The UN commission report released last month found that Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children in its ongoing campaign of genocide. It details and demonstrates Israel’s genocidal intent to destroy Palestinians, in whole or in part.
The report makes for sobering reading. It details the slaughter of more than 20,000 Palestinian children, and the wounding of 44,000 others, since Israel’s assault on Gaza began in October 2023. The findings present a damning indictment not just of Israel, but also of the global community that has actively enabled the destruction of a generation by failing to prevent genocide as mandated by international law, and to enforce the International Court of Justice’s set of provisional measures issued in early 2024.
The report is grounded in international children’s rights law, which was born in the aftermath of World War I, with the League of Nations adopting the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924. The declaration recognises children’s vulnerability and imposes obligations on states and the international community to protect them in times of peace and war.
For children in Palestine, this promise was never kept – and the basic duty to protect them is breached daily.
Children are half of the population in Gaza, and the UN commission’s decision to focus on their legal rights in its analysis of the genocide in Gaza is significant. Israel’s actions, the report finds, have shown an intent to erase the biological and social continuity of Palestinian society.
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The report documents the physical and mental harms inflicted on children, amid repeated displacements, starvation, mass trauma, orphanhood and disabling injuries. Some have been arrested and tortured in Israeli prisons, where they are subjected to sexual violence as part of a process of collective shaming.
Such acts violate their internationally recognised human rights, constituting war crimes, crimes against humanity and democidal acts.
Devastating onslaught
The report also draws attention to the sharp increase in state and settler violence against children in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, in the context of Israel’s broader war on Palestinian children.
The UN commission’s extensive research, which relied on open-source information and interviews with victims and witnesses, highlights stories of babies, toddlers and children attacked by Israeli forces.
The UN commission opted not to name the children, amid concerns that it could put them or their families in harm’s way. The basic dignity of being named has thus been denied to these Palestinian children, even postmortem.
Israel’s onslaught has devastated the education and healthcare sectors, for example by targeting neonatal and maternity wards.
Their testimonies highlight the daily struggle for survival amid Israeli attacks, displacement, hunger and fear, as they experience ‘unchilding’
Many children in Gaza have been unable to attend school for close to three years, with more than 90 percent of the territory’s educational facilities damaged or destroyed. In the occupied West Bank, military raids and harassment of children on their way to school have become the norm.
Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children is not new. For decades, human rights groups, UN bodies and scholars have documented Israel’s ongoing violations of the rights of Palestinian children. Organisations such as Defence for Children International, Al-Haq, Unicef and Unrwa have tracked these abuses and issued explicit calls for states to intervene.
In October 2023, days after Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza, UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese published a report covering the preceding period, detailing decades of killing, maiming, jailing and orphaning of Palestinian children of all ages, resulting in personal, generational and collective trauma.
A year later, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child pointed to Israel’s ongoing denial of its obligations to protect Palestinian children, condemning “in the strongest terms the severe violations of rights” that have accompanied the Israeli military’s actions, “including the tremendous loss of life”.
Blanket impunity
Israel’s genocide of Palestinian children has been live-streamed. Doctors returning from Gaza have recounted treating children who were targeted by snipers and quadcopters. The children themselves have shared their harrowing experiences, even holding a news conference outside al-Shifa Hospital to send a clear message to the world: “We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children.”
Their testimonies highlight the daily struggle for survival amid Israeli attacks, displacement, hunger and fear, as they experience “unchilding” – the denial of a safe childhood.
As part of its war on children and acting with impunity, Israel has targeted some of the very groups documenting these violations of Palestinian children’s rights, declaring them to be “terrorist” organisations. This continues a decades-long pattern of Israel raiding the offices of civil society groups and arresting and harassing their staff.
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Defence for Children International – Palestine has seen its offices raided multiple times and had confidential materials seized by Israeli forces. It was ultimately forced to shut its doors this year, bringing an end to years of work uncovering human rights abuses, representing children in international fora, and assisting and representing those arrested by the Israeli army.
The targeting of human rights organisations and human rights defenders led the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child subsequently to issue a statement calling on Israel “to immediately lift all restrictions and obstacles facing child rights defenders and humanitarian organisations in the occupied Palestinian territories”. It further urged the international community “to use all available means to hold Israeli authorities accountable”.
Yet, the international community and states continued to allow Israel to act with impunity. It is the world’s failure to hold Israel to account for its crimes that has enabled the genocide in Gaza, a core element of which has been the deliberate targeting of children. The international community ignored decades of reports and warnings, allowing Israel to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Without concrete action, state expressions of “deep concern” are meaningless; they are the opening lines of the obituary for the international legal framework built in the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and its promise of “never again”.
It is therefore imperative that states take the UN commission’s recommendations seriously. They must cease arms transfers to Israel, impose sanctions, and ensure prosecution in international courts of all those responsible for carrying out this genocide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
