The scale and rate at which Palestinian children in Gaza are being killed and injured is without precedent in modern conflicts worldwide. Children in Gaza are dying due to Israel’s intentional practices, in acts that amount to war crimes and “the crime against humanity of extermination.”
By Maureen Clare Murphy, Reposted from The Electronic Intifada , July 03, 2026
Israel’s deliberate targeting of children establishes, in part, its genocidal intent to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza, according to an independent UN commission of inquiry tasked with investigating Israel’s system of oppression as a whole.
“Israel’s hostilities and violence have eroded the full spectrum of Palestinian children’s rights under … international law,” according to the three experts behind the report.
The investigators found that Israeli forces intentionally inflicted conditions of life on children in Gaza – including deaths “due to the lack of essential medical care” and deliberate use of lethal force against children – in acts that amount to war crimes and “the crime against humanity of extermination.”
“The killing of and serious bodily and mental harm inflicted upon Palestinian children was part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence” of Palestinians in Gaza, they conclude in their 94-page report.
The harm of Israel’s violence towards children in Gaza will stretch far beyond the duration of its ongoing genocidal campaign, according to the commission.
Israel’s targeting of children erodes the foundation of Palestinian society and its “demographic vitality and overall capacity of the Palestinian people to sustain and exercise its right to determine its future as a people.”
Israeli forces perpetrated the crime of persecution against Palestinian children, according to the commission.
Israeli forces deliberately killed children in Gaza using precision weapons and arbitrarily arrested adolescent boys who were systematically labeled as “terrorists,” “suspects” or “fighters” in what also amounts to the crime against humanity of enforced disappearance.
The abuses against Palestinian children were motivated by their identity as such.
Palestinian children were collectively punished in retaliation for the events of 7 October 2023, the commission concludes. Detained children were subjected to the crimes against humanity of “torture and other inhumane acts causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.”
The commission previously released its findings on the “physical and emotional mistreatment” of Israeli children during the attack led by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Forty children were killed in Israel that day and hundreds were injured; some children witnessed the killings of their family members.
The investigators concluded that “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including against Israeli children and child hostages.”
Most dangerous place to be a child
The scale and rate at which Palestinian children in Gaza were killed and injured is without precedent in modern conflicts worldwide, according to the commission, making the coastal enclave “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”
Around half of Gaza’s population were children on 7 October 2023. In the two years that followed, at least 20,179 children were killed and another 44,143 injured – “constituting 30 percent of those killed and 26 percent of those injured,” according to the report.
More than 1,000 children had one or more limbs amputated in just the first three months of the Israeli attacks beginning in October 2023. In some cases, children’s limbs were amputated without anesthesia.
In one case, a 17-year-old girl’s uncle, a doctor, amputated his niece’s leg without anesthesia while their “neighborhood was encircled by Israeli military tanks and vehicles” in December 2023.
At least 21,000 children in Gaza were made newly disabled between October 2023 and the beginning of September last year.
More than 5,000 of those killed were under the age of 5. Around 1,000 had not yet reached their first birthday and 420 were newborns.
The actual number of children killed and injured is even higher than the staggering figures recorded by the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.
An estimated 5,160 children’s bodies have not yet recovered from the rubble, according to Save the Children. An unknown number of children were buried in unmarked graves or remain missing.
The horrifying number of children killed is due to Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including homes where children would presumably be present. And it is also due to the deliberate targeting of boys and girls with high precision weapons by soldiers who would be able to recognize they were aiming at children.
The investigators found that child casualties since 7 October 2023 increased “absolutely and proportionately” in comparison with previous episodes of Israeli aggression in Gaza due to the Israeli military’s “use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects and an expansion of its targeting criteria.”
Children are at greater risk of being killed by explosive weapons like those used by Israel to destroy entire neighborhoods due to their “proportionally larger body surface area, pliable bones, smaller limbs and thinner skin.” The younger the child, the more likely they are to be killed by blast injuries, according to the commission.
