UN Report Says Gaza’s Children Were Not Collateral Damage. They Were the Target

A new report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, published on 23 June 2026, alleges that Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children as part of conduct amounting to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The United Nations report was published by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, the Human Rights Council-mandated body investigating violations in the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel. Released in Geneva on 23 June 2026 under the title “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023, the report makes one of the gravest allegations yet advanced by a UN inquiry: that Palestinian children in Gaza were not merely victims of war, but were allegedly targeted because they represent the biological, social and political continuity of the Palestinian people.

The Commission’s findings are not a criminal judgment. They are findings made on a “reasonable grounds” standard by a UN-mandated inquiry, and Israel rejects them in their entirety.

The report’s most serious allegation is not that Israel killed Palestinian children. It is that Israeli forces allegedly targeted children because children carry the biological and social continuity of the Palestinian people.

That is the legal and moral centre of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry report on Palestinian children in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. It does not treat the deaths, injuries, starvation, orphaning, detention and trauma of children as the tragic residue of urban warfare. It presents them as part of a wider system of destruction: physical, demographic, psychological, educational and reproductive.

The Commission’s finding is stark. It says the conduct of Israeli authorities, Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers “does not constitute mere incidental harm or collateral damage” to Palestinian children. On the contrary, it says Israeli forces and settlers directly and intentionally targeted Palestinian children in many instances, killing tens of thousands and leaving tens of thousands more with irreversible physical and mental harm.

Israel rejects the allegations. It has repeatedly said its military operations are directed against Hamas, that it does not deliberately target civilians, and that international inquiries into its conduct are biased. That denial will form the core of Israel’s legal and political answer. Israel also argues that the Commission fails to give adequate weight to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks, hostage-taking, and use of civilian areas for military purposes. But the report is not merely a casualty count. It is an attempt to build a criminal-law architecture around a central claim: that children were attacked not only as individuals, but as the future-bearing body of a people.

The Commission says there are reasonable grounds to conclude that 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, including East Jerusalem. It also says Israel has disregarded the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of July 2024 and binding provisional measures ordered in the South Africa v Israel genocide case.

The legal categories matter because they show the escalation in the Commission’s claim. War crimes concern prohibited conduct in war: wilful killing, torture, inhuman treatment, intentional attacks on civilians, destruction of property and outrages upon personal dignity. Crimes against humanity require a wider or systematic attack against a civilian population. Genocide requires the most difficult element of all: specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such.

The report attempts to cross that legal threshold through the targeting of children.

It argues that Palestinian children in Gaza were directly targeted in multiple settings: during evacuations, in shelters, near humanitarian distribution sites, inside homes, in vehicles, around camps and near ill-defined military boundaries after the ceasefire. It says medical professionals treated many children with direct gunshot wounds to the head and upper body, injuries the Commission says were consistent with fire from snipers, drones or quadcopters. It also says that in some cases children were alone when shot, or that adults nearby were not harmed.

That is the report’s answer to the standard military defence. Israel’s stated position and defence its likely to advance is clear: Gaza is an intensely difficult battlefield; Hamas embeds itself among civilians; civilian deaths, however grave, do not prove a policy of targeting children; and intent cannot be inferred from harm alone. The Commission’s reply is that the pattern, repetition, precision, foreseeability and persistence of the harm make the explanation of accident or collateral damage inadequate.

The report does not stop with killings. It says the harm inflicted on children must be understood cumulatively. Bombings, shootings, collapsing buildings, deprivation of medical care, hunger, contaminated water, displacement and lack of safe shelter have produced children with amputations, burns, polytrauma, chronic pain and permanent disability. It describes a generation of children transformed into long-term patients in a territory whose hospitals have been destroyed, overwhelmed or deprived of supplies.

