Outrage as UN-Palestinian exhibition uses murdered Israeli child’s image as a Palestinian civilian casualty

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The United Nations office in Geneva removed multiple photos from a pro-Palestinian exhibit after several critics, including the Israeli mission, noted that dead Israeli children had been included.

“Hamas killed Ido,” the Israeli mission to the U.N. in Geneva posted on X, formerly Twitter. “We call on [U.N. Geneva Director-General Tatiana] Valovaya to immediately remove this exhibition, which spreads misinformation and is part of a propaganda campaign.”

The mission first flagged the misinformation on Thursday after identifying the picture of a 5-year-old named Ido Avigal among the pictures of Palestinian children allegedly killed by Israel in Gaza. The mission said that Avigal had died in 2021 when a Hamas rocket barrage hit his house in Sderot, and it called his inclusion in the exhibition “despicable.”

Another user noted that the exhibit also included the picture of a Palestinian teenager who allegedly served in the Mujahideen Brigades, another extremist group based in Gaza and the West Bank. The U.N. did not confirm the veracity of any specific claim but acknowledged that some errant photos were posted “near” the exhibition and disavowed them.

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“While some people may indeed have seen [the photos] as the exhibition was in a public area, our colleagues were notified very quickly and very quickly put them down,” Alessandra Vellucci, director of the United Nations Information Service, told Fox News Digital.

Velluci acknowledged that multiple “images” were included in the exhibit but insisted they “were not there for long.” She said that no one saw who included the images. 

Vellucci explained that the Geneva U.N. office included the exhibit as part of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people – an annual observance dating to 1977 on the day when the General Assembly had 30 years earlier voted to adopt the resolution on the partition of Palestine.

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“The exhibition was organized in accordance with the GA resolution 60/37 of 1 December 2005, which requested the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the Division for Palestinian Rights to organize an annual exhibit on Palestinian rights or a cultural event in cooperation with the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the U.N.,” Vellucci said.

“However, before the commemoration started, additional images – including the one you refer to – were found to have been posted near the official exhibition,” Vellucci continued. “They were immediately removed as they were not part of the official, authorized exhibition.”

Flags of member states are shown at the entrance to the United Nations Geneva office. (Siavosh Hosseini/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“The director-general was not informed in advance about these additional images, and as I said, her staff immediately took them off,” she added, promising to reach out to the Israeli mission for any potential information on the issue. 

Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said he had no knowledge about the exhibit or who organized it, but a critic slammed the New York headquarters for continuing to perpetuate its own forms of misinformation with two videos near the public entrance that amount to a form of “blood libel.” 

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“At UN Headquarters in New York the public entrance currently has an exhibition for the same occasion that has a litany of grotesque blood libels,” Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, told Fox News Digital. 

This view shows the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People program at the United Nations Geneva office on Nov. 29, 2023. (Muhammet Ikbal Arslan/Anadolu via Getty Images)

She described how one video claims that “leading Zionist politicians” pursued “the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians” while the other video accused Israel of promoting an “apartheid” state driven by “the capacity of the sword to defeat the sword.” 

Bayefsky argued that these videos, in contrast to the exhibit in Geneva, convey the image of Jews who “massacre” hapless Arab civilians while saying “absolutely nothing about 75 years of successive Arab wars launched to annihilate the Jewish state.” 

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“Where is the outrage of this vile incitement of Jew hatred that is funded and organized by the United Nations itself, together with its Palestinian partners?” Bayefsky said. 

The U.N. did provide comment to Fox News Digital regarding the videos by time of publication. 

Peter Aitken is a Fox News Digital reporter with a focus on national and global news.