Children were deliberately targeted and killed and maimed by Israeli military snipers, operators of armed drones and soldiers in tanks.
The commission found that the Israeli military’s 401st Brigade deliberately killed Hind Rajab, 5, and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan, along with other members of their family while they attempted to flee their Gaza City neighborhood in January 2024. Two Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedics were killed when attempting to reach the vehicle in which Hind and six members of her family were fired upon by Israeli soldiers who knew there were children inside.
Israeli soldiers from the military’s 98th Division used precision weapons to hit a 15-year-old child holding a white flag while his family was preparing to evacuate their home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, the same month that Hind and Layan were killed. After the boy was hit, soldiers fired two more shots, “likely … to ensure that he was dead.”
The soldiers shot and killed the boy’s 20-year-old brother and shot and injured their mother and prevented the boys’ father from recovering their bodies. The family was forced to evacuate while the two brothers’ bodies remained in front of their home. The slain brothers’ parents were told that an ambulance crew eventually evacuated the bodies but never learned where their sons were buried.
The controller of a quadcopter equipped with a sniper rifle fired a single bullet that struck the head of a 10-day-old baby while he was being breastfed by his mother inside a tent in Nuseirat camp in central Gaza in April 2024. The newborn “sustained brain injuries and now suffers from seizures,” the commission states.
That same month, a 4-year-old girl was paralyzed on the left side of her body after she was shot in the head by a quadcopter while she was eating with her family in a tent in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. No one else was injured, leading the commission to conclude that the girl was specifically targeted.
Shooting kids for competition
Unit 888 of the Israeli military – also known as the “Refaim” or Ghost Unit – operates the advanced quadcopters, which have been described as “a new generation of lethal weapons” by Israeli military personnel in media interviews.
Some attack quadcopters have been configured to carry ammunition that “behave in a similar manner to ‘cluster munitions’ within a human body,” with their pellets fragmenting into submunitions that damage multiple organs.
Medical practitioners working in Gaza’s hospitals reported to the commission “a consistent pattern of receiving children with single gunshot wounds either by quadcopters or snipers,” suggesting a “high degree of precision … indicative of the deliberate targeting of the child victim.”
One doctor who traveled to Gaza on a medical mission assessed that Israeli soldiers were “deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice – a different body part being targeted on different days.”
The commission noted that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published testimonies from Israeli soldiers who admitted to competing with one another on how many civilians they killed, including children.
Spaces of care for children were rendered militarized zones throughout Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
In October 2024, the Israeli military intentionally and without warning attacked Al-Amal orphanage in Gaza with heavy munitions at night while children were asleep, “resulting in the deaths of children and other civilians and extensive damage to the structure, while surrounding structures were not hit.”
“No innocent children”
Israeli officials cast Palestinian children in Gaza as “terrorists,” with the deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, stating that “every child born there is already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth.” Another lawmaker stated that babies in the maternity ward of Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital were “all born terrorists.”
Such rhetoric from Israeli officials portraying children as legitimate targets has “filtered through the Israeli army’s ranks,” the commission states in the report.
An Israeli policy that casts Palestinian boys as “terrorists” or “future terrorists” is reflected in the high number of teenagers killed in the West Bank since October 2023, according to the commission. Israeli forces killed 213 Palestinian children – seven of them girls – in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, between 7 October 2023 and 20 October 2025.
Palestinian children as young as 2 were killed in the West Bank during the period examined in the report. As in Gaza, children in the West Bank were killed in drone strikes as well as by sniper fire.
In January last year, the Israeli military shot a 10-year-old boy at his father’s home in Tulkarm and detained the ambulance crew that was attempting to evacuate the child. “I am the one who shot your son. God willing, he will die,” one of the soldiers told the boy’s father.
The child died around a week later.
