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During a high-profile visit to the occupied West Bank, the head of the Church of England, Archbishop Dame Sarah Mullally, has publicly committed to using her influential position to advocate for the peace and freedom that Palestinians are inherently owed, while framing the daily acts of persistence amid occupation as powerful examples of “faithful resistance”.

Mullally delivered these remarks in a sermon this past Sunday at St Peter’s Anglican Church, located in Birzeit, a Palestinian Christian community in the West Bank. She told gathered worshippers that this quiet, faithful resistance does not always take dramatic forms: it can be seen in the everyday efforts of parents who navigate the complex, restrictive network of Israeli checkpoints every day just to earn a living to support their households, or to get their children to school to build a better future. It is also visible, she added, in the simple act of congregating week after week in this church to share communion together.

“All these acts of faithful resistance point to our hope in Jesus Christ and reflect your ongoing struggle for freedom and dignity,” Mullally told the congregation. She acknowledged the profound gap in experience between her own life and the reality of Palestinians under occupation, noting that she takes for granted basic privileges that are out of reach for most people living in the territory: the ability to cross borders and checkpoints without obstruction, to gather freely with neighboring communities, and to travel to Jerusalem without restriction.

“I will use my role as archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve,” she stated. Mullally also emphasized that the global Christian community has not forgotten Palestinian people, adding: “The church is called to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep. The church stands with you in your right to live in freedom and dignity.”

As part of her regional tour, which also included stops in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem alongside Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, Mullally met with 26-year-old Palestinian Christian woman Layan Nasir, who has been detained by Israeli authorities three times over the past five years. After being welcomed by Nasir’s family in their home, Mullally said she would hold the family in her prayers, and ask for divine blessing and healing for Layan following what she described as the terrible trauma of her imprisonment. She also extended her prayers to all people held in what she called unjust detention across Palestine, Israel, and the entire globe.

Mullally noted that the core purpose of her visit was to create space to listen directly to the experiences of local communities, to hear both their hopes and their anxieties, their moments of joy and the enormous challenges they face daily, and to join them in praying for justice and peace that can bring healing to both people and the land.

This visit comes amid growing concern from senior Church of England leaders over the deteriorating situation in the occupied Palestinian territories. Last year, four senior bishops from the church called on the British government to take immediate action to address escalating Israeli settler violence, warning that the ongoing aggression is eroding Palestinian life and putting the long-standing Christian presence in the Holy Land at severe risk. In their statement, the bishops highlighted that as the war in Gaza continues, conditions in the West Bank have deteriorated rapidly, with rising levels of settler violence and intimidation—including direct attacks on land and church properties in Taybeh, another Christian-majority West Bank town.

Just earlier this year, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, shared his own firsthand experience of occupation during a visit to the region, recounting that he was stopped at checkpoints and intimidated by armed militias who barred him from visiting Palestinian families in the West Bank. “It was sobering for me to see this wall for real on my visit to the Holy Land, and we were stopped at various checkpoints and intimidated by Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” Cottrell said.

The warnings from Church of England leaders align with recent alerts from Palestinian church affairs officials. Just last month, a delegation from Palestine’s Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs told European Union officials that long-standing Israeli policies pose an existential threat to the centuries-old Palestinian Christian community in the Holy Land.

The United Nations’ leading independent investigative body focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict released a landmark 88-page report this week, concluding that Israeli security forces have systematically and deliberately targeted Palestinian children as a central component of alleged genocide in the Gaza Strip. The inquiry, conducted by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, documents widespread harm against children across Gaza and the occupied West Bank dating from October 7, 2023, stretching past the October 2025 ceasefire.

Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the commission and an experienced Indian jurist, stated that the weight of collected evidence irrefutably confirms that Palestinian children have been intentionally targeted and killed by Israeli forces. Muralidhar emphasized that violations have persisted despite the ceasefire agreement, noting that Israel continues to disregard both the truce terms and its obligations under international law to protect Palestinian civilian children.

This latest report builds on the commission’s earlier finding that Israel bears responsibility for genocide in Gaza, detailing two distinct pathways through which children have been targeted. The first involves direct strikes using precision weaponry, including military quadcopters and sniper rifles. The second is an indirect, systemic campaign to destroy the basic conditions required for children to survive.

