The United Nations’ leading independent investigative body mandated to probe violations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has issued a landmark 88-page report concluding that Israeli security forces have systematically and deliberately targeted Palestinian children, committing acts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes across the Gaza Strip, alongside additional war crimes in the occupied West Bank. The report covers the two-year period from October 7, 2023, to October 7, 2025, documenting that at least 20,179 Palestinian children were killed and another 44,143 wounded in Gaza during this window, with children accounting for 30% of all fatalities and 26% of all injuries recorded.
Srinivasan Muralidhar, the current chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem), emphasized that overwhelming on-the-ground evidence confirms Palestinian children have been intentionally targeted and killed by Israeli forces. He added that even after the ceasefire agreement reached in October 2025, the killing and maiming of children has continued, with Israel consistently ignoring the terms of the truce and its legal obligation to protect Palestinian children under international humanitarian law.
Drawing directly from the provisions of the UN Genocide Convention, the inquiry concluded that the deliberate targeting of children constitutes clear evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, within Gaza. This finding builds on the commission’s September 2024 conclusion that Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza, a finding that former commission chair Navi Pillay described at the time as the most authoritative genocide determination the United Nations had issued to date on the situation in Gaza.
Unlike previous findings, the new report centers its analysis specifically on the impact of the conflict on children, examining direct violence, arbitrary detention, reproductive harm, and long-term psychological trauma. The inquiry documents a repeated, consistent pattern of children being struck by Israeli precision weapons, including fire from sniper units and attacks by reconnaissance quadcopter drones. Medical workers operating in Gaza documented hundreds of cases where children presented with single gunshot wounds concentrated in the head and upper torso.
The report details two horrific, representative cases to illustrate this pattern: in April 2024, a 10-day-old infant was shot in the head by an Israeli quadcopter while breastfeeding inside a displacement tent in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. Four months later, in August 2024, a four-year-old girl was killed by a quadcopter strike to the head while eating a meal with her family in Khan Younis. Seventeen frontline medical practitioners who treated casualties in Gaza confirmed to the commission that this pattern of targeted head and upper torso wounds from sniper and drone fire was uniform across child casualties. One physician told investigators that Israeli soldiers appeared to be engaging in “deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice.”
The commission has publicly identified specific Israeli military units it found responsible for these targeted killings, including the Kfir Brigade, the 162nd Division, the 98th Division, the 99th Division, and an elite drone unit known as the Refaim or Ghost Unit.
The report confirms that lethal violence against children has not ended with the October 2025 ceasefire, which Israel has repeatedly violated despite the agreement’s mandate to end all hostilities. A prominent example cited is the killing of two brothers, aged 9 and 10, who were shot dead by an Israeli drone near Bani Suheila in southern Gaza in late November while collecting firewood. Israeli forces attempted to frame the children as “suspects” crossing a restricted military boundary known as the yellow line, but the commission dismissed this claim as entirely baseless. Investigators confirmed the boys were more than 300 meters from the nearest Israeli troops, their identity as children collecting firewood was unambiguous, and the drone operator had an unobstructed, clear view of the pair before launching the strike.
Beyond direct targeted killings, the report details the total systemic destruction of Palestinian childhood across every aspect of daily life. As of October 2025, 459 of Gaza’s 564 school buildings had sustained direct military damage, leaving more than 668,000 school-age children completely cut off from formal education and forcing them to miss three full academic years. By January 2026, more than 335,000 children under the age of five face severe long-term developmental delays after the complete collapse of early childhood support services in the enclave.
Attacks on neonatal medical infrastructure have directly caused hundreds of preventable newborn deaths, the inquiry finds. Before October 2023, Gaza operated 178 incubators across eight full neonatal intensive care units; by November 2024, only 54 incubators remained functional. The report records that miscarriage rates in Gaza have risen by as much as 300% since the start of the conflict, and as of March 2026, 70% of all newborns in Gaza are classified as premature or underweight due to widespread maternal malnutrition and collapsed healthcare.
The inquiry also documented widespread abuse against Palestinian children detained by Israeli forces, finding that detained children are routinely subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced public nudity, coercive stress positioning, and deliberate denial of food, water, and emergency medical care. One case highlighted is that of a 17-year-old boy from Ramallah who died in Israel’s Megiddo Prison in March 2025 from severe, prolonged malnutrition; Israeli authorities withheld his body from his family for months after his death. The commission classified his death as a deliberate war crime of willful killing.
Muralidhar emphasized that the harm inflicted on Palestinian children will outlast active hostilities: “Even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight. The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible.”
The commission has issued a series of binding calls for action: it demands Israel immediately halt all military operations in Gaza and the West Bank, release all detained Palestinian children, return the bodies of deceased children withheld from families, and end its years-long blockade of Gaza. The inquiry also urges all UN member states to immediately cease all arms transfers to Israel and impose targeted sanctions on Israeli officials responsible for the documented violations, and calls on the International Criminal Court to prioritize the investigation of crimes against children in its ongoing inquiry into Palestinian violations.
Notably, Israel did not respond to 13 separate formal requests for information or access from the commission to conduct its investigation.