A man plays with a baby as Palestinian children look on amid the rubble in Khan Younis, Gaza, in March. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A man plays with a baby as Palestinian children look on amid the rubble in Khan Younis, Gaza, in March. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images Gaza Israel continues to commit genocide by targeting children in Gaza, UN inquiry finds Independent report says by aiming at children Israel is undermining capacity of Palestinian people to exist
Prefer the Guardian on Google Israel continues to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza, an independent UN inquiry has found.
The report by the UN independent international commission of inquiry examined violations against Palestinian children since the start of the war in Gaza , and said about 30% of the people killed by Israeli forces have been children.
A previous report by the commission in September found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and that Israeli officials, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, incited these acts. Netanyahu is separately wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) for war crimes.
The Israeli mission in Geneva said Israel rejected the commission’s “libellous sham”. Israel has fought hard against allegations of genocide, while receiving critical diplomatic support from its allies, including the US and the UK.
A significant body of research by legal and rights experts has concluded that Israel is intent on destroying Palestinians, including analyses by UN investigators, rights bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch , and genocide scholars worldwide.
Genocide, which became a crime after the second world war and the Holocaust, is considered the most serious international crime.
View image in fullscreen Women mourn a baby killed in an Israeli strike on Khan Younis last year. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images The convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide defines it as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
The UN commission said in its report, released on Tuesday , that Palestinian children were deliberately targeted and killed during the war, including after a ceasefire came into effect in October 2025.
It said this was a key element in establishing genocidal intent by Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.
“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, the commission’s chair, in a statement accompanying the report.
View image in fullscreen Children jostle for food at an aid point in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on Monday. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions and weapons with widespread effects in densely populated residential areas, despite mounting child casualties, the commission said.
“This indicates that such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional,” it said. It added that it believed children were targeted collectively because the Israeli security forces considered the civilian population as a whole to be associated with Hamas and other armed groups.
Muralidhar said that by targeting children, Israel was undermining the capacity of the Palestinian p…