The inquiry’s compiled casualty data underscores the scale of child harm: between the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and October 7, 2025, Israeli military operations killed at least 20,179 children and injured an additional 44,143 across Gaza. These figures account for 30% of all total fatalities and 26% of all injuries recorded during the period. Children under the age of five made up at least 5,031 of those killed, including 1,029 infants under one year old and approximately 420 newborns. The commission estimates an additional 5,160 children remain trapped and buried under rubble from Israeli strikes, and notes that the true death toll is almost certainly higher, as many deaths have gone unrecorded amid the breakdown of civil governance and health infrastructure.

Investigators documented a repeated pattern of intentional targeting of children with precision weapons, collecting testimony from 17 Gaza-based medical practitioners who described treating large numbers of children with single gunshot wounds to the head and upper torso, inflicted by Israeli snipers or drone operators. One doctor told the commission that the consistent pattern of injuries indicated Israeli soldiers were engaging in what amounted to “deliberate shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice.” Forensic analysis of 15 of these cases confirmed that 12 of the victims suffered single gunshot wounds consistent with the accounts of intentional targeting.

The report includes detailed accounts of multiple specific, verified cases of deliberate child targeting. On January 29, 2024, Israeli forces from the 401st Brigade, 162nd Division shot and killed five-year-old Hind Rajab in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, alongside six of her family members. When two Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics traveled to the area to rescue the child, Israeli forces shelled their ambulance, killing both first responders. The commission concluded Israeli forces deliberately shot the family and intentionally obstructed the medical rescue mission.

Less than a week earlier, on January 24, 2024, Israeli soldiers from the 98th Division operating in Khan Younis shot and killed a 15-year-old boy who had exited his family’s home carrying a white flag after receiving an Israeli evacuation order. When the boy’s 20-year-old brother ran to his aid, soldiers shot him as well. The commission ruled the shooting was deliberate.

Additional cases include an April 12, 2024 strike by an Israeli quadcopter operator on a 10-day-old infant who was being breastfed by his mother inside a shelter tent in the Nuseirat refugee camp. The commission confirmed the operator had a clear, unobstructed view of the interior of the tent before opening fire; the baby survived but now experiences permanent seizures. On August 24, 2024, another quadcopter operator shot a four-year-old girl in the head while she ate with her family in a Khan Younis tent. She survived but was left permanently paralyzed on her left side, with the inquiry confirming she was deliberately targeted. Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, the commission documented more than 100 additional child killings and hundreds of injuries in the weeks immediately following the truce. One high-profile post-ceasefire case involved two brothers, ages nine and 10, who were killed by a drone strike from the Israeli Kfir Brigade while gathering firewood for their wheelchair-using father near Bani Suheila in southern Gaza. Israel claimed the boys were armed suspects crossing a newly established Israeli demarcation line inside Gaza known as the “yellow line,” but the commission dismissed the claim as baseless: the boys were more than 300 meters from Israeli positions, were visibly children engaged in collecting firewood, and the drone operator had an unobstructed view before firing.

Beyond Gaza, the inquiry documented widespread child targeting in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Between October 7, 2023, and October 20, 2025, Israeli forces killed 213 Palestinian children in the West Bank, with investigators confirming a systemic pattern of labeling boys as “terrorists” or “future terrorists” to justify targeting. One case details the January 25, 2025 killing of a two-year-old girl, shot in the back of the head by soldiers from the Menashe Brigade while the child ate dinner with her family in southern Jenin. She is the youngest child killed in the West Bank since the start of the current conflict. Another case records the January 28, 2025 shooting of a 10-year-old boy by soldiers from the Ephraim Brigade during a raid on his family’s home in Tulkarm. CCTV footage confirmed the boy was unarmed; Israeli forces delayed an ambulance transporting him to care for 30 minutes, and one soldier openly told the boy’s father, “I am the one who shot your son. God willing, he will die.” The child succumbed to his injuries on February 7, 2025.

The report also documents widespread violence against children carried out by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Between January and June 2025 alone, settlers carried out more than 1,000 attacks across 230 Palestinian communities. Specific incidents include the April 2025 knife-point abduction of two siblings under five years old who were playing outside their home; settlers dragged the children to an olive grove and tied them to a tree. In August 2024, armed settlers abducted two 15-year-old boys who were herding cattle, beat them, sexually assaulted them, and fractured one boy’s leg, with one settler urinating on the victim.

