Although William Schabas, a longtime foe of Israel, has resigned from his position as chairman of the UN commission investigating last summer’s Gaza war, the commission is nonetheless likely to produce a catalogue of unfounded libels similar to the 2009 Goldstone report. Part of the problem with these reports, explains Hillel Neuer, is that they are written mainly by a staff appointed by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR)—an agency that stands out even within the UN as a bastion of hatred for Israel. Nor are the staffers chosen for their impartiality:

When I met with the Schabas commission on September 17, 2014 to personally hand them a written demand for Schabas’s recusal, there were only two staff members in the room, both of them from OHCHR’s Arab section. . . . One was Frej Fenniche, a Tunisian who was a spokesman for the UN’s notoriously anti-Semitic Durban conference on racism in 2001. The other was Sara Hammood, a former spokesperson for the UN’s most anti-Israel committee. Hamood also worked as a “policy adviser on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory” for Oxfam Novib, where she wrote one-sided reports and joined others in critical statements against Israel. This was the initial staff . . . who were presumably involved in hiring the others.

The current staff—Schabas has mentioned that it is composed of “a dozen specialists”—[also] includes Karin Lucke, OHCHR’s former coordinator of the Arab region team, . . . now listed as working for the UN in New York. Amnesty [International] notes that the current team includes the OHCHR staff from “Geneva, Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip.”

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.