The functionaries who populate the most underutilized real estate on Turtle Bay are managing to keep themselves busy, though the deliverables they are churning out are of questionable value. The United Nations remains dedicated to popularizing any allegation of Israeli perfidy it can find. But the institution’s investigations into these claims seem designed not to substantiate or disprove the allegations. Rather, they are conducted with minimal effort, seemingly to preserve as much ambiguity as possible.

On Monday, for example, a U.N.-sponsored investigation into Israel’s claim that the international organization’s body devoted solely to the Palestinian issue, UNRWA, supports and sponsors Hamas’s terrorism came up short. Rather, it failed to validate Israel’s specific claim that “one in 10” UNRWA employees was a member of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And yet, the investigators themselves made it clear that the inquiry was deliberately limited to avoid substantiating Israel’s indictment of the U.N.

“It is a separate mission, and it is not in our mandate,” said the investigation’s point person, onetime French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, of the claim that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 massacre. The U.N. couldn’t establish the exact number of people on its payroll who are accused of kidnapping Israeli women and children, hiding captives from Israelis, distributing ammunition to terrorists, or even pillaging kibbutzim on 10/7. Presumably, the organization similarly failed to inquire into claims going back decades that UNRWA facilities have been used to hide weapons, shield terrorists from Israeli reprisal, and actively indoctrinate Palestinian schoolchildren in the dogma of Jew hatred. That would be terribly inconvenient.

Elsewhere at the U.N. this week, so-called human-rights officials are calling for what we can only assume would be a measurably more vigorous investigation into the allegation that Israeli Defense Forces are implicated in the massacre of Israeli civilians. “Palestinian Civil Defense said over the weekend that it had found a mass grave containing 283 bodies on the grounds of Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, two weeks after a similar mass grave was found at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City,” the New York Times reported.

But a few paragraphs into that piece, the Times gives Occam’s Razor its due:

It was not clear where the people discovered in the mass grave were originally buried. But wartime chaos in Gaza has made it common for Palestinians to bury the dead in mass graves or in courtyards and back gardens in a hurried way that might be unthinkable in times of peace.

That plausible explanation is rendered more plausible by the cursory inquiry some media outlets conducted into the allegations promulgated by Hamas officials. “The location of that burial site was geo-located by experts to the same location where Hamas officials claimed to have discovered the new mass grave,” the Times of Israel reported. It cited open-source information identifying footage “from Palestinians digging graves/mass graves dated 25 January, 28 January and 03 February while IDF entered the hospital around 15 February.” The IDF denies the allegations, though it notes that it did infiltrate the Nasser facility in February, where it liberated 10/7 hostages, detained dozens of terrorists, and discovered weapons caches — again, in a hospital. Nevertheless, support for the claim that Israelis massacred Palestinian civilians, including women and the elderly, and buried them in the holes they dug out in the effort to identify Israeli hostages “beneath piles of waste” is scant.

If the U.N. even gets around to debunking the charge, it will be a footnote. The institution will have long since moved on to the next salacious claim of Israeli treachery. After all, the outfit has to do something with our tax dollars.