Mistreatment of detained Palestinian children is another core finding of the report. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have detained more than 1,655 children in the West Bank, 600 of whom were arrested in 2025 alone. As of December 31, 2025, 51% of all detained children are held under administrative detention—imprisonment without charge or trial—the highest share ever recorded. The commission collected consistent testimony of abuse: children are beaten, blindfolded, forced into painful stress positions on sharp gravel, terrorized by attack dogs from the moment of arrest, and denied food, water, and medical care by prison authorities. Multiple accounts confirm systemic sexual violence against detained boys, including rape by prison guards. One 17-year-old boy from Ramallah died in March 2025 at Megiddo Prison; Israeli authorities had been aware of his head trauma, severe malnutrition, and weight loss since December 2024 but failed to provide any medical care. A post-mortem confirmed he died from prolonged, severe starvation, with the commission ruling his death amounts to the war crimes of torture, inhuman treatment, and wilful killing, and that Israeli prison authorities are directly responsible.

The report also details the systematic destruction of Gaza’s child-serving infrastructure, including hospitals and schools. All three of Gaza’s major pediatric hospitals were attacked and forced to close within the first two months of hostilities. Before October 2023, Gaza operated 178 incubators across eight neonatal intensive care units; Israeli attacks and the ongoing siege reduced that number to just 54 by November 2024, forcing medical staff to place three or four infants in a single incubator. At Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital, Israeli forces cut power, gave staff just 30 minutes to evacuate, and blocked evacuation efforts for remaining patients. When a ceasefire allowed investigators access weeks later, four dead babies were found decomposing in the neonatal unit, still connected to non-functional life support machines. At least 15 newborns died of preventable hypothermia between December 2024 and February 2025, a direct result of the conditions created by the Israeli siege. Israel’s blockade and attacks on reproductive healthcare have pushed miscarriage rates up by as much as 300% since October 2023, and by October 2024, Gaza women were three times more likely to die in childbirth than before the war. As of March 2026, 70% of all newborns in Gaza are premature or underweight.

In the education sector, Israeli forces hit 459 of Gaza’s 564 school buildings between October 2023 and October 2025, with more than 97% of all schools suffering damage or complete destruction. More than 668,000 school-age Gaza children have missed three full academic years and been locked out of formal education. The inquiry documented multiple cases of Israeli soldiers filming themselves during controlled demolitions of schools and posting the footage online. In one video, a soldier can be heard saying, “In my childhood, I’ve always dreamed of blowing up my school. Today I’m blowing up a school. Wow.” In another, a soldier mocks Palestinian students, saying they will “not be engineers any more.” The commission confirmed the 252nd Division carried out deliberate demolitions of at least two UN-run schools in Beit Hanoun in November 2023, and that Israeli forces have seized dozens of other schools to use as military bases, weapons storage, and barracks.

Systemic starvation of children has been another key tactic, the report finds. By October 2025, UNICEF had recorded 151 child deaths from malnutrition caused by Israel’s siege and blockade, with July 2025 seeing 24 children under five die from starvation-related causes. The blockade also derailed a planned fourth round of polio vaccinations for 600,000 Gaza children scheduled for April 2025, allowing polio to re-emerge in Gaza in August 2024, 25 years after the disease was eradicated from the territory.

Investigators also documented a widespread pattern of dehumanization of Palestinian children, with at least 35 instances of Israeli soldiers filming themselves destroying or mocking children’s toys, schoolwork, and personal belongings in wrecked Palestinian homes, schools, and public spaces, then posting the footage to social media. The commission concluded these are not isolated incidents, but reflect an institutionalized culture of dehumanization across Israeli military units, with no disciplinary action taken by commanders against soldiers responsible for the acts.

In its final conclusions, the commission ruled that there are reasonable grounds to confirm Israeli authorities and security forces have continued to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the West Bank. On the charge of genocide, the inquiry notes that the deliberate targeting of children is a key piece of evidence establishing genocidal intent: as the bearers of Palestinian biological and social continuity, targeting children is a deliberate strategy to destroy the Palestinian people as a group. The commission named specific Israeli military units responsible for documented killings, urged the International Criminal Court to prioritize crimes against children in its ongoing investigation into the situation, and called for full accountability for all commanders bearing responsibility for the violations. Israel did not respond to any of the commission’s 13 requests for information or access to Israeli territory for the investigation.