The Commission’s conclusion is not simply that children were wounded. It says the injuries are of a kind that will shape their entire lives. A child who loses a limb in Gaza is not only injured on the day of the blast or gunshot. He or she enters a life of repeated surgery, rehabilitation, prosthetic needs, chronic pain and social dependency in a place where the medical infrastructure required for recovery has been dismantled. Disability, in that framing, ceases to be only an individual condition. It becomes a demographic reality.

The report says Gaza now has the highest concentration of child amputees in the world. That claim, if sustained, is not just a humanitarian statistic. It is evidence of social deformation. It describes a future population growing up with visible and invisible wounds, with reduced autonomy, reduced educational development, reduced physical mobility and a permanent relationship with trauma.

Mental harm occupies the same place in the report. Children in Gaza, the Commission says, have been exposed to explosions, the deaths of family members, repeated displacement, loss of schooling, denial of healthcare and the collapse of ordinary safety. It describes nightmares, anxiety, depression and traumatic stress, compounded by the absence of stable schools, safe spaces or psychological support. It says fear and grief have become part of daily life.

Here, the report makes one of its broader claims. It says childhood has not merely been interrupted. It has been reconstructed around survival. The child is no longer primarily a learner, a player, a family member, a social being in formation. The child becomes a displaced person, a mourner, a patient, a survivor, a witness and often an orphan.

That is why the report treats schools and hospitals as central, not peripheral. Schools are not only buildings. They are institutions of continuity. They carry memory, discipline, socialisation, literacy, numeracy and the ordinary rhythm of childhood. The Commission says Israeli attacks on schools in Gaza and the wider disruption of education have resulted in the complete removal of formal education in the Strip. It says even improvised learning cannot compensate for years of bombardment, displacement and collapse of basic services.

The consequence, in the report’s language, is cognitive and social. Lost education is not simply a gap on a timetable. It weakens reading, mathematics, memory, structured study and the ability to imagine a future beyond immediate survival. In Gaza, the Commission says, children have effectively been left behind even where informal lessons continue. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, it says schooling has also been disrupted by military operations, settler violence, closures, raids and attacks on students and schools.

Hospitals occupy the same structural position. They are not only places where the wounded are treated. They are part of the machinery through which a society keeps children alive. The Commission says Israeli attacks on hospitals, including paediatric and neonatal services, dismantled children’s access to life-sustaining care. It describes procedures carried out in damaged or overstretched facilities, sometimes without anaesthesia, sterile conditions or postoperative care.

The report links this to newborns and pregnant women. It says Gaza’s maternity and neonatal healthcare infrastructure has been targeted and destroyed, contributing to miscarriages, premature births, low birth weights, neonatal mortality and congenital birth defects. It says birth rates have fallen over two years and that the reproductive capacity of Gazans has been harmed. This is where the report’s genocide analysis moves beyond battlefield death and into demographic survival.

In genocide law, the Commission says, three underlying acts are especially relevant to children: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm; and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part. In an earlier report, it also addressed measures intended to prevent births, though that finding did not apply specifically to children.

The new report’s argument is that attacks on children, maternity care, neonatal health, food, water, shelter, hospitals and schools cannot be separated. They form a system. On the Commission’s account, the child is attacked directly through shooting and bombing, and indirectly through the destruction of the conditions required for growth, recovery, learning and survival.

The Commission also treats starvation as a method of war. It says Israel’s blockade and siege deprived children of calories, proteins and nutrients necessary for growth. It describes acute and chronic malnutrition, visible deterioration in hair, skin and teeth, weakened immunity and the re-emergence of diseases such as polio. It says food insecurity, destroyed healthcare and reduced immunisation have severely undermined children’s health.

That claim is among the most serious in the report because starvation in war is not merely suffering; when deliberately imposed, international law treats it as a prohibited method of warfare. The Commission says Israel had actual and constructive notice of the effects of its measures and continued them despite warnings, including binding ICJ orders. It says the duration of the siege, the vulnerability of children, the blocking of humanitarian aid and the entrapment of civilians in Gaza support a finding of genocidal intent.

