A new UN inquiry says Israel “deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children” as part of a strategy to “destroy the biological continuity of the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The report, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023,” was released by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Tuesday. The recording period ended on 31 March 2026.
It purports to examine violations and crimes against Palestinian children by the Israeli security forces since 7 October 2023, resulting in the death of “at least 20,179 and injury of 44,143 children.”
The paper refers to the killing of Palestinian children as “deliberate” and also claims Israel uses “torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children.”
It is worth noting that the UN reports consider a ‘child’ to be “every human being below the age of 18 years.”
Israel has over 3,000 probes, over 100 criminal investigations into own conduct
At least until 2025, IDF officials told The Jerusalem Post that at least around 40% of those killed in Gaza were Hamas, which is not historically a poor percentage in wars. This is especially true taking into account that Hamas systematically used human shields, with some areas like Rafah having boobytraps in nearly every home, and hospitals and schools regularly used as command centers.
A significant chunk of “children” killed have been Hamas fighters ages 16 and 17 years old, wielding arms and posing an equal danger to IDF troops as Hamas operatives over the age of 18.
Israel has over 3,000 preliminary probes and over 100 criminal investigations into its own conduct, and due to the war continuing almost non-stop since October 7, it still has not had the capacity to put out its full narrative regarding various specific incidents, but likely will over the next year or years. Reports that make final judgments before knowing the Israeli side are premature.
Israel has admitted serious errors in the World Central Kitchen, Palestinian Red Crescent, Reuters journalists, and other cases. This means that when Israel rejects other allegations, it should be viewed as credible.
“Genocide” does not apply when a military makes errors, only when it is proven that a military purposefully commits mass killings. Throughout the invasions of Gaza, the IDF always used several methods to try to evacuate (often successfully) the general civilian population from areas it was about to attack. These warnings often cost the IDF by allowing Hamas to escape in the masses of civilians who fled.
Other than in July-August 2025, when the IDF admitted an emergency in food insecurity, for most of the war, while food supplies were sometimes down in Gaza as compared to pre-war, there is no evidence that mass starvation ever took place, and even in summer 2025, a food surge by the IDF ultimately prevented any large-scale starvation. For significant portions of the war, the number of food trucks entering Gaza was even significantly higher than pre-war. Since fall 2025, the food supplies to Gaza have been multiple times higher than pre-war.
Purported evidence
The report claims that multiple sources of information were consulted, including thousands of open-source items and remote and in-person interviews and group discussions with victims and witnesses.
However, it said, “where the risk of re-traumatization was high, the Commission did not contact the family [of children] directly but relied on information already collected by independent national and international organizations as well as open-source published photographs and videos assessed as ‘credible’ and used for the purposes of analysis and corroboration.”
It does not state what these “independent national and international organizations” are.
The statistics used in the report, such as “between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025, at least 20,179 children were killed, and 44,143 children were injured as a direct result of the hostilities in Gaza,” seemingly all rely on data provided by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.
The framing of many of the case studies is also noteworthy.
For example, the report speaks of an incident on 29 November 2025, when two brothers, aged 10 and nine, were killed in an Israeli drone strike near Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. The boys were said to be “gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father when the strike occurred.”
Israeli security forces stated that soldiers spotted two “suspects” crossing the ‘yellow line’, acting suspiciously and approaching their forces, so a drone eliminated the “immediate threat”.
The report then writes that “the soldiers should not have classified the boys as ‘suspects’ in the first place since they were clearly involved only in collecting firewood. By maintaining that the children killed were “suspects”, the Israeli security forces have deflected responsibility to Palestinian children, portraying them as “terrorists” rather than casualties. Such tactics by the Israeli security forces serve to distort the factual narrative and further marginalize affected children and their families.”
Here, the report takes a specific incident and creates a general assertion about Israeli policy. The two boys are extrapolated to “Palestinian children” in general, which works to undermine cases where under-18 Palestinians have, in fact, been shown to be terrorists.
The above section was about Gaza, but similar assertions are made with regard to Israeli actions in the West Bank.
“The Commission assesses that the high number of boys killed reflects a policy of targeting boys due to their perceived threat as “terrorists” or “future terrorists”. There is no acknowledgment of the possible veracity of Israel’s claims.
Some of the data in the report cannot even be corroborated. For example, the report says, “Prior to October 2023, there were 90,000 children living with a disability in Gaza,” but the link provided is invalid.
Some of the more extreme case studies, especially those in Part E, are not possible to corroborate because they are anonymized.
Two of these involve highly-disputed claims about Israel’s use of dogs to commit violent acts against Palestinians.
“Children reported facing extremely abusive treatment when arriving at military detention facilities, including being forced to make confessions, being forced to strip to their underwear in front of others, being blindfolded and handcuffed while forced to kneel on gravel or asphalt, being beaten with weapons and kicked in the head and other body parts, and being terrorized by dogs.”
The report then says “a 15-year-old boy detained at Sde Teiman facility told the Commission that […] Israeli soldiers entered his cell with dogs, made him and other detainees lie on their stomachs, and released the dogs on them.”
There is another case study of another 15-year-old boy who reported being electrocuted through a needle inserted into his
shoulder.
Other accusations
The report echoes previous conclusions from a March 2025 report, where the Commission concluded that Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the “reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare, including the destruction of the Al-Basma In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Center, Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, in December
2023.”
The UN report also seemingly blames Israel for child marriage rates in Gaza.
“As the situation in Gaza has sharply increased child marriage and early pregnancy (see para. 223), it has in turn severely impacted the mental health of girls, exposing them to physical, psychological, and sexual violence.”
There is also significant focus on Israel’s alleged targeting of schools and hospitals, with no acknowledgment or discussion of Hamas’s use of hospitals, schools, and humanitarian zones for military purposes.
The Commission concludes that, based on the evidence reviewed, and consistent with its previous reports, there are “reasonable grounds that the Israeli authorities and the Israeli security forces have continued to commit the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
Elliot Malin, who specializes in International Law, said the report’s assertion that Israel ‘deliberately’ targeted Gaza children in acts of genocide “is not a legally available conclusion.”
“Targeting children as a form of genocide would require demonstration either: (1) that a substantial portion of the children of Gaza, relative to the whole child population of Gaza, was destroyed with the intent to destroy the group as a whole; or, (2) that the intent was to destroy a substantial portion of the child population in Gaza with the intent to destroy the group as a whole.!
“To do that, you’d have to factor in the total population of minors in Gaza, which is 50% or 1.115 million. 20,000 alleged children being killed in Gaza is 1.7% of the children in Gaza. That’s not substantial enough to constitute genocide.”
Salo Aizenberg, of UN Watch, said the report fails to provide corroborating evidence of any incident of IDF soldiers targeting children.
“In none of the cases can the COI definitively establish that a civilian Palestinian child was identified by an IDF soldier and intentionally targeted for death. That conclusion is speculative throughout. The COI’s methodology effectively assumes that a child killed in Gaza was both killed by the IDF and intentionally targeted merely because the child died.”
He also notes how the UN presumes no military presence.
“Throughout its incident-by-incident assessments, the COI repeatedly makes comments such as: “The Commission could not find any indication of a threat towards members of the Israeli security forces” (g., para. 58). But the COI has no way of knowing whether Hamas or PIJ operatives were present, engaged in combat, or operating from the area at the time of an incident, especially given Hamas’s exclusive use of civilian clothes for combat and its operations from apartments and concealed tunnel shafts beneath civilian areas.”
Aizenberg also notes, as did the Post, the failure to acknowledge that not all minors in Gaza or the West Bank are innocent civilians.
