When Israeli soldiers came to the house in Sheikh Radwan between December 20 and 21, 2023, they threw four hand grenades into a room where 30 family members had gathered. Among them was a five-year-old boy. The grenades tore open his abdomen. Soldiers then entered the house, shot eight family members dead - including the boy's mother, seven months pregnant, shot in the abdomen and breasts, and his father, shot in the head - before ordering the survivors to leave.
The boy was carried by hand to a nearby school, where he lost consciousness. A doctor reinserted his exposed intestines using diapers and tape. He was taken to Al-Shifa Hospital, where he underwent surgery alone. He has since endured eight operations. Three more were still needed as of late 2025. He uses a wheelchair. His six-year-old brother, who watched his parents be executed, told his aunt he wishes to die to be with them.
This is one of hundreds of documented cases in a sweeping report published on 18 June 2026 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the United Nations Human Rights Council. The three-member inquiry panel was headed by noted Indian jurist, Justice (Retd) Srinavasan Murlidhar.
Running to nearly 90 pages, it is among the most comprehensive and damning international legal assessments of Israel's conduct toward Palestinian children since the war began on October 7, 2023. Its central conclusion is that Israel has committed genocide, crimes against humanity, and multiple war crimes, and that Palestinian children have been among its primary victims.
The Scale
The numbers alone are staggering. Between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2025, at least 20,179 Palestinian children were killed and 44,143 were injured as a direct result of hostilities in Gaza. Children made up 30 percent of those killed, a significantly higher proportion than in previous Israeli military operations in the territory, when children accounted for roughly 24 percent of fatalities.
At least 5,031 of those killed were under five years old. Of those, 1,029 were under one year old. Around 420 were newborns.
UNICEF has called Gaza "the most dangerous place in the world to be a child." The Commission's report further concluded that the scale and nature of harm inflicted on Palestinian children was not incidental but deliberate.
An estimated 5,160 additional children are believed to be buried under rubble. Thousands more are missing, their deaths unrecorded in unmarked graves.
Deliberate Targeting
One of the report's most serious findings concerns what the Commission describes as a systematic pattern of Israeli forces deliberately targeting individual children using precision weapons - sniper rifles, quadcopter drones, and tank-mounted machine guns - in circumstances that make accidental fire implausible.
The Commission interviewed 17 medical professionals who had worked across hospitals in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2025. All described the same pattern: children arriving with single gunshot wounds to the head or upper body, with no shrapnel injuries consistent with explosive weapons. In 12 of 15 forensically examined cases, wounds were consistent with a single precision gunshot.
"Based on the clustering of injuries and the targeted body parts, I assess that Israeli soldiers have been deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice," one doctor told the Commission. "There is a very clear pattern that suggests deliberate aiming of different body parts of children."
Among the most extensively documented cases is the killing of Hind Rajab, five and a half years old, on 29 January 2024. Hind and six family members were attempting to evacuate from Tal al-Hawa in Gaza City when their car came under fire from Israeli forces. The Commission determined that soldiers from the 401st Brigade, under the 162nd Division, opened fire on the car from approximately 275 meters, close enough to clearly identify the children inside. Hind was shot in her upper arm, back, and foot.
Two Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedics dispatched to rescue her, after receiving clearance from Israeli authorities, were also killed when their ambulance was shelled. The ambulance was found burnt beyond recognition, with an exit hole consistent with an anti-tank round. Hind was likely dead by 7 p.m. that evening. A claim by the Israeli military that its forces were not present in the area was found by the Commission to be false.
On November 29, 2025, after a ceasefire agreement had come into effect, two brothers aged nine and ten were killed by an Israeli drone strike near Khan Younis while gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father. The Israeli military described them as "suspects" who had crossed the demarcation line and posed an "immediate threat." The Commission found this claim baseless: the boys were over 300 meters from Israeli soldiers, clearly engaged in collecting firewood, and visible in broad daylight to the drone operator.
No investigation into either killing has been made public.
A Culture of Impunity
The report draws on a deeply disturbing body of evidence from Israeli soldiers themselves, including testimonies published in Israeli media, social media posts, and a Channel 4 documentary, describing the targeting of Palestinian children without restraint and with the apparent encouragement of commanding officers.
An Israeli soldier from the 252nd Division admitted to a reporter from Haaretz that he shot and killed an unarmed 16-year-old, and was congratulated by his battalion commander afterward. Another soldier described a sniper firing 50 to 60 bullets daily, including at children, while being "forced and threatened" by his commander to shoot regardless of the target's age. In the documentary Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel's War, soldiers described shooting civilians in the head as a matter of course. "The first shot is directly to the head," one said.
Another recounted watching two teenagers shot while pushing a cart. A third described drones as tools that "dehumanise the other side. You see everything on a screen. You drop the bomb. It feels like a game."
The Commission also documented explicit rhetoric from senior Israeli officials characterising Palestinian children as terrorists. A deputy speaker of the Knesset wrote in January 2025 that "every child born in Gaza is already a terrorist from the moment of his birth." A senior minister stated that 300 babies in the maternity ward of Al-Shifa Hospital were "all born terrorists." A former Likud member of parliament said on Israeli television in May 2025: "Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to conquer Gaza and colonise it and not leave a single Gazan child there."