Israel will contest that fiercely. Its answer will be that aid access has been obstructed by war conditions, Hamas diversion, security risks and the practical realities of a battlefield. It will also say that genocidal intent cannot be inferred from siege conditions imposed during a military campaign against an armed group. That defence is not trivial. Courts are cautious about converting destructive war into genocide without proof of specific intent.

The Commission’s case is that the proof lies in the totality: the direct shootings, the mass casualties, the repeated attacks on child-bearing infrastructure, the destruction of schools and hospitals, starvation, detention abuse, sexual violence, orphaning, psychological devastation, and the continuation of conduct after warnings. It is not one event. It is the pattern.

The detention findings add another layer. The report says Palestinian children, especially adolescent boys, have been arrested, tortured and ill-treated in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. It says they were held with adults, denied lawyers and family access, subjected to physical violence and left in conditions where their whereabouts were withheld or denied. The Commission says this may amount to enforced disappearance, abduction, deportation, torture, persecution and collective punishment.

The age and gender element is significant. The report says Palestinian boys were presumptively treated as terrorists or fighters despite age-verifying identity cards. It describes age-based persecution intersecting with nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion. In other words, the child is not protected by childhood. He is reclassified as a future threat.

That reclassification is one of the report’s most chilling themes. The Palestinian child, especially the boy, is allegedly treated not as a civilian to be protected but as a danger in embryo. The law of armed conflict is built on distinction: combatant and civilian, fighter and child, military objective and protected person. The report alleges that this distinction collapsed.

The Commission also documents incidents of sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinian children, often during arrest or detention. It says such violence was used to punish, instil fear and treat Palestinian bodies as instruments of collective shaming and oppression. In its genocide analysis, it says sexual violence against children forms part of the infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, intended not only to damage the individual child but to attack the Palestinian group.

The report’s conclusions are unusually direct. It says Israel, as occupying power, is legally bound to ensure the protection, care and survival of Palestinian children. Instead, it says Israeli authorities and forces deliberately inflicted death and severe bodily and mental harm on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children, destroying family ties, identity, innocence, safety and future.

It says children represent the biological and social continuity of the Palestinian people. By targeting them, the report argues, Israel erodes the foundations of Palestinian society and weakens the demographic vitality and collective capacity required for Palestinian self-determination.

That is the point at which the report becomes more than a catalogue of alleged crimes. It becomes an accusation about the destruction of a people’s future. Not simply its present population. Its reproductive life. Its schools. Its memory. Its children’s bodies. Its children’s minds. Its capacity to continue.

The report also names specific Israeli units and formations that it says may bear responsibility for particular incidents involving the killing or injury of Palestinian children. These include brigades and divisions allegedly involved in drone strikes, shootings, the killing of children in vehicles, the use of grenades inside a house, sniper fire against children holding a white flag, and attacks in the West Bank. Naming units matters. It moves the report closer to a prosecutorial map. It identifies possible chains of responsibility rather than leaving the allegations at the level of the state.

The Commission’s findings will not end the legal argument. They will intensify it. Israel will say the report is politically motivated, hostile to its right of self-defence and insufficiently attentive to Hamas’s responsibility for the war launched on October 7, 2023. Its defenders will say the Commission relies on contested evidence, draws excessive inferences from battlefield tragedy and uses the language of genocide to criminalise Israeli military action.

Those arguments will have force in some courts and capitals. The genocide threshold remains high. Reasonable grounds are not a conviction. A Commission of Inquiry is not a criminal tribunal. Its findings are evidence, not judgment.

But the report has shifted the charge. It does not merely accuse Israel of disproportionate force. It alleges the systematic targeting of Palestinian childhood as a means of destroying Palestinian continuity. That is why the report is so dangerous for Israel legally and politically. The accusation is not only that children died. It is that the future they represented was allegedly made into a military object.

If the Commission’s account is accepted, Gaza’s children were not collateral damage in a war against Hamas. They were treated as the living infrastructure of a people whose survival was being dismantled.