The 94-page report, published on 18 June and covering events from October 2023 through 31 March 2026, concludes on reasonable grounds that Israeli occupation forces committed genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes against Palestinian children.
The report names specific military units, including the Kfir Brigade, the 162nd Division, and the 98th Division, as bearing responsibility for documented killings.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, found that Israel has killed at least 20,179 Palestinian children and wounded 44,143 in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025, representing 30 percent of all those killed during that period.
The proportion of child fatalities in the current Israel war in Gaza surpasses the toll in all previous Israeli wars on the Strip. During the 2008–2009 and 2014 wars, they accounted for roughly 24 percent of those killed.
The commission's genocide finding rested on three categories of underlying acts: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm; and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.
"Children are not just part of a population; their survival is central to the existence and continuity of the Palestinian group," the commission wrote.
"The sheer number of cases investigated and documented by the Commission showing a clear pattern that children were directly targeted by the Israeli security forces constitutes a key element in the Israeli authorities' genocidal intent."
Palestinian children have been "deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces," said Srinivasan Muralidhar, the commission's chair, in a statement accompanying the report. Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, he said, killings continued with "continued disregard" by Israel for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law.
"The destruction of their health, education, and development is irreversible," Muralidhar said.
“By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future," said Muralidhar, who chairs the inquiry.
Israel has ignored 13 requests for information submitted by the commission, according to the body’s report.
EDITORS NOTE: Graphic content / The brother of 12-year-old Palestinian Ahmed Mohsen mourns by the boy's body after he was taken for treatment following reported Israeli targeting, at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP
Ignoring calls to end the genocide
The commission's report comes days after UNICEF issued a damning assessment, stating that at least 265 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza since a ceasefire was announced in October 2025, an average of one child every day. The agency described the truce as a "cruel and deadly illusion" for children living in the territory.
This marks the second time an independent UN commission has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In September 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found reasonable grounds to conclude that Israeli authorities had committed, and continue to commit, acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The commission stated that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the evidence.
In the early months of the war, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, enable humanitarian assistance, and preserve evidence.
The court later issued additional provisional measures, including an order to halt its ground invasion of Rafah, an order Israel ignored.
For nearly three years, Israel has rejected or ignored repeated calls from international courts, UN bodies, and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Al-Haq, to end policies and acts that fall under the Genocide Convention.
Human Rights Watch documented that Israeli forces escalated their atrocities in 2025, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide, killing more than 69,000 Palestinians, including over 19,000 children at the time of the report.
Amnesty International has continued to call for an arms embargo and an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza, urging states to halt all military and security assistance to Israel.
Israeli rights group B'Tselem concluded Israel has acted in a coordinated and deliberate manner to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip, committing genocide.
Deliberate targeting
Among the commission’s most damning findings was evidence that Israeli snipers and quadcopter drones systematically targeted children as intended victims.
A doctor who conducted multiple medical missions in Gaza told the commission that wound patterns showed Israeli soldiers shooting teenage boys "in a game of target practice," with different body parts targeted on different days.
Seventeen medical practitioners deployed across Gaza hospitals between October 2023 and July 2025 were interviewed by the commission. All reported a consistent pattern of children arriving with single gunshot wounds to the head or upper body — injuries consistent with aimed fire rather than combat crossfire.
Documented cases include a 10-day-old baby shot through the head while being breastfed inside a tent in Nuseirat camp; a 15-year-old shot while holding a white evacuation flag in Khan Younis; and a four-year-old girl struck in the head while eating breakfast with her family in a displacement camp.
In each case, adults nearby were unharmed, which the commission said indicated deliberate selection of the child as a target.
In the case of Hind Rajab, then 5 years old, the commission found Israeli forces shot and killed her, five family members, and two Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedics who had been dispatched to rescue her in Gaza City on 29 January 2024.
Israel's claims that its forces were not present in the area were found to be false. The commission identified the 401st Brigade as responsible.
