A UN commission found Israel is still committing genocide. Sky News called it a claim.

Have you noticed how a UN finding of genocide turned into a claim? This was Sky News's headline on Monday night.

The UN commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory did not make a claim. It investigated cases, applied the law to them and reported its findings to the UN General Assembly. This is what it found.

• Israel is still committing genocide in Gaza. Israeli forces "continue to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza" since the 'ceasefire' of October 2025.
• Israeli attacks killed more than 1,431 people in Gaza after the 'ceasefire', up to 30 September 2026, including at least 300 children and 130 women.
• In the West Bank, Israel committed the crimes against humanity of extermination, torture, rape and other sexual violence, and persecution "with nationality, race and ethnicity at its core".
• Israeli forces killed 1,080 Palestinians in the West Bank between 7 October 2023 and 30 September 2026. Airstrikes killed 254 of them. In the 15 years before, airstrikes there killed six.
• Israeli forces deliberately killed and seriously harmed Palestinian children, which the commission calls age-based persecution.
• The commission sent Israel two requests for information. Israel answered neither.

So we read the coverage. We found 26 English-language headlines from 25 outlets, published on 26 and 27 October, and counted every word of 15 of the reports, sentence by sentence, by what each sentence was about and whose words it carried.

What the figures show

• Israel's denial got 1,178 words. Palestinians got 46. Those 46 words came from one man, the Palestinian ambassador in Geneva, in The New York Times, answering the commission's criticism of the Palestinian Authority. Not one of the 15 reports quoted a Palestinian about what Israel did.
• Sky News gave 21% of its report to Israel's denial and to doubts about the commission. Of the 15, no outlet outside Israel gave them a bigger share. Only Israel National News (26%) and The Times of Israel (25%) did.
• Two of the 26 headlines used the word "claims": Sky News, and a Times of Israel live-blog entry. Sky is the only outlet that put the word genocide in quotation marks in a headline.
• Reuters never told its readers that the commission found crimes against humanity. Its report does not contain the words extermination, torture, rape or crimes against humanity. CBC ran the same Reuters copy.
• Not one report said Israel had refused to answer the commission. Seven outlets put Israel's denial in the headline or the standfirst.

What Sky News did

Sky wrote "claims" or "alleges" about the commission's findings nine times, in the headline, the standfirst and the body. Even the death tolls were claims: "The report claims 1,431 people, including at least 300 children and 130 women, have been killed", and "It claims Israeli forces have killed a total of 1,080 Palestinians". Both figures come from the UN's own casualty records.

Nothing Israel said was a claim. Israel "says", "dismissed", "denied", "insisted" and "called". One sentence about Israel needed no attribution at all. Israel "has previously denied claims of genocide, insisted it only launches attacks in response to Hamas ceasefire breaches, and does all it can to avoid civilian casualties."

The report Sky was writing about describes two 1,000-pound unguided bombs that Israel dropped on two homes in Nuseirat refugee camp on 29 October 2025. They killed 19 members of one family, seven of them children. Israel listed two of the dead as commanders in Islamic Jihad.

Now notice how Sky wrote about the dead.

The commission's own count was in the report Sky had in front of it. Israel has killed more than 75,000 Palestinians across the occupied territory since 7 October 2023, including at least 21,500 children. Sky left that figure out and used the health ministry's, with "Hamas-run" attached. AFP's report on the same day said the UN considers the ministry's figures reliable. Sky did not.

Then Sky added its own doubt about the commission, in the middle of a sentence about killings.

That is how you turn a genocide finding into a he-said-she-said. Put the finding in quotation marks, call the death toll a claim, attach "Hamas-run" to the dead, and hand the state accused of genocide the standfirst and a subheading of its own.

Notice the different standards

In June the same commission published a report on Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza. It documented 249 cases of executions and severe violence, with at least 108 deaths. The Times of Israel and the Associated Press reported its findings plainly, attributed to the UN.

