A UN Commission of Inquiry has found that the killing of children and other harm inflicted on them has been central to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, alongside a systematic pattern of war crimes and crimes against humanity that have affected young people in both Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023.
The findings are set out in a report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. They are framed around what the title of the document refers to as the destruction of “The Essence of Childhood.” The commission used the phrase to reflect what it described as the collapse of nearly every protection owed to children under international law.
In an interview with Arab News, the chairperson of of the commission, Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, said the conclusions it reached were based on a documented pattern of tactics used by Israeli forces and settlers that specifically target children, including the use of drone-mounted weapons, among them quadcopters.
Medical practitioners who testified before the commission at a public hearing described large numbers of infants and young children who were brought to them with gunshot wounds to the head, skull and neck, including one case of a baby shot through the head by a quadcopter while feeding at her mother’s breast.
“This can’t be just collateral damage or an incidental outcome of a targeted killing of a population,” Muralidhar said.
“We are finding a whole trend where children are specifically being targeted by the Israeli forces.”
The commission found that the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza, the infliction of serious physical and mental harm against them, and the deliberate imposition of harsh conditions of life — including starvation, the destruction of hospitals, and the blockade on humanitarian aid — were carried out with the specific intention of destroying Palestinians as a group “in whole or in part.” This is the core definition of genocide under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
It concluded that the deliberate targeting of children, who embody the biological and social continuity of the Palestinian people, was central to establishing this intent, and that these findings relating to children reinforced and extended a determination of genocide first made in a previous report by the commission.
At least 20,179 children were killed and 44,143 injured in Gaza between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 7, 2025, the commission found. This was about 30 percent of all those killed in the territory during that time, which represented a sharply higher proportion than during previous escalations of hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians in 2008-09 and 2014.
At least 5,031 of the children killed were under the age of 5, including about 420 newborns, and an estimated 5,160 children remain buried under rubble, according to Save the Children figures.
The report states that killings of children had continued after the October 2025 ceasefire agreement took effect, particularly around what Israeli forces refer to as the “yellow line,” a poorly marked demarcation zone inside Gaza.
More than 100 children were killed in Gaza between October 2025 and mid-January 2026 alone, the commission found.
It investigated the case of two brothers, aged 9 and 10, who were killed by a drone as they gathered firewood near Khan Younis in late November. It concluded that they could not plausibly have posed a threat from the distance described by soldiers.
Among the most detailed findings was a reconstruction of the killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab and six members of her family in Tal Al-Hawa in January 2024 when their vehicle came under Israeli fire, as well as the shelling of a Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance sent to help her, which the report attributed to the actions of the Israeli military’s 401st Brigade.
The commission also documented dozens of cases of children who were shot by snipers or quadcopter drones, and concluded that the precision and pattern of the wounds, many of them to the head or upper body, indicated deliberate targeting rather than incidental harm.
Extensive sections of the report were devoted to the destruction of healthcare services for children, including the collapse of neonatal intensive care capacity in Gaza, the deaths of premature infants as a result of hypothermia or a lack of incubators, and a decline in live births of about 41 percent during the first half of 2025 compared with the same period in 2022.
Muralidhar said five out of six hospitals that had been functioning in Gaza had been completely destroyed by Israeli forces, and that doctors who testified before the commission described having to perform amputations on infants without anesthesia.
He said medical staff had been forced to adopt a grim shorthand to describe the nature of child casualties, including: “WCNSF” for a wounded child with no surviving family; “brain matter out” for children whose skulls were split open, which was a signal to prioritize other patients; and “precious child,” used to indicate when only one child in a family had survived.
“Nothing can be worse for a doctor than to watch helplessly while somebody who has to be treated, whose life has to be saved, is allowed to die,” Muralidhar said.
The report also documented the near-total destruction of the education system in Gaza, where more than 97 percent of schools have been damaged or destroyed. It found that Israeli forces carried out controlled demolitions of schools and universities that the commission said were deliberate and unnecessary.
On the topic of detentions, the commission found that Palestinian children, including boys as young as 5, were locked up alongside adults and had been subjected to beatings, prolonged stress positions and, in some cases, sexual violence.
The report documented what it described as the preventable death of a 17-year-old boy at Megiddo Prison in March 2025 as a result of what it concluded was deliberate deprivation of food, water and medical care.
The commission found 213 Palestinian children, the vast majority of them boys, were killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, by Israeli security forces between October 2023 and October 2025. It attributed this to a “gendered security framing” that treated Palestinian boys as presumptive threats.
It also documented a sharp increase in settler violence against children, including abductions, beatings and, in one case, two boys who were sexually assaulted while herding cattle.
The commission also documented a pattern of Israeli soldiers filming themselves mocking, destroying or weaponizing children’s playthings in Gaza; in some cases, soldiers attached toys to the front of tanks. This was described as evidence of an entrenched culture of dehumanization within the ranks
Muralidhar described such conduct as “sadistic,” adding: “Even things which can bring some joy to children, they are being tampered with … We’ve said, ‘You’re destroying the childhood of Palestinian children. And this is very deliberate.’”
Asked why attacks on maternity wards, deliberate starvation and the destruction of schools matter so much in efforts to establish intent to destroy a population, Muralidhar said the right to life means the right to a meaningful life, including the right to shelter, safety, family and play.
There have been cases of Palestinian children playing with unexploded ordnance, he added, suffering further injuries as a result, and doctors told the commission about children in settlement-adjacent camps who play in sewage water for lack of anything else to do.
Many children have been rendered mute by the constant bombardment, “completely stunned into silence,” Muralidhar said, rather than behaving as children normally would.
“We’re going to have several generations of Palestinian children who will not see this full personhood,” he added.
The commission based its findings only on evidence that had been subjected to strict scientific scrutiny, he said, including protocols for the gathering and analysis of information that were aligned with those of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, Muralidhar said, and he rejected any allegation of bias.
“The only concern is that justice should be done to all victims, whether such victims are Israeli children, Israeli women, Israeli men, or Palestinian women, men and children,” he added.
Looking to the future, the emerging patterns in Gaza and the West Bank revealed a risk that Palestinians would find themselves confined to isolated enclaves that are cut off from one another, Muralidhar warned.
“Is this what the State of Israel wants? Is this what its citizens really want?” he asked.
“Why are we letting this happen in complete violation of the very basis for the creation of the State of Israel, which was also under a resolution of the United Nations?”
The report called on Israeli authorities to immediately halt military operations near the yellow line; to comply with binding orders issued by the International Court of Justice; to release data on child detainees; and to end what it described as a policy of withholding the bodies of Palestinian children.
It urged UN member states to suspend the transfer of arms to Israel, where there is reason to believe they could be used in the commission of international crimes, and called on the Security Council to impose sanctions on Israeli officials and military commanders found to be responsible for violations.
It also recommended that the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor devote particular attention to crimes against children during the ongoing investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine.
The commission specifically named several Israeli military units it said bear particular responsibility for specific incidents documented in the report, including the 401st Brigade, the 162nd Division, the 98th and 99th Divisions, and the Duvdevan Unit, among others.