Hind Rajab
An Israeli Channel 14 television segment broadcast in July 2025 featured military officials boasting that the drones' accuracy exceeded any human sniper's capability and that operating them was like "watching a video game."
Killings continued after a ceasefire took effect in October 2025. On 29 November 2025, a drone struck two brothers, ages 9 and 10, as they gathered firewood for their wheelchair-bound father near a newly established Israeli demarcation line in southern Gaza.
Israeli forces described them as "suspects" who posed an "immediate threat." The commission found the characterization baseless, noting the boys were located more than 300 metres from Israeli soldiers and were clearly children engaged in collecting wood.
Genocidal statements
The commission documented a pattern of senior Israeli officials publicly describing Palestinian children as threats or enemies, statements it said helped foster a military culture of impunity.
In a May 2025 television interview, former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin declared: "Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy." That January, Knesset deputy speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote that "every child born there is already a terrorist." In October 2023, Knesset member Merav Ben-Ari told parliament that children in Gaza had brought their own deaths upon themselves.
Testimonies from Israeli soldiers published in Haaretz and in the British documentary "Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel's War" described soldiers competing over civilian kill tallies, operating without rules of engagement, and admitting to shooting unarmed children. "The first shot is directly to the head," one soldier said.
One soldier, describing drone operations in the documentary, said the experience of killing felt detached, noting that an operator could kill Palestinians while sitting comfortably in a basement, far from any danger.
Haaretz reported in December 2024 that soldiers from the 252nd and 99th Divisions described internal competitions over how many civilians they could kill. A soldier from the 252nd Division admitted to shooting an unarmed 16-year-old, saying his battalion commander congratulated him.
In a separate September 2025 report, Haaretz cited a sniper in the Nahal Brigade who described firing 50 to 60 bullets per day, killing many people, including children, and said he was at times ordered by his commander to shoot regardless of the victim's age.
"The Commission notes a broad pattern of a permissive military culture in which Israeli soldiers are encouraged to directly target Palestinian children with or without directives from superior commanders," the report states.
Detention and abuse
More than 1,655 Palestinian children have been detained by the Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 7 October 2023, including 600 arrested in 2025 alone. As of December 2025, a record 51 percent of the 351 children held by the Israeli Prison Service were in administrative detention, meaning imprisonment without charge or trial.
The commission documented a systematic pattern of abuse from the first moments of arrest: nighttime raids, beatings, forced kneeling on gravel while blindfolded and handcuffed, denial of food and water, terrorization by dogs, and detention alongside unrelated adult men in violation of international law.
A 15-year-old from Gaza who was held for 54 days told the commission he was repeatedly electrocuted through a needle inserted into his shoulder, forced into agonizing stress positions for up to 12 hours at a stretch, and was told at one point to drink his own urine. Upon release, he was dropped at the Kerem Shalom crossing with no medical care and no family to receive him.
A 17-year-old from Ramallah died in Megiddo Prison on 22 March 2025. He had been healthy at the time of his arrest six months earlier. An autopsy found severe, prolonged malnutrition, muscle wasting, colitis, and scabies — all conditions the commission noted were treatable.
Prison medical records viewed by the commission showed the boy had been diagnosed with "head trauma and inadequate food" in December 2024. His family learned of his death through a media article. As of November 2025, Israeli authorities were still withholding his body.
The commission also concluded that sexual violence against Palestinian children in Israeli detention, including forced nudity, sexual assault, and genital violence, was "a systematic, state-enabled assault" on their bodies and dignity, constituting crimes against humanity.
Children in custody reported repeated strip searches, sexualized threats, and placement in solitary confinement as routine practices.
EDITORS NOTE: Graphic content / A child injured by reported Israeli targeting reacts while being treated at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.
Healthcare and newborns
All three of Gaza's major specialized pediatric hospitals were forced to close within the first two months of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.
A video authenticated by the commission and confirmed by The Washington Post and CNN showed the decomposing bodies of four babies still attached to disabled life-support machines in the neonatal intensive care unit of Al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital after Israeli forces cut off electricity and gave staff 30 minutes to evacuate.
