Israel ‘deliberately targeted’, killed 20,000 Palestinian children since 2023: UN inquiry panel

The Israeli military has deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children to commit a genocide, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry said on Tuesday.

The Israeli forces have killed more than 20,000 children and injured 44,000 since October 2023, the commission said.

The panel, established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 to investigate alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a report that the scale and nature of military operations had resulted in “unprecedented death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children”.

“