the narrative of Israeli culpability.

On April 8, 2025, the UN Secretary-General took the extraordinary step of publicly rejecting Israel’s plan to coordinate humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza. His language was unusually harsh, accusing the Israeli government of proposing a mechanism that would politicize relief operations and violate the UN’s supposedly sacrosanct neutrality. In his tirade, Guterres also referred to Israel as to “the occupying power,” a claim freighted with political bias that disregards the complex legal and historical reality of Gaza since Israel’s 2005 disengagement. The reality Guterres chose to ignore are that Gaza is controlled by Hamas, a terror group that siphons aid, hides weaponry in hospitals, and uses civilians as shields. Guterres’s rebuke amounts to little more than a declaration that Israel must rely on international intermediaries that have repeatedly failed to prevent weapons smuggling and tunnel reconstruction. His words were less about humanitarian principle and more about reaffirming the UN’s reflexive mistrust of any Israeli-led initiative, however grounded in legitimate security concerns.

The pattern repeated itself on April 11, when the UN Human Rights Office issued a warning that Israel’s operations in Gaza could render the territory uninhabitable for Palestinians as a group. She implied, without evidence, that the actions might amount to collective punishment or worse. The statement glossed over Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes, the group’s continued rocket fire, and its repeated violations of international humanitarian law. It also ignored Israel’s efforts to minimize civilian casualties, including leafletting, corridor evacuations, and targeted strikes. Instead, the UN office advanced a narrative in which Israel is guilty by default, regardless of context or proportionality.

These twin interventions reveal an institution that has abandoned impartiality in favor of performative outrage. The UN’s apparatus on the Israeli-Palestinian issue long ago ceased to be a forum for balanced diplomacy. It has become a stage for political posturing against the Jewish state, rewarding its enemies with rhetorical cover while condemning its defenders with procedural sanctimony. What we are witnessing is not a defense of humanitarian law but its weaponization against one party in a complex conflict. In its haste to issue statements and pass resolutions, the UN routinely erases Hamas’s agency, excuses its atrocities, and flattens every military action by Israel into a war crime.

The implications are dangerous. The UN’s credibility erodes when it filters every development through an anti-Zionist lens. Worse still, it emboldens Hamas and its backers by signaling that the international system will provide diplomatic insulation no matter how flagrantly they violate norms. Israel is left to defend itself not only on the battlefield but in an institutional arena rigged against it.

Until the UN confronts its own biases, it will remain not a guardian of peace, but a swamp of cynicism, fueling the very conflict it pretends to restrain. So long as it reserves its harshest scrutiny for the region’s only democracy, its moral authority will stay exactly where it belongs—on mute.