Another day, another instance of Israeli government allegations used to justify a US-led push to escalate the mass slaughter in Gaza turning out to be as thin as many had first predicted.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US National Intelligence Council — a group of eighteen policy experts and analysts that evaluate pressing national security concerns for US intelligence agencies — only had “low confidence” in Israeli claims that about a dozen staffers at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) took part in the October 7 attacks. What that means, according to the paper, is that they believe the claims are “plausible” but can’t say anything more than that, because they haven’t independently verified them and their Israeli counterparts haven’t showed them the underlying evidence. Still, Washington found it “credible,” a nameless US official assured the paper.

There were, in fact, good reasons to be skeptical about the claims from the start, beyond the Israeli government’s propensity to push dubious nonsense and outright lies. We already knew from a leak that Israeli officials were planning these exact allegations months ago as part of an effort to push out UNRWA, an agency they’d long hated. They revealed these claims on the exact same day the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made its ruling that Israel was plausibly carrying out a genocide. And a senior Israeli official admitted that “a lot of the intelligence is a result of interrogations of militants,” where abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees are rife.