UN inquiry finds Israel committed genocide against Palestinian children in Gaza

A United Nations commission of inquiry has concluded on reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities and security forces have committed genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

The report, published on 18 June 2026 under document reference A/HRC/62/CRP.2, was produced by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.

The three-member panel was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 and does not officially represent the UN as an institution.

The commission said it had found reasonable grounds to conclude that Israeli forces "deliberately carried out acts inflicting death and severe bodily and mental harm on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children", and that this conduct formed part of "a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza by targeting their children."

Israel's foreign ministry rejected the report, describing it as a "libellous sham", a "propaganda piece" and a "fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel rather than seek the truth." Israel's government has consistently denied genocide allegations, stating that military operations in Gaza were conducted in self-defence and in accordance with international law.

Scale of child casualties

According to the commission, at least 20,179 Palestinian children were killed and 44,143 were injured as a direct result of hostilities in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025. Children constituted 30 per cent of those killed and 26 per cent of those injured during that period.

The commission noted that at least 5,031 children under five years of age were killed, including 1,029 under the age of one and approximately 420 newborns. An estimated 5,160 children are believed by Save the Children to be buried under rubble. The commission said the true figures were certainly higher than those officially recorded, with unknown numbers of children buried in unmarked graves or listed as missing.

UNICEF has ranked the Gaza Strip as "the most dangerous place in the world to be a child", according to the report.

Deliberate targeting

The commission said it had investigated and documented cases demonstrating a consistent pattern of children being deliberately targeted by Israeli forces in Gaza. It said precision weapons, including quadcopter drones and sniper rifles, had been used to shoot children at their vital organs.

The commission interviewed 17 medical practitioners deployed to hospitals in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2025, who described a consistent pattern of receiving children with single gunshot wounds from quadcopters or snipers. It reviewed CT scans, X-rays and medical reports, with forensic analysis confirming that in 12 of 15 investigated cases the wounds were consistent with a single gunshot.

Among the specific cases investigated was the killing of Hind Rajab, aged five and a half, on 29 January 2024, along with six members of her family and two Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedics. The commission concluded that Israeli forces from the 401st Brigade, under the 162nd Division, had deliberately targeted the family and obstructed the medical rescue of Hind by shelling the ambulance.

In another case, a 15-year-old boy holding a white flag was shot dead by Israeli snipers in Khan Younis on 24 January 2024. A 10-day-old baby boy was shot in the head by a quadcopter drone while being breastfed by his mother in Nuseirat camp on 12 April 2024 and survived with brain injuries.

Post-ceasefire killings

The commission found that killings of children continued after the ceasefire agreement of 10 October 2025. According to UNICEF, more than 100 children were killed in the weeks following the ceasefire.

The report documented the killing of two brothers, aged 10 and nine, on 29 November 2025, by an Israeli drone strike near Bani Suheila in southern Gaza. The boys were gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father when the strike occurred.

The commission found that the Israeli security forces' Kfir Brigade was operating in the area and had misidentified the boys as suspects, classifying them as an "immediate threat." The commission rejected that characterisation, noting the boys were located more than 300 metres from Israeli soldiers and were engaged in collecting firewood.

The commission said that a vaguely defined demarcation line, referred to as the "yellow line", established inside Gaza after the ceasefire had become a site of recurring killings of civilians, including children who unknowingly crossed it while attempting to return to their homes.

Detention and torture

The report found that Palestinian children, particularly adolescent boys, had been systematically subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture and ill-treatment in Israeli prisons and military detention facilities. Over 1,655 children from the West Bank were detained since 7 October 2023, with 600 detained in 2025 alone.

The commission heard testimony from a 15-year-old boy who described being arrested during mass arrests in Gaza in December 2023 and subjected over 54 days to interrogation, electrocution, food and water deprivation and forced stress positions.

On 22 March 2025, a 17-year-old boy from Ramallah died in Megiddo Prison. A post-mortem found severe prolonged malnutrition leading to muscle wasting, colitis and scabies. The commission concluded that prison authorities had caused his death through deliberate deprivation of adequate food and medical care, amounting to the war crimes of torture, inhuman treatment and wilful killing.

The commission also documented incidents of sexual and gender-based violence against children in detention, including forced nudity, sexual assault and genital violence, which it characterised as systematic and state-enabled.

Healthcare, starvation and education

The commission found that Israeli attacks on hospitals, including all three major paediatric hospitals in northern Gaza, had systematically denied children access to life-sustaining care. Decomposing bodies of four newborns were found in the neonatal unit of Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital following attacks and forced closure in November 2023.

By August 2025, the commission said, newborn bed capacity in Gaza had been reduced by 50 per cent, denying approximately 2,500 infants access to critical neonatal care. Miscarriage rates had risen by up to 300 per cent since October 2023, and by March 2026, 70 per cent of newborns in Gaza were classified as either premature or underweight.

The commission concluded that Israel had committed the war crime of intentionally using starvation as a method of warfare. It reported that nearly 95,000 children were identified with acute malnutrition in 2025 and that by August 2025, famine had been confirmed for the first time in Gaza Governorate. At least 151 child malnutrition deaths had been recorded by October 2025, with 24 occurring in July 2025 alone.

Of 564 school buildings in Gaza, 459 were directly hit between October 2023 and October 2025. Over 97 per cent of schools had been damaged or destroyed, and more than 668,000 school-aged children had been denied access to formal education. The commission said children in Gaza had missed three full academic years. Psychological harm had been pervasive and intergenerational, with UNICEF reporting that nearly all of Gaza's 1.2 million children were in need of mental health support.

West Bank and settler violence

The commission documented the killing of 213 Palestinian children by Israeli forces in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, between October 2023 and October 2025. It found that Palestinian boys were systematically targeted on the basis of their perceived status as potential threats.

The report also found a sharp increase in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian children in the West Bank, with more than 1,000 settler attacks recorded in the first half of 2025, the highest monthly average since the UN began compiling records in 2006. 

The commission said the Israeli government bore legal responsibility for failing to protect Palestinian children from settler violence and that settlers operated "not as a deviation from state policy but as a means of implementing it."

Legal findings and named units

The commission concluded on reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities and security forces had continued to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and war crimes in the West Bank, consistent with its previous findings.

It named specific military units responsible for killings of children, including the Kfir Brigade, the 162nd Division's 401st Brigade, the 98th Division, the Ephraim Brigade, the Menashe Brigade, the 417th Territorial Brigade, the Paratrooper Battalion under the Menashe Brigade, the Duvdevan Unit and the Multi-Dimensional Unit/Unit 888 (known as the "Refaim" or Ghost Unit).

The commission's recommendations included an immediate halt to military operations near the "yellow line", the release of all child detainees, the lifting of the siege on Gaza, the cessation of arms transfers to Israel by member states, and referral of matters to the International Criminal Court, which has already issued arrest warrants against Israeli officials.

The International Court of Justice is separately hearing a case brought by South Africa accusing Israeli forces of genocide, though a final ruling is expected to take years.