Deliberate targeting of children is a key element establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, released a report on June 23. The commission reiterates “the deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.”
The paper describes the deliberate targeting and killing of Palestinian children, including post-ceasefire since the October 2025 Gaza peace plan. The Commission also examines a sharp increase in violence perpetrated by members of Israeli settlers against Palestinian children in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the commission. “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.”
The report documents severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood, separation, disability, repeated displacements, starvation, and the collapse of education and healthcare have erased childhood and will continue to affect children in Gaza throughout their lives, a wide range of crimes Zionist Israel vehemently denies despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary.
According to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commission,
By targeting children, Israel is eroding the foundational structure of Palestinian society, weakening the demographic vitality, and overall capacity of the Palestinian people to sustain and exercise its right to determine its future as a people.
In addition to mistreating children during imprisonment without charge, “Israeli security forces have also used sexual violence against children as part of the collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered, and intergenerational pattern of Israeli occupation and hostilities.”
The IDF has targeted neonatal and maternity care centers in Gaza, endangering the health of newborns, and has dismantled or destroyed orphanages and education facilities. “Even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight,” said Muralidhar. “The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible.”
UN Watch, a pro-Israel NGO not associated with the United Nations, responded the same day the commission released its report. “The Report’s conclusions are built on layers of speculation and inference unsupported by direct evidence at every stage of the analysis,” claims Salo Aizenberg, described as an independent scholar and author who writes about antisemitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. “Yet despite these uncertainties, it repeatedly reaches definitive conclusions regarding Israeli responsibility and intent.”
The chair of UN Watch is Alfred H. Moses. He also served as president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a Zionist lobby and political action group serving as the foreign policy wing of the Israel lobby. It lobbies political leaders and supports the Herzliya Conference (an Israeli city named after the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl) in Israel. The AJC is associated with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The AJC and ADL issued a Joint Unity Pledge in 2011 stating: “America’s friendship with Israel is an emotional, moral and strategic bond that has always transcended politics.”
It is said Emanuele Ottolenghi is a member of AJC. He is a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neocon think tank that has, since 2003, called for, along with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, regime change in Iran. FDD has also campaigned against UN court hearings.
Despite accusations by UN Watch and others that the latest commission report is baseless, there is a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary. Since October 2023, the Israeli military is confirmed to have killed at least 66,148 Palestinians in Gaza (as of October 1, 2025), the vast majority civilians. The number “includes people who hospitals have identified and officially confirmed to have been killed. At least ten thousand others are missing under the rubble and presumed dead,” notes the Institute for Middle East Understanding. The IDF “has killed at least 20,000 children—about 2% of all the children in Gaza—including at least 953 babies under one year of age. That’s an average of at least one child killed every hour since October 2023.”
UNICEF reported on June 19 that at least 265 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza since a ceasefire was announced in October 2025. “During a period supposedly defined by restraint and protection, a child has been killed, on average, every single day for more than eight months,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder told reporters in Geneva. “While the world continues to speak the language of ceasefire, families in Gaza continue to bury their sons and daughters,” he said.
As should be expected, Israel rejects the findings and calls the report biased and defamatory. “Israel dismisses this libelous sham,” said Israel’s mission in Geneva, adding that “every child deserves protection” and asserting that the report ignored “the brutal tactics of Hamas,” according to The Jerusalem Post.
However, there is a large number of Israelis in favor of starving and murdering Palestinian children. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich admitted with pride that the IDF continues to murder children along with adult Palestinians with impunity. “We’ve been fighting for two and a half years in the Gaza Strip, just look at how destroyed it is… and the world didn’t stop us.”
Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, “boasts about the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and assures that he’s repeating it in the same way in Lebanon, bragging that they’ve expelled 200,000 Lebanese from their homes… and that they’ll never return.”
“We control 60% of Gaza and that entire area has been destroyed; we enter and destroy everything—that’s our model, and now we’re doing it in Lebanon. Not a single one of the 200,000 southern Lebanese will return to their homes. We’re not going to stop occupying Syria, Lebanon, or Gaza.”
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security since 2022, a far-right Kahanist that had a portrait, in his living room, of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer, has made numerous statements in favor of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In February 2025, his Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party introduced a controversial bill proposing the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza. Ben Gvir recently demanded the IDF “burn all of Lebanon… You go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.”
According to UNICEF, 247 children have been killed and 992 injured in Lebanon since 2 March, with an average of 12 children killed or maimed every day. “Without sustained support, many children risk carrying the consequences of this war with them for years to come,” warned Marcoluigi Corsi, a UNICEF Country Representative in Lebanon.
In April, it was reported that the IDF is subjecting Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank to a campaign of systematic ethnic cleansing, according to B’Tselem. More than 190 children have been killed in the West Bank since 7 October 2023, many times higher than the yearly average over the previous decade, reports The Electronic Intifada. Since the 2025 ceasefire, Israel added “increased offensive activity” in the West Bank to its official list of “war objectives,” B’Tselem notes in its Gaza Doctrine: The West Bank is Under Fire.
Israel’s “war objectives” are obvious. It has long planned to ethnically cleanse Gaza, the West Bank, and also Lebanon, which it will annex if conditions permit. ”Israel’s war on Gaza, withal, is not about October 7 as Western mainstream media would suggest,” writes Jamal Kanj, author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America.
It’s about the 75-year-old war to empty Palestine of its indigenous population. Israel is systematically carrying out its plan under the leadership of a psychopath intoxicated on American weapon technology, taxpayers’ money to fund his wars, and enabled by prevailing Western double standards.
“What is happening in Gaza cannot be fully described in words,” Muhammad Abu Salmiya, director of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, destroyed by the IDF, told The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal. His correspondence published in the journal “is a plea to every human being to help stop this genocide right now—we cannot live like this; the world should not be silent about the killing of civilians in the thousands.”
Much of the world is not silent. However, due to the immense influence the Zionist lobby has over the US government, which provides the means and diplomatic cover for Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, it does not appear that the crimes perpetuated by Israel will end any time soon.
Article posted with permission from Kurt Nimmo