By August 2025, neonatal bed capacity had fallen 50 percent. Medical personnel working in hospitals in Khan Younis, Rafah, and Deir al-Balah described placing three or four premature infants together in a single incubator. At least 15 newborns died of hypothermia between December 2024 and February 2025.
"I have not seen this level of neonatal suffering caused intentionally by Israel," a pediatric doctor, age 72, told the commission. "This is not a normal situation for neonates to die from cold."
Miscarriage rates surged by up to 300 percent by July 2024 compared to pre-war levels. By March 2026, 70 percent of newborns were classified as either premature or underweight.
A 10-month-old baby was identified in August 2024 as Gaza's first confirmed polio case in 25 years; a fourth polio vaccination campaign planned for 600,000 children was halted in April 2025 when Israel blocked the entry of supplies. Vaccination coverage, which had stood at 98 percent before the war, fell below 70 percent.
The UN's Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine in Gaza in August 2025, the first officially declared famine in the Middle East. Approximately 95,000 children were identified with acute malnutrition in 2025.
The commission reaffirmed its earlier finding that Israel committed the war crime of intentionally using starvation as a method of warfare.
Doctors in northern Gaza are reporting that they no longer see normal-sized babies. AFP
Without education
Of Gaza's 564 school buildings, 459 were directly hit between 7 Oct. 2023 and 11 Oct. 2025. As of November 2025, 97 percent of all school facilities were damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombardment, and Palestinian children in Gaza had been denied formal schooling for three consecutive years.
More than 668,000 school-age children were without access to formal education.
The commission documented multiple instances of Israeli soldiers filming themselves demolishing and mocking educational facilities and posting the footage publicly. In one video, a soldier can be heard saying before detonating a school: "In my childhood, I've always dreamed of blowing up my school." He then destroyed it.
In another video, a soldier in uniform says, directed at the rubble of an educational facility: "That is how you will not be engineers anymore."
The commission concluded that the "destruction of Gaza's education system is expected to harm Palestinians for generations to come," projecting a setback of 69 years to Gaza's human development index.
Children write in notebooks by the rubble of destroyed buildings near a tent being used as a make-shift educational center for primary education students in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip. AFP
Dehumanization of childhood
The commission documented at least 35 instances in which Israeli occupation soldiers filmed themselves inside children’s bedrooms, schools, and public spaces, mocking toys, destroying school supplies, and treating children’s sports equipment as trophies before posting the videos publicly.
In one video, a soldier rides a child's wooden toy horse through a debris-strewn Gaza apartment. In another, soldiers hang a teddy bear by its neck from the barrel of a tank. In a third, a soldier loads a machine gun using a plastic toy rhinoceros.
"These acts are aimed at mocking Palestinians, including children, in Gaza with the underlying aim of dehumanizing, degrading, and subjugating Palestinians collectively," the commission concluded, adding that the pattern reflected "a climate of total impunity."
No simple recovery
The commission called on Israel to cease committing violations and crimes affecting Palestinian children, and to end its continuing presence in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in line with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.
It further called on Israel to immediately halt operations near the so-called “yellow line” inside Gaza — a poorly demarcated Israeli-controlled zone where children have continued to be shot while attempting to return home or collect firewood since the October 2025 ceasefire — and to release detained children, return the bodies of the dead to their families, and permit unrestricted humanitarian access.
The commission also recommended that member states arrest Israeli officials subject to International Criminal Court warrants, halt all arms transfers to Israel, and impose targeted sanctions on military and political leaders, while urging the UN Security Council to prohibit military-related trade with Israel.
“A ceasefire that allows Israeli security forces to open fire on children crossing an ill-defined boundary cannot credibly be seen as a cessation of hostilities,” the commission concluded.
“Even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight,” said Muralidhar. “The destruction of their health, education, and development is irreversible.”
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