Israel's foreign ministry did the same. On the Hamas report in June it posted on X: "Now even the UN is documenting these crimes." On Monday it called the same commission's report "a propaganda document detached from reality, aimed at undermining Israel's right to self-defense, delegitimizing the Jewish state, and legitimizing jihadist terrorism against its citizens." None of the reports we read told readers that the ministry had praised this commission four months earlier.

What The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel did

The Jerusalem Post put the foreign ministry's words in its headline, spelling mistake included: "'Legitimazes Jihad': Foreign Affairs Ministry slams UN report accusing Israel of genocide". The title it gives search engines and social media says something else: "UN commission accuses Israel, Palestinian Authority of human rights violations". Genocide, extermination and rape became human rights violations.

Then the Post told its readers, in its own voice: "In contrast, Hamas is named exactly twice, and neither mention accused Hamas of committing a crime or other wrongdoing." It left out why. This report covers killings by state forces, Israel's and the Palestinian Authority's. In June the commission published a whole report on Hamas and other armed groups, the one Israel's foreign ministry praised. This report also says, in a footnote, that the commission will keep investigating sexual violence against Israelis by members of armed groups.

The Times of Israel's web address still carries its first headline: un-sponsored-probe-accuses-israel-of-ongoing-gaza-genocide-west-bank-crimes-against-humanity. The headline on the page now leads with Israel: "'Misinformation campaign': Israel rejects UN-sponsored probe accuses it of ongoing Gaza genocide".

What Reuters, The Independent and The New York Times got wrong

• Reuters wrote that the report "examined violations against Palestinian children". That was the commission's June report on children. This one examines killings and harm by Israeli and Palestinian state forces. Reuters also wrote "In its report to the UN Security Council". The report went to the General Assembly. And it left out every crime against humanity the commission found.
• The Independent's headline left out the genocide finding, and its standfirst is Israel's denial: "Benjamin Netanyahu's government has denied its military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide". The denial it quoted was not a response to this report. It was Netanyahu's speech to the UN General Assembly last month, calling the genocide allegations "the biggest lie of the century".
• The New York Times wrote that Israeli forces had killed "1,080 Palestinians since the cease-fire agreement" in the West Bank. The report's 1,080 covers three years, from 7 October 2023 to 30 September 2026.

What nobody printed

The commission investigated cases one by one. These are some of them. Only Haaretz mentioned any of them, in one sentence.

• On 5 June 2026 in Hebron, an Israeli soldier fired two rounds into a family's car without warning and shot their seven-month-old baby in the head. Video shows the father slowing down, stopping the car and raising his hands. The army said the car accelerated towards the soldiers.
• On 15 March 2026 in Tammun, Israeli forces fired at a car carrying a family of six. The mother, the father and their two youngest sons were shot in the head and killed. The two older sons were injured, and then the soldiers assaulted them.
• On 9 February 2025, a woman eight months pregnant was shot at least twice in the back and pelvis as she fled Nur Shams refugee camp by car. The Israeli military's justification: she "looked suspiciously at the ground".
• On 25 June 2025 in Shu'fat refugee camp, a Border Police officer shot a 67-year-old woman in the face as she sat on her rooftop with her family, children among them. Israel said its forces were responding to stone-throwing. Witnesses said there was none.
• On 17 October 2025 in Gaza, Israeli forces fired on a car 120 metres outside the unmarked Yellow Line and killed 11 people, seven of them children. Israel kept everyone away from the site until the next morning. The evidence suggests at least one of them could have been saved.
• On 6 September 2024, an Israeli soldier shot Ayşenur Eygi, a Turkish-American woman, in the head as she watched a protest in Beita. The commission found he targeted her deliberately, intending to kill her. He reportedly raised a fist to a colleague afterwards.

Ayşenur Eygi is the only victim the commission names. No report we read named her.

Every headline we found

A UN commission found genocide in Gaza and extermination in the West Bank. Sky News found a claim, and gave Israel the standfirst.

Sources: UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, report A/81/430 (advance unedited version, 14 October 2026) and OHCHR press release, 26 October 2026; report A/HRC/62/22, 8 May 2026; Israel's foreign ministry on the June report, as reported by JNS, 11 June 2026; the 26 headlines listed above.