Key Takeaways:
- The UN COI report’s claims that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children with quadcopters relies on fantastical assertions about Israeli military technology and tactics that have no basis in evidence or reality.
- Commissioners lacking any military expertise or forensic methodology somehow traced individual bullets to specific drone-mounted weapon.
- Details such as cube-shaped bullets do not appear to exist, yet are featured in the report and media interviews.
The June 18 Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (COI) report, alleging that the Israeli military deliberately targeted Palestinian children as part of a strategy to commit genocide during the October 7 War, is based heavily on fantastical beliefs, presumptions, and speculation about Israeli military technologies and tactics that severely discredit the document’s conclusions. In the first in a series of articles on the claims, the COI’s allegations about fleets of firearm-equipped quadcopters demonstrates the unreliability of the report.
COI Commissioner Srinivasan Muralidhar explained to CNN in a Saturday video interview that the “strongest evidence” that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was deliberately targeting children was “a combination of quadcopters, sniper rifles, and drones.”
Yet the arguments regarding these quadcopters are also the elements that most cast doubt on the veracity of the report.
Many of the alleged incidents highlighted as evidence in the COI report involved the ostensible use of quadcopters equipped with rifles and sniper rifles to target children, claiming that of 168 minors reported to the COI killed or wounded by gunshots between November 2023 and July 2025, 70 were supposedly shot by quadcopters. Anonymous doctors reportedly told the COI that there was a consistent pattern of children seeking treatment from quadcopter gunshots. One doctor reportedly estimated that, within two weeks of her tenure in a hospital, she supposedly saw around five children shot by quadcopters.
Firearm Quadcopters are Uncommon
The chief problem with the underlying claim that serves as the basis of much of the COI report is that firearm-equipped quadcopters are simply not in service to the extent that would match the supposed widespread pattern. Prototypes for firearm-equipped quadcopters exist, but there is no evidence for widespread deployment in Gaza. To the contrary, the use of firearm-equipped quadcopters is rare enough that Gaza deployment veteran IDF soldiers consulted with by HonestReporting had never seen or were unfamiliar with such a platform. Military analyst Andrew Fox also wrote in 2024 that his sources within the IDF indicate that the weapons were not in widespread use by the Israeli military.
Cube-Shaped Bullets
Perhaps the most implausible claim about the armed quadcopters is that they shoot cube-shaped pellets. Muralidhar told CNN that cube-shaped pellets were used by armed quadcopters in at least one instance. The report asserted that the supposed ammunition was designed to cause superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering. The quadcopter models mentioned in the report are equipped with standard firearms adapted for the drones. These firearms operate in a manner unlikely to facilitate cubed projectiles. This, along with the ballistic aerodynamic issues for such a projectile, make them unlikely to exist.
Unexplained Forensic Process
Be they cube or normal bullets, Muralidhar and the other two commissioners, have somehow been able to trace the bullets in their case studies back to firearm-laden quadcopters, despite having no military experience or according to the report having consulted with relevant military experts. There is no indication in the report methodology indicating how they achieved this feat. The report details that they viewed images of a bullet supposedly from the story, and were able to not only determine the caliber and the type of firearm-used, but that the firearm was placed on a quadcopter. There would not be any marks on the projectile to indicate that the firearm was held aloft by a drone. Forensic ballistics analysis can determine the model and trajectory of a bullet, but from the methodology described, this investigatory process was not applied. It is also not explained how the anonymous doctors cited in the report could determine that gunshot wounds were inflicted by quadcopters, which presumably are indistinguishable from gunshots inflicted by a rifleman.
Nuseirat Case Study
The three suspicious elements come together in one case study, with a April 2024 incident featured in the report. In Nuseirat a 10-day-old baby boy was supposedly shot and wounded by a quadcopter while being breastfed by his mother in a tent.
“The mother was alone in the tent, breastfeeding her baby, when a single bullet from a quadcopter hit the baby in the head and exited through the back of his head, hitting the pillow behind her. The baby survived but sustained brain injuries and now suffers from seizures,” read the report. “The Commission viewed and analyzed images of the bullet that hit the baby. The Commission concluded on reasonable grounds that the bullet was fired from a sniper rifle mounted on a quadcopter. Considering that the shooting occurred in broad daylight, the Commission concludes that the quadcopter controller would have been able to see inside the tent and assesses that the target was a mother and a baby.”
The Commission was again able to determine, only by viewing pictures of the bullet that allegedly struck the child, that the bullet came from a quadcopter rather than any other platform. The weapon was determined to be a sniper rifle, despite most sniper rifles being too long, heavy, and chambered with too large of a caliber for it to be feasible for a quadcopter to reliably utilize the system. The bullet, as implied by Muralidhar in the CNN interview, was supposedly a cube-shaped round. Though supposedly being a particularly damaging type of round, the bullet did not kill the child.
The quadcopter controller was determined, without explanation, to have been able to see inside the tent, despite the angle of the shot and location of the device not being known. The shot was deliberately targeted against the baby rather than the mother, as opposed to any other explanation such as a miss or mistake.
Muralidhar told CNN that the thermal imaging sights and cameras on quadcopters allows controllers to be able to always determine whether they are viewing a child or an adult. Yet in reality, thermal imaging often is limited by environmental factors such as fog, objects in the field, and even a sense of scale.
Claims that technology or viewpoint meant that a perpetrator, always assumed to be the IDF, pervade the entire report. The same massive leaps in logic and presumptions that allow the Commissioners to determine that a rare quadcopter is responsible just by glancing at the image of a bullet is played out more broadly with the claims that Israel is deliberately targeting Gazan children.
The tragic outcomes of the October 7 War appear to have been given predetermined backstories that are designed to fit the crimes, even if the trajectory doesn’t make any sense.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
