Masked gunmen line up three blindfolded men outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. A crowd gathers to watch. One gunman addresses the spectators and pronounces the men traitors condemned to die, accused of collaborating with Israel. They are knocked to the ground and shot in the head and upper body. The date is September 21, 2025.

Three weeks later, eight Palestinian men surrender to Hamas after days of clashes. Hamas promises they will be treated fairly and investigated. Less than two hours later, all eight are dragged into a public square in Gaza City, forced to kneel while onlookers shout “collaborator” and “spy,” and shot at close range.

The United Nations (UN) recorded both executions. They even appear in a new UN report documenting 249 cases of execution, torture, and severe violence in Gaza between August 2024 and January 2026, a number the UN itself concedes is likely only a fraction of the total.

At least 108 Palestinians were killed. Hundreds more were maimed. Bones were broken with pipes and cement blocks. Roughly sixty incidents involved Hamas-affiliated forces: the Qassam Brigades, the so-called Sahm Unit, and Hamas police. In Gaza, there is no law except the gun in the hand of whoever holds it that day.

Call this report a reluctant confession. The UN did not set out to expose Hamas. It merely tripped over facts too ugly to ignore.

None of this behavior is new. Hamas seized Gaza in 2007 by throwing rivals from rooftops and shooting opponents in the streets. Terror movements govern through fear, intimidation, and horrifying violence. What is new is that these crimes have now been documented by an institution that spent years looking the other way.

Worse, the UN did not merely fail to stop Hamas’s corruption and brutality. It helped sustain the political and educational systems in which both flourished.

The men doing the shooting were raised in a society where hatred was cultivated, dissent crushed, martyrdom glorified. For decades, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) operated Gaza’s schools while Hamas steadily tightened its grip over the Strip. 

The victims of that system, as we now see, are not only Israelis. They are the families who buried the men outside al-Shifa Hospital, the children who watched the executions, and the relatives who were promised a fair investigation only to receive corpses within two hours.

As chairman of the U.S.-Israel Education Association, I believe there must be a better alternative. That is why we have proposed something called the AGES Fund, a coalition effort to replace UNRWA’s failed educational monopoly with vetted teachers, transparent textbooks, and a curriculum built around coexistence, economic opportunity, and civic responsibility. 

AGES cannot undo the crimes described in this new UN report. But it might help ensure that Gaza’s next generation does not produce another report like it. 

Unfortunately, even after documenting Hamas’s torture and murder of Palestinians, the UN Commission still attempts to blame Israel, describing these crimes as occurring in an environment engineered by Israel.

The UN’s human-rights machinery has spent so long treating Hamas as a symptom and Israel as the disease, that presented with masked gunmen shooting kneeling prisoners in a public square, it still searches for an Israeli fingerprint on the trigger.

But facts have a stubborn quality. Once written down, they resist reinterpretation. The report says what it says. Hamas executes Palestinians. Hamas tortures Palestinians. Hamas steals from Palestinians and kills those who notice. 

For nearly two years, the world tried to dismiss such accounts as Israeli allegations. They cannot be dismissed any longer. They are now findings of the United Nations itself.

The question now is whether the world will continue funding the institutions that produced this misery or finally invest in ones that might prevent the next generation from repeating it.

 Bruce Pearl is the former head basketball coach of Auburn University and chairman of the US-Israel Education Association.