UN inquiry says Israel’s targeting of children extends Gaza genocide

GENEVA — A United Nations commission of inquiry has concluded that Israeli forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza, a pattern it says amounts to genocide and has continued despite the ceasefire that took effect last October. The 100-page report, released on 23 June by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, covers the period from 7 October 2023 to 31 March 2026.

“Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said the commission’s chair, the former Indian judge Srinivasan Muralidhar.

The findings build on the commission’s September 2025 conclusion that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The new report frames the killing of children as a key indicator of genocidal intent, and says Israeli military operations have continued to cause “unprecedented death, injury and trauma”.Roughly 30 per cent of those killed in Gaza since the war began were children, according to the commission, which said it had identified specific Israeli military units responsible for attacks on them. Commissioners described two mechanisms of harm: wide-area explosive strikes, and the use of drones and sniper fire directed at children’s heads and upper bodies. The report also documents a pattern of attacks on hospitals, clinics and reproductive healthcare facilities. Strikes on neonatal and maternity care, it says, endangered newborn survival and drove increases in miscarriages and birth defects, while last year’s aid blockade caused starvation-related deaths and a rise in disease as immunisation rates fell. In the occupied West Bank, the commission characterised Israeli conduct towards children as war crimes rather than genocide. Israel, which does not cooperate with the commission and has long accused it of institutional bias, rejected the report outright. The Israeli Foreign Ministry described the findings as a “libelous sham”, and Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, dismissed the document as a political attack on the state. Israeli officials maintain that operations in Gaza target Hamas, which killed 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages in its October 2023 assault on southern Israel, and that civilian deaths result from Hamas embedding itself among civilians. That justification has been complicated by events on the ground. On 6 July, Hamas dissolved the emergency committee that had administered Gaza since it seized control from Fatah in 2007, announcing it would transfer civilian authority to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body established in January under Security Council Resolution 2803 and chaired by the engineer Ali Shaath. A Hamas spokesman called the step “a positive step forward on the path to implement the ceasefire deal”, while stating explicitly that the move was intended to remove any pretext for continued Israeli operations. The group did not, however, pledge to disarm — the central demand of both Israel and Washington — and the handover has yet to take effect in practice, with committee members so far blocked from entering the territory. The Board of Peace, the transitional authority chaired by President Donald Trump, said its assessment would be “guided by actions, not promises”.

The killing has not stopped. More than 1,100 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the ceasefire began, and the commission recorded children among those killed and wounded after October 2025. At the Security Council’s quarterly Middle East debate on 28 July, Colombia’s delegate said it was difficult to characterise that reality as a ceasefire, while UN Deputy Special Coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov told members Gaza still faces near-daily casualties and has been denied the conditions for meaningful reconstruction. Israel’s representative replied that “the main problem remains that Hamas refuses to disarm.” The commission is mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but operates independently and cannot compel action. Its findings carry no binding force, though they may feed into proceedings at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, where South Africa’s genocide case against Israel remains at the written pleadings stage — a merits judgment is still years away.