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A UN-backed commission report accuses Israel of severe violations against Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank, prompting a strong Israeli rebuttal.
A new UN inquiry said Israel “deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children” as part of a strategy to “destroy the biological continuity of the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The report, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023,” was released by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Tuesday, covering up to March 31 of this year.
It purports to examine alleged violations and crimes against Palestinian children by the Israeli security forces since October 7, 2023, resulting in the death of “at least 20,179 and injury of 44,143 children.”
The paper refers to the killing of Palestinian children as “deliberate,” and also claims Israel uses “torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children.”
It is worth noting that the UN reports consider a “child” to be “every human being below the age of 18 years.”
Israel has over 3,000 probes, over 100 criminal investigations into own conduct
Until 2025, IDF officials told The Jerusalem Post that at least around 40% of those killed in Gaza were Hamas, which is not a historically poor percentage in wars.This is especially true when taking into account that Hamas systematically used human shields, with some areas like Rafah having boobytraps in nearly every home, and hospitals and schools regularly used as command centers.
A significant portion of “children” killed have been Hamas fighters aged 16 and 17 years old, wielding arms and posing an equal danger to IDF troops as Hamas operatives over the age of 18.
The report did not address that Israel has over 3,000 preliminary probes and over 100 criminal investigations into its own conduct.
Due to the war continuing almost non-stop since October 7, Israel still has not had the capacity to release its full narrative regarding various specific incidents, but likely will over the next year or years.
Many legal experts find that the reports that make final judgments before knowing the Israeli side are premature.
Israel has admitted serious errors in the World Central Kitchen, Palestinian Red Crescent, Reuters journalists, and other cases. Top Israeli legal officials also acknowledged that by virtue of this war being longer and much larger than past wars, the IDF made more mistakes.
But many legal experts argued that this means that when Israel rejects other allegations, it should be viewed as credible.
Many legal experts said that the term ‘genocide’ does not apply when a military makes errors, but rather only when it is proven that a military purposefully commits mass killings.
Throughout the invasions of Gaza, the IDF always used several methods to try to evacuate (often successfully) the general civilian population from areas it was about to attack.
The Post has seen examples where these warnings often cost the IDF by allowing Hamas to escape among the masses of civilians who fled.
Other than in July-August 2025, when the IDF admitted an emergency in food insecurity, for most of the war, while food supplies were sometimes down in Gaza as compared to pre-war, there was no evidence that mass starvation ever took place.
And in summer 2025, a food surge by the IDF ultimately prevented any large-scale starvation. For significant portions of the war, the number of food trucks entering Gaza was even significantly higher than pre-war. Since fall 2025, food supplies to Gaza have been multiple times higher than pre-war.
Purported evidence
The report claims that multiple sources of information were consulted, including thousands of open-source items and remote and in-person interviews and group discussions with victims and witnesses.However, it said that “where the risk of re-traumatization was high, the Commission did not contact the family [of children] directly but relied on information already collected by independent national and international organizations as well as open-source published photographs and videos assessed as ‘credible’ and used for the purposes of analysis and corroboration.”
It did not state what these “independent national and international organizations” are.
The statistics used in the report, such as “between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025, at least 20,179 children were killed, and 44,143 children were injured as a direct result of the hostilities in Gaza,” seemingly all rely on data provided by the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
The framing of many of the case studies is also noteworthy.
For example, the report spoke of an incident on November 29, 2025, when two brothers, aged 10 and nine, were killed in an Israeli drone strike near Bani Suheila, east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
The boys were said to be “gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father when the strike occurred.”
Israeli security forces stated that soldiers spotted two suspects crossing the yellow line, acting suspiciously and approaching their forces, so a drone eliminated the “immediate threat.”
The report then writes that “the soldiers should not have classified the boys as ‘suspects’ in the first place since they were clearly involved only in collecting firewood.
“By maintaining that the children killed were ‘suspects,’ the Israeli security forces have deflected responsibility to Palestinian children, portraying them as terrorists rather than casualties.