Israel deliberately engaged in Genocide of Palestinian children: UN Inquiry
Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, an independent UN inquiry said in its report released Tuesday June 23, 2026
Geneva: Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, an independent UN inquiry said in its report released Tuesday June 23, 2026.
The report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel examined violations against Palestinian children since the start of the Genocide on October 7, 2023.
Around 30% of those killed in the Gaza assault were children, the UN report found.
A previous report by the commission in September 2025 found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and that top Israeli officials including the country's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu incited these acts.
The UN Commission of Inquiry said that Palestinian children were deliberately targeted and killed during the war, including after a ceasefire came into effect in October 2025. It said this was a key element establishing genocidal intent by Israeli occupation authorities and forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.
“The evidence shows that 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.
The report found that the proportion of children killed was higher than in previous assaults. Between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2025, at least 20,179 children were killed, around 30% of the overall death toll.
By comparison, in previous Israeli assaults on Gaza in 2008–2009 and 2014, children made up approximately 24% of conflict-related fatalities, the report said.
More than 50,000 children have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since Israel began its war on Gaza, according to the UN children’s agency (UNICEF).
The agency noted that one Palestinian child has been killed every day on average for more than eight months in Gaza, since the so-called “ceasefire” took effect last October.
On Monday, the UN also warned that children are being left “increasingly unprotected” as humanitarian groups and rights defenders are forced to scale back their operations in the Palestinian territory.
Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions and weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated residential areas despite mounting child casualties, the commission said.
“This indicates that such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional,” the UN Commission said.
It said it believed children were targeted collectively because the Israeli forces considered the civilian population as a whole to be associated with Palestinian resistance factions.
Conditions imposed by Israel in Gaza, including widespread attacks, repeated displacement and starvation caused by the blockade of aid, food and medicine, severely harmed children’s health and development, resulting in preventable deaths and trauma, the report said.
The inquiry also found that attacks on healthcare and reproductive facilities impacted the survival of newborns and reported increases in miscarriages, and that nearly all children in Gaza were reported to require psychological support.
In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Commission found a sharp increase in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian children and documented evidence of torture, including sexual and gender-based violence, during mass arrests and detention.
It said Palestinian children, particularly boys, were subjected to systematic mistreatment in detention, including forced stripping, beatings and food deprivation.
The commission concluded that the treatment constituted the crimes against humanity of torture and other inhumane acts causing great suffering or serious injury.
Palestinians across the occupied territory, including children, have faced a surge in arrests and detention since Israel launched the war on Gaza.
More than half of the Palestinian children detained in Israeli prisons at the end of last year were being held without charge or trial, a Palestinian rights group, Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCIP), said in March.
“Even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight,” UN Commission's Chair, Muralidhar, said.
“The protection, care and survival of Palestinian children are inseparable from the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” he added.
“By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future”, he said.
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