A new report from the United Nations Human Rights Council has documented systemic human rights abuse is targeting Palestinian children.
Tension over Israel continues to grow within US political discourse. From both sides of the aisle, people’s attitudes towards the Zionist settler-colonial project are souring. Israel is the most disliked it has ever been, with a recent survey from the Pew Research Center finding that the majority of people across 36 countries hold unfavorable views of Israel and Netanyahu, with the number as high as 60% among Americans.
Support for Israeli war crimes continues to drive a rift between both parties. Just this week, opposition to Israel played a key role in the outcomes of New York’s congressional primaries, with anti-Zionist candidates receiving sweeping victories over candidates backed by establishment Democrats. Meanwhile, on the right, conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson officially announced he was leaving the Republican Party specifically due to its continued support for Israel.
These sentiments will likely only continue to grow in light of a new report recently released by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. From the very beginning, the report is unambiguous in its findings with the headline reading “the essence of childhood has been destroyed.” In it, the inquiry found conclusive evidence that Israeli forces have consistently and deliberately targeted children in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and including within protected refugee camps, resulting in the death of at least 20,179 and injury of 44,143 since October 7th, 2023.
According to the report, among those killed, 5,031 were under the age of five, while more than 1,000 were under one year of age. Most disheartning, the inquiry found that approximately 420 of those killed were newborn babies.
The commission noted the actual number of child casualties is “certainly higher”, due to the amount of unaccounted child victims who are missing or buried under rubble, estimated to be roughly an additional 5,160.
The commission interviewed 17 medical professionals who had worked at hospitals across Gaza. Among them, one doctor attested that many of the injuries they documented were akin to “a game of target practice”, with Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of teenage boys on different days. With other doctors documenting similar acts of deliberate depravity.
Among the 94 page report, one haunting section of many stands out.
In relation to attacks on residential areas, the Israeli security forces knowingly and foreseeably caused child deaths by launching continuous intensive airstrikes on densely populated areas, deploying large-yield bombs calibrated for maximum casualties, contributing to the fact that 27 percent of those killed or wounded in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025 were children. These deliberate attacks wiped out entire families across two or three or even four generations, with the Israeli security forces fully aware that children would be present and that children, with their small fragile bodies, have a higher chance of death and serious injury in such attacks. The Israeli security forces continued and repeated these attacks over a two-year period, without amending targeting criteria or selection of weapons, while child casualties mounted. This indicates that such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional.320 The Commission concludes that children were intentionally targeted collectively because the Israeli security forces considered the civilian population as a whole to be associated with Hamas and other armed groups, and that the Israeli security forces knew that children were present in the areas it attacked, and yet it intentionally directed its attacks on civilian residential areas and civilian property.
The report also found a deliberate targeting of neonatal and maternity care centers as well as pediatric hospitals which directly contribute to what the report described as a “particularly severe impact on birth rates and infant health outcomes” and referred to such tactics as a “systematic and total denial of essential, life-preserving medical services to Palestinian children”.
The report would additionally detail deliberate targeted attacks against schools, and children playing outside.
Chair of the UN commission, Srinivasan Muralidhar, said in a statement:
“The protection, care and survival of Palestinian children are inseparable from the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.
“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,” he added.
Commissioner Chris Sidoti said at a press conference in Geneva, citing cases from the report:
There can be no doubt in anyone who reads today’s report that every international legal norm has been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities towards Palestinian children and they need to be held accountable.
The commission would also conclude that by restricting humanitarian aid and attacking Gazans at aid distribution sites, Israel was guilty of using systematic starvation as a method of warfare. A war crime which Israel has repeatedly afflicted among the civilians of Gaza, even prior to the current conflict.
Sadly, as the report details, some Palestinian children face a fate worse than death…
Among the numerous documented crimes of Israeli security forces committed against Palestinian children, were multiple accounts of torture, rape, and other sexual violence committed against children detained in the custody of Israeli soldiers.
The report documents in excruciating detail the ways in which, during raids by Israeli forces, young boys and girls are publicly stripped and forced to participate in humiliating acts. When in detention centers, strip searches are frequently employed against the children who are then molested during the process and beaten if they cry.
They are also subjected to other inhumane and cruel treatment such as being denied adequate food, water, and medical care, verbal degradation and dehumanization, violence against the genitals, isolation in solitary confinement, intimidation and sometimes mauling by security dogs, and being forced into tortuously painful stress positions while stripped for up to 12 hours at a time.
The report notes (emphasis ours) ―
Several organizations have documented sexual violence against Palestinian children from Gaza and West Bank in Israeli detention as a systematic and integral component of the prison system’s torture regime, far beyond isolated incidents. These acts exploit children’s unique vulnerabilities – their physical fragility, emotional dependence and cultural stigma around male victimization – to inflict profound, irreversible trauma. Embedded in prison facilities without oversight, where children face parallel horror like starvation, torture and other cruel treatment (see Section E on Mistreatment of children during arrest and in detention), sexual violence occurs with tolerance or explicit encouragement within the custodial chain.
…
Based on investigated and documented cases, direct testimonies from child survivors and credible reports from different organizations, the Commission finds that sexual- and gender-based violence is being used in the context of detention and arrests as a method of warfare and intimidation against Palestinian children. Sexual violence against Palestinian children in Israeli detention is not exceptional but a systematic, state-enabled assault on their bodies and their dignity and deliberately meted out to cause humiliation. Child survivors face intense stigma, lessened self-esteem, fear of retaliation and almost no realistic prospect of perpetrators being held accountable, given the lack of transparent, independent investigations and failure to prosecute even when serious sexual abuse is captured on video.
As of December 2025, 51% of child detainees were held under administrative detention, meaning imprisonment without charge.
Prior to this report the same commission had already found Israel guilty of committing genocide.
To be clear, Israel’s genocidal intent was obvious the entire time. As The Free Thought Project reported in October of 2023, leaked documents from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence revealed internal plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
For their part, Israeli officials have not been shy about publically promoting genocidal rhetoric and openly advocating for the targeting of children.
Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, openly called for the total destruction and erasure of Gaza in October of 2023, stating emphatically, “do not leave a child there.” In January of 2025 he insisted “every child born in Gaza is already a terrorist from the moment of birth.”
Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari Has been on record asserting that “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves.”
While former member of Israeli parliament Moshe Feiglin has publicly declared “every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy.”
Even years prior to the current genocide, The Free Thought Project reported the mainstream media’s complicity in covering up the murder of children by Israeli soldiers. This complicity has only increased in the years since.
From the very outset of the genocide in October of 2023, corporate media began promoting Zionist propaganda and sensational claims without evidence to justify the slaughter.
Through the continued dissemination of disinformation, Western media would continue to help spread the narratives to help facilitate the genocide, including attempts to justify the murder of children amid widespread civilian massacres.
In late 2024, it was revealed that Israeli spies connected to the infamous Unit 8200 had successfully infiltrated the American media apparatus to spread Zionist propaganda.
The world has sat by for nearly three years forced to watch as these innumerable abominations occur with alarming continuity, as cries for accountability ring hollow, condemnations from human rights organizations are ignored, and rulings from international judicial bodies are callously disregarded. One can only hope that the grave depravity documented in this most recent report will finally be enough to galvanize an adequate international response to hold the Zionist regime accountable for its abhorrent crimes against humanity.