An error-filled new Harvard Law School report relies on terror-linked sources to depict Israel as burning Palestinian children to a crisp.
Antisemitism at Harvard contributed to the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay and is at the center of a legal battle between Harvard and the U.S. government over billions of dollars in research funding. In court and in public statements, Harvard says it is working to improve the situation.
The release of the half-baked report, though, highlights how Harvard has not yet implemented even the recommendations of its own antisemitism task force. The April 29, 2025 report of the task force said, “We were surprised to encounter significant academic programs that lacked any involvement from the ladder faculty, and we think as a nearly hard rule that the University should avoid creating programs like these in the future.” Ladder faculty, in academic jargon, are core academic faculty who progress up the ranks of the ladder from junior assistant or associate to senior tenured full professors on the basis of their world-class academic research. It recommended, “Requiring a faculty director, who is a responsible tenured member of the ladder faculty, to oversee all activities of such programs.” The International Human Rights Clinic that produced the demonize-Israel report is led by a clinical professor of law, Susan Farbstein. That is not a “ladder faculty” position.
The report’s lead author is identified as Bonnie Docherty, who serves simultaneously as senior adviser at Human Rights Watch, an anti-Israel advocacy group, and as a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. Five Harvard Law-affiliated students—Talish Babaian, Siri Beck-Friis, Sumaya Daghestani, Sofia Fruet, and Luisina Kemanian-Leites—are credited in the report for having “contributed significantly to the research, analysis, and writing.” A May 2025 report by NGO Monitor called the overlapping relationship between Harvard and Human Rights Watch “problematic,” and said the “close cooperation” is “inconsistent with, and in violation of, basic academic norms.”
The nongovernmental organizations “systematically demonize Israel…in contrast to the academic norm of political neutrality and balance,” NGO Monitor said.
It’s not the first time the Harvard Law School human rights clinic has been a trouble spot. A February 2022 report from the same clinic accused Israel of apartheid. That report was published jointly with Adameer, which was sanctioned in June 2025 by the U.S. Treasury department, which called it a “fraudulent charity linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. ” The PFLP has been designated since 1997 by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization.
All the process-related matters about ladder faculty supervision and external cooperation might be easier to overlook if the report itself were less one-sided and more credible.
Instead, it’s a joke. Israel is mentioned 38 times in the report. Hamas is mentioned once and Hezbollah not at all. A press release from the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic says in the second paragraph that the report “documents 23 verified incidents of Israeli use in southern Lebanon between March and May 2026.”
That disparity was highlighted by a human-rights lawyer who reviewed the report at the request of the Washington Free Beacon.
“The United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and every other modern military use white phosphorus – and Western forces do so within the law of armed conflict. Where a specific use is alleged, existing law already supplies the test: distinction, proportionality, and precautions. No new treaty is needed to apply it,” said the lawyer, Brooke Goldstein, executive director of The Lawfare Project. “What the United Nations should be addressing, but is not, are the methods and practices of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the other terrorist organizations that exercise de facto control over civilian populations: the recruitment of child soldiers, the deployment of suicide bombers, the stockpiling of weapons in homes and residential neighborhoods, the conversion of hospitals and schools into military facilities, and the targeting of civilians. Each of those practices violates existing international humanitarian law, and each is why smoke rounds (white phosphorus) end up over villages. A campaign that spends 45 pages on the munition and not one sentence on the armed group embedded beneath it has chosen to prioritize propaganda over the protection of civilians.”
At least three of the sources cited in the Harvard report for lurid tales of charred Arabs are tainted by terrorist associations.
One person named in the report, Muhammad Abu Shamla, an UNRWA security guard, describes an airburst of white phosphorus munitions in 2009 over the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) Headquarters Compound in Gaza City. What the Harvard Law report doesn’t say is that, according to a bipartisan letter from Congress, “at least twelve employees of UNRWA had connections to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and about ten percent of all of the agency’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups.” The Israeli military has described someone with the same name as Abu Shamla as a senior Hamas operative.
Another tale in the Harvard report, about a Gazan 2-year-old who “has scars covering 80 percent of her body and required years of treatment,” is attributed to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. NGO Monitor has documented extensively how the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund works with Hamas and was “named in declassified Hamas documents as an organization subject to Hamas’ diktats.” Said NGO Monitor, “PCRF runs the pediatric cancer unit inside Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City. In November 2023, the IDF released ‘evidence of Hamas infrastructure at Rantisi – video of explosives, suicide vests and even a motorcycle used in the 7 October attacks, hidden in a basement.’”
Another source in the report is “British-Palestinian physician Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, who treated survivors of weapons containing the substance at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza in 2009 and 2023.” Even the New York Times has conceded that Hamas was active at al-Shifa hospital. The Harvard report doesn’t mention that. The Jewish Chronicle in London has described Abu Sittah as “a shameless extremist who has frequently got too close for comfort to terrorists,” though one British review cleared him of antisemitism.
The Harvard report falsely describes Gaza as “one of the most densely populated areas in the world.” In fact Gaza is less densely populated than Tel Aviv, Manhattan, Manila, Paris, or Buenos Aires.
Harvard tries to have it both ways, including a fine-print disclaimer that the report “does not purport to represent the institutional views of Harvard Law School or Harvard University” but also slapping a big Harvard Law School logo on the front of the report and the press release, hosting the entire thing on a Harvard website, and having the work done by Harvard students and faculty members.
There’s a veneer in the report of discussion of international law and the use of white phosphorus, and mentions in passing of non-Israeli users of the material, but there are also lots of graphic, if suspiciously sourced stories of children charred, attributable in the report’s account to Israel rather than to the Islamist terrorist groups using Gaza and Lebanon as bases to attack Israel. In previous press coverage of the issue, which is extensively covered by the press to the degree that there’s no need whatsoever for Harvard Law School to be adding its voice in a duplicative way, the Israeli military told the New York Times that “the primary smoke-screen shells used by the I.D.F. do not contain white phosphorus” and that its use of white phosphorus “complies and goes beyond the requirements of international law.” The Israeli military told the Times that “These shells are used by the I.D.F. for creating smoke screens and not for targeting or causing fires and are not defined under law as incendiary weapons.” Harvard includes no Israeli response or indication that it sought one.
As is typically the case, Harvard rewards the students who engage in the anti-Israel activism. Of the five named students who worked on the demonize-Israel report, Sumaya Daghestani got a $60,000 Harvard “Public Service Venture Fund” fellowship to work in London and Damascus, Babaian is an associate at Milbank, and Beck-Friis works at Human Rights Watch in London. Fruet and Kemanian-Leites appear still to be Harvard Law students.
The dean of Harvard Law School, John C.P. Goldberg, did not reply to my email from this morning asking him, “Do you think this report is up to Harvard Law School standards of excellence and rigor, or in line with the school’s mission? At this stage into Harvard’s antisemitism saga, how is it possible that we are still getting Harvard-branded reports demonizing Israel and holding it to a double standard?”
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