The Israeli military claimed that the boy was “messing with the ground” – a purported justification for the use of lethal force under the Israeli military’s expanded open-fire regulation apparently intended to target persons planting explosives on roads or picking up stones.
The commission observes in its report that Israeli soldiers also left children they shot to bleed out without rendering aid and denied Palestinian paramedics access to injured children.
A 14-year-old boy who was shot in al-Faraa refugee camp in the West Bank city of Tubas in November last year threw a cap at soldiers standing by while he was lying on the ground, seemingly to get their attention.
Instead of providing him with first aid, soldiers placed a stone by him to frame him as a stone-thrower; fired warning shots at the boy’s mother as she attempted to approach her son; and aimed a laser light from a gun at the heads of an ambulance crew trying to reach the site. The boy died and the military confiscated his body.
“This incident reflects a broader, recurrent pattern in which Israeli security forces lie to shift responsibility to Palestinian children until contradictory evidence arises and, even then, avoid systematic accountability by attributing incidents to individual error,” the commission states – echoing its previous findings in relation to the conduct of the Israeli military Gaza.
Of the 19 Palestinians killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank between 7 October 2023 and 30 September 2025, two were children. Another boy was killed either by settlers or soldiers.
The commission states that it found a pattern of settlers targeting children engaged in ordinary activities, “turning everyday spaces into sites of fear” to the point of forcing the closure of schools and relocation of communities.
“Settlers forcibly seized children, dragging or forcing them to isolated spots … and immobilizing them with ropes or ties, to exercise control and induce terror,” according to the report. “The attacks have instrumentalized children as part of a broader coercive strategy to drive Palestinians off their land.”
The commission concludes that “settler violence functions not as a deviation from state policy but as a means of implementing it.”
“Both the state of Israel and violent settler groups share and collaborate in the same strategic objectives: the entrenchment of Israeli settlement on Palestinian land, annexation of Palestinian territory and the displacement of Palestinian people from their land.”
Children’s hospitals targeted
The Israeli military directly attacked Gaza’s three major pediatric hospitals, forcing each to close in the first two months of the onslaught.
Al-Nasr hospital was attacked at least three times in November 2023, cutting off the electricity supply and causing one baby to die from lack of oxygen. Snipers shot at staff, making it impossible to evacuate, while also “refusing to allow the hospital to transfer pediatric and neonatal patients” before allowing two pediatric hospitals, including Al-Nasr, half an hour to evacuate on 10 November 2023.
“At least four premature babies dependent on life-support equipment could not be safely moved due to lack of portable oxygen and ongoing fire,” the commission states. Around two weeks later, during a pause in fighting, the decomposing bodies of the premature babies were found still attached to the life support machines that were cut off from electricity during the attack.
The Israeli military “did not claim that Al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital was used by Hamas,” the commission observes.
Nine children were among 15 civilians killed and 19 children were among at least 30 people injured when an Israeli airstrike hit people waiting in line for nutritional supplements for children at a health clinic in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in July 2025.
The Israeli military “reportedly said that they were targeting a Hamas militant but did not identify the person,” the commission states. The attack forced the suspension of nutrition supplement distribution at the clinic.
Israel’s targeting of healthcare facilities and its ongoing blockade, preventing or severely limiting the entry of essential medicines, supplies and equipment, means that “children injured in Gaza will suffer well into their adulthood.”
Infants will not meet developmental milestones in their first year. Speech and language milestones will be delayed and children’s “cognitive abilities could be impaired in the long-term,” the commission states.
“A doctor summarized the situation by saying that the essence of childhood has been destroyed in Gaza.”
Meanwhile, “fatigue, physical exhaustion and elevated stress levels” have harmed maternal health, causing rates of miscarriage and death during childbirth as well as the prevalence of babies born prematurely and with low birthrate to spike.
“Doctors have reported no longer seeing ‘normal-sized’ babies in Gaza,” according to the commission, while babies born needing corrective surgery have been deprioritized due to the large number of children with traumatic injuries, “leading to avoidable death within the first days after birth.”
