Israel’s security forces continue to deliberately target Palestinian children, according to a new UN commission report.
Such attacks amount to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the occupied West Bank, the report found.
The targeting of children is “part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza”, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel concluded.
Israel has killed at least 21,000 Palestinian children and injured a further 44,000 since October 2023.
Despite the October 2025 ceasefire, Israeli military operations have continued in Gaza, resulting in unprecedented death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children.
“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar said.
“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.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the uptick in settler violence in the West Bank has left children with “severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood, separation, disability, and repeated displacements”, the report stated.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s education and healthcare systems have erased childhood and will continue to affect children throughout their lives, it found.
One doctor quoted in the report said: “The essence of childhood has been destroyed in Gaza.”
Last year Moshe Feiglin, a far-right politician and former Likud member of the Israeli Knesset, told Israel’s Channel 14: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.”
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 BBC reported.
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