A UN commission of inquiry says Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank.
A new report alleges that Israeli authorities and security forces have "deliberately carried out acts inflicting death and severe bodily and mental harm on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children", and that the killings continued even after last October's ceasefire in Gaza.
The commission says it has reasonable grounds to conclude that those acts "form part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza by targeting their children".
Israel's foreign ministry said it "utterly rejects" the commission's report, calling it a "libellous sham" and "a propaganda piece as outrageous as its previous ones".
The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.
At least 73,035 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, including more than 21,280 children, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen as reliable by the UN.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 to investigate alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
Its three-member expert panel does not officially speak for the UN.
Last September, the commission accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. A report said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that four of the five acts of genocide defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention had been carried out by Israeli authorities and security forces. Israel strongly rejected that report, calling it distorted and false.
The commission has previously concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and other grave violations of international law on 7 October 2023, and that Israeli security forces have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
Last October, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire as part of US President Donald Trump's plan to end the war.
Since then, both sides have accused each other of violating the truce repeatedly. Gaza's health ministry says more than 1,020 Palestinians have been killed, among them 265 children. The Israeli military says four soldiers have also been killed.
On Tuesday, the commission of inquiry said in a statement released together with the report that "the intense scale and systematic nature" of Israeli military operations in Gaza had continued, resulting in "unprecedented death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children".
"Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law," said Srinivasan Muralidhar, an Indian jurist who chairs the commission.
"The protection, care and survival of Palestinian children are inseparable from the Palestinian people's right to self-determination," he added. “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.”
The commission's new report says Israel has targeted Palestinian children in Gaza directly by shooting at their vital organs using precision weapons, such as quadcopter drones and snipers, and by using high-impact weapons in strikes on residential buildings, schools, and displacement camps crowded with children.
Israel is also legally responsible for failing to protect Palestinian children from being targeted by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank, it adds.
The report also says that children in Gaza and the West Bank, especially adolescent boys, have been "arrested, tortured, and ill-treated in Israeli prisons and detention facilities", and that it has documented "incidents of sexual and gender-based violence targeting Palestinian children, often during arrests or in detention".
Israeli attacks on neonatal and paediatric hospitals in Gaza have meanwhile "systematically dismantled children's access to life-sustaining care, undermining their survival as a protected group", according to the report.
It also accuses Israel of using starvation as a method of war, and warns that restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza have "produced acute and chronic malnutrition among children in Gaza, removing the basic conditions necessary for their survival".
And it alleges that through attacks on schools, mass displacement and enforced closures, Israeli authorities have "systematically disrupted children's ability to learn, thereby sabotaging the intellectual and social foundations of Palestinian society itself".
The Israeli foreign ministry condemned the report, saying the commission was a "fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel rather than seek the truth".
"It completely erases Israeli children who were brutally murdered, kidnapped, and targeted by Hamas, while ignoring Hamas' cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war," it added. It accused the commission of lacking "any credible verification mechanism for its claims".
Israel's leaders have consistently rejected allegations of genocide, and say its military's operations in Gaza have been conducted in self-defence, to defeat Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, and to secure the release of Israeli hostages.
They have also insisted that Israeli forces have operated in accordance with international law and take all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently hearing a case brought by South Africa that accuses Israeli forces of genocide, but it could take years to reach a conclusion. Israel has called the case "wholly unfounded" and based on "biased and false claims".
Source: BBC
– Agencies
