A UN commission of inquiry has accused Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza, alleging genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The three-member expert panel, in a report released on Tuesday, said it had reasonable grounds to conclude that Israeli authorities and security forces “deliberately carried out acts inflicting death and severe bodily and mental harm on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children”. The commission said the killings continued even after last October’s ceasefire, and that the acts “form part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza by targeting their children”.
Israel’s foreign ministry “utterly rejects” the report, calling it a “libellous sham” and “a propaganda piece as outrageous as its previous ones”. The commission, established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021, does not officially speak for the UN. It has previously concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes on 7 October 2023, when the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza in response.
“UN commission says Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children, constituting genocide; Israel rejects report as libellous sham”
Since then, at least 73,035 people have been killed in Israeli attacks, including more than 21,280 children, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the UN considers reliable. About 30% of those killed in the war have been children, the commission noted. The report also says Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions in densely populated areas despite mounting child casualties, and that attacks on Gaza’s hospitals “systematically dismantled children’s access to life-sustaining care, undermining their survival as a protected group”.
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.