UN inquiry commissioner to face a Jewish audience

A member of the UN commission that accused Israel of genocide will defend its findings before a Melbourne Jewish audience next month, in a debate organised by the activist group ABC Watch.

Chris Sidoti, one of three commissioners on the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, will debate military law expert Dr Brian L. Cox on Thursday, October 8 at 7.45pm.

ABC Watch has billed the event as a world first, saying none of the commission’s three commissioners has previously been challenged in a live debate.

About 400 people are expected. The venue will not be announced in advance for security reasons.

Sidoti is a former Australian Human Rights Commissioner and a former commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission.

Cox is a lecturer at Cornell Law School and a visiting scholar at the University of Ottawa. He is a retired US Army officer who served 22 years, seven of them as a military lawyer, with deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now based in Colorado.

The commission found in September last year that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and in June that Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian children. Cox disputes the commission’s findings and methodology, and the way it applied the international law of armed conflict.

ABC Watch’s Sharon Kuperholz said she had told Sidoti “point blank that he can have exactly zero of his supporters there” because of security concerns.

“We don’t want pro-Palestinians turning up to harass and attack the guests, nor disrupt the event,” she said.

“So Chris is coming to his credit, knowing full well that he’ll be facing 400 hostile Zionists.”

Kuperholz said she respected Sidoti for agreeing to appear.

“He’s very confident. He’s been doing this for a long time,” she said.

“He’s going to be debating his very own 72-page report. Nobody is going to know it better than he does.”

Kuperholz said her husband, Mark, first came across Cox on X, where he had been posting detailed critiques of the commission’s reports, and contacted him.

Cox is covering much of the cost of his flight to Australia himself. Kuperholz and her husband are paying Sidoti’s travel from Sydney and his accommodation. Ticket prices are set only to recover travel costs.

ABC Watch says the commission’s reports were not legally binding but had been cited by governments, NGOs and media as evidence of genocide. It argued that only the International Court of Justice can make such a determination, and that it has not done so.

The group said the report had reached its finding despite “a complete dearth of evidence and misunderstanding of international law”.

Kuperholz, who has visited Israel every year since the October 7 attacks, is a strong critic of the report.

She said Hamas “is almost omitted as an active belligerent fighting force” in the genocide report, and argued that genocide requires proof of specific intent, with no other plausible explanation for Israel’s conduct.

She pointed to IDF warnings before strikes, evacuation corridors, aid deliveries and polio vaccinations.

“The conclusion of genocide is absolutely crushed under the weight of evidence to the contrary,” she said.

Asked whether she expected anyone to change their mind, she said: “I strongly doubt there will be many people in our community who believe that a genocide has taken place.”

Kuperholz also disputed casualty figures published by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. She claimed more than 30,000 of the roughly 72,000 dead were fighters, and that 157 of the 268 journalists Hamas says were killed had been identified as members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad or other armed groups. Those figures are contested.

The commission stands by its findings. At a Geneva press conference in June, Sidoti said no one who read the children report could doubt that Israeli authorities had violated every international legal norm, and that they must be held accountable. He was appointed to a second term on the commission in November 2025.

The debate will be filmed and livestreamed to interstate and overseas viewers. ABC Watch said clips would be used on social media “to destroy the genocide myth”.

Asked whether the night could turn rowdy, Kuperholz said she trusted the audience but understood the anger.

“We ourselves, as Australian Jews … we’ve all been called genocidal baby killers,” she said.

“If emotions are running high, I don’t blame our community for that, but I would ask that they contain their emotions so that we can get the debate done.”