Detention, Torture and Sexual Violence
The report also details what it describes as systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention and prison facilities.
Since October 2023, over 1,655 children were detained in the West Bank alone. As of late 2025, more than half of child detainees in Israeli prisons were held under administrative detention - imprisonment without charge or trial, indefinitely - a record high.
Testimonies gathered by the Commission describe children being blindfolded and handcuffed, forced to kneel on gravel for hours, beaten across the head and genitals, terrorised by dogs, and deprived of food, water and sleep. A 15-year-old boy held at the Sde Teiman facility described spending 23 days as the only child among 70 adults, shackled with metal chains that cut into his wrists, allowed only four hours of sleep, and subjected to repeated dog attacks.
Another 15-year-old described being electrocuted through a needle inserted into his shoulder during interrogation, as well as being denied water and told to drink his own urine.
In March 2025, a 17-year-old boy from Ramallah died in Megiddo Prison. An autopsy found severe, prolonged malnutrition resulting in muscle wasting, colitis, and scabies - all treatable conditions that were left untreated. Prison medical records showed that his deteriorating condition had been noted. The Commission found his death amounted to the war crimes of torture, inhuman treatment and willful killing.
On sexual violence, the report documents forced public nudity during mass arrests, with boys stripped to their underwear in open air and photographed by soldiers; sexual assault in detention; genital violence; and in new testimony provided to the Commission, rape of boys by guards. The Commission concluded that sexual violence in Israeli detention is "not exceptional but a systematic, state-enabled assault" on children's bodies and dignity.
Starvation and Medical Collapse
The Commission finds that Israel's total siege of Gaza, declared on October 9, 2023, has had devastating and disproportionate effects on children. By early 2025, nearly 95,000 children were identified with acute malnutrition. Prior to October 2023, acute malnutrition among children under five in Gaza was almost non-existent, at 0.8 percent.
In August 2025, famine was confirmed in Gaza Governorate for the first time - the first officially confirmed famine in the Middle East region. July 2025 was the deadliest month for child malnutrition deaths, with 24 children under five dying. By October 1, 2025, UNICEF had recorded 151 child deaths from malnutrition.
A 12-year-old girl with coeliac disease died of septic shock on October 9, 2025, after Israel's spring blockade cut off the gluten-free food she needed to survive. Israeli authorities approved her medical evacuation to Italy approximately one month after her death.
The report documents the near-total collapse of Gaza's paediatric healthcare system. All three specialist children's hospitals in northern Gaza were forced to close within the first two months of the conflict. The Commission verified video footage showing the decomposing bodies of four newborns left in the neonatal intensive care unit of Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital after it was forced to evacuate in November 2023, their life-support machines rendered defunct by Israeli attacks on the hospital's electricity supply.
As of September 2025, only 36 incubators remained available in northern Gaza, compared to 126 before October 2023. Doctors reported three or four infants sharing a single incubator. Miscarriage rates had increased by up to 300 percent. By March 2026, 70 percent of newborns were classified as premature or underweight. Fifteen newborns died from hypothermia between December 2024 and February 2025.
Education Destroyed
Between October 2023 and October 2025, 459 of Gaza's 564 school buildings were directly hit. As of November 2025, more than 97 percent of schools were damaged or destroyed. Over 668,000 school-aged children had been denied access to formal education. Gaza's children have now missed three full academic years.
The Commission documented deliberate demolitions of schools by Israeli forces, with soldiers filming themselves and posting videos with captions such as: "For all those asking why there is no education in Gaza — oops, a missile fell on you. That is how you will not be engineers anymore."
In one video, a soldier is seen blowing up a school while saying: "In my childhood, I've always dreamed of blowing up my school. Today I'm blowing up a school. Wow!"
The Legal Findings
The Commission concludes, on the basis of all evidence reviewed, that Israel has committed:
Genocide, including by killing members of the Palestinian group, causing serious bodily and mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. The Commission finds that the targeting of children who "embody the biological and social continuity of the group" is central to establishing genocidal intent.
Crimes against humanity including extermination, murder, torture, persecution based on age and identity, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts.
War crimes including willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment, intentional attacks on civilians, intentional attacks on hospitals and schools, use of starvation as a method of warfare, and sexual violence.
The Commission also identifies specific Israeli military units responsible for particular killings of children, including the Kfir Brigade, the 162nd Division, the 401st Brigade, the 98th Division, and others.
Recommendations
The Commission calls on Israel to immediately halt military operations in and near populated areas, withdraw forces to the 1967 boundary, release detained children, return the bodies of killed children to their families, and allow unhindered humanitarian access. It calls on all member states to cease arms transfers to Israel and impose targeted sanctions on officials with command responsibility. It calls on the UN Security Council to impose comprehensive sanctions and authorise enforcement measures. And it calls on the International Criminal Court to give particular attention to crimes against children in its ongoing investigation.
The report ends with a bleak prognosis. Gaza now has the highest concentration of child amputees in the world. Tens of thousands of children face a lifetime of disability, trauma, and interrupted development. An entire generation has been denied education, safety, and childhood itself.
"The essence of childhood," one doctor told the Commission, "has been destroyed in Gaza."
Full report can be accessed here:
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