Education destroyed
Children in Gaza have been deprived of a formal education for nearly three years due to Israel’s attacks and mass forced displacement. Gaza’s schools and universities have been damaged and destroyed – Israeli soldiers have recorded videos of them celebrating during the controlled demolition of education facilities.
Before October 2023, “Gaza had historically maintained one of the highest literacy rates in the world.” Children living there today have been forced to focus on surviving rather than learning.
“The destruction of Gaza’s education system is expected to harm Palestinians for generations to come,” the commission states.
“Loss of human capital, combined with the physical destruction of infrastructure, has led to a projected setback of 69 years in Gaza’s human development index and has created a potential ‘brain drain’ by denying young generations access to education.”
High rates of acute malnutrition – resulting in the first confirmed case of famine in the Middle East – due to Israel’s siege, deplorable living conditions for displaced families and lack of access to dental care will negatively impact the health of Gaza’s surviving children for the rest of their lives.
Children’s immune systems have been compromised by starvation and malnourishment, “severely impairing children’s ability to heal when sick or injured and contributing to the death of pediatric patients,” according to the commission.
“Children just did not recover,” a doctor who visited Gaza on multiple medical missions told the commission.
Children in Gaza are exposed to “chronic and unrelenting” trauma that experts estimate will result “in psychological and epigenetic transmission of this trauma affecting future generations.”
Boys and girls in Gaza are preoccupied with “death and dying, with suicidal thoughts being common among children,” the report states.
The rates of child marriage in Gaza have risen sharply as families resort to the practice “as a survival strategy.” Nearly a quarter of families surveyed in June 2024 reported that a child under the age of 16 was heading their family’s household.
Children detained and tortured
Children from the West Bank and Gaza alike were mistreated while being detained and arrested by the Israeli military after 7 October 2023, the commission found.
The Israeli military “systematically and intentionally” singled out boys aged 12 and older during mass arrests. The number of children from Gaza who have been detained remains unknown as Israel has not “disclosed the data nor the whereabouts of the arrested children.”
A 15-year-old boy was detained during mass arrests in Gaza in December 2023 testified to being “repeatedly interrogated and tortured,” including through electrocution, and “deprived of food and water and forced into painful positions for up to 12 hours at a time” over a period of 54 days, the report states. After he was released at Karem Shalom crossing, the boy was “taken by an aid agency to a school where he stayed without his family, fearful, hungry and cold.”
More than 1,650 Palestinian children have been detained in the West Bank since 7 October 2023, many of them held without charge or trial under administrative detention orders.
Children from the West Bank who were held in Israel Prison Service facilities were subjected to violence and denied medical care and medicine, as well as food and water restrictions. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said that the food and water restrictions may amount to starvation, the commission states.
A 17-year-old boy who was healthy and fit when he was arrested in September 2024 died in March the following year. The teen likely died from starvation and dehydration after being deprived of food and water, with his mistreatment “amounting to the war crimes of torture, inhuman treatment and willful killing,” the commission states.
Detained Palestinian children are routinely strip-searched upon arrival to Israel’s prison system and “throughout custody,” according to testimonies of children received by the commission.
Children reported being recorded by guards while being beaten during transport. Other documented abuses include “being held naked, threats of sexual abuse and abuse of a sexual nature, as well as placement in solitary confinement,” the report states.
Released child detainees from Gaza “describe being stripped, forced to remain naked or in diapers and subjected to genital beatings and other forms of sexualized torture carried out in front of other prisoners as a method of humiliation and domination.”
The commission concludes that sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinian children in Israeli detention “is not exceptional but a systematic, state-enabled assault on their bodies and their dignity and deliberately meted out to cause humiliation.”
UN investigators also observe in their report that the transfer of detainees outside occupied territory – such as Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem – “amounts to deportation, which is a crime against humanity and a war crime.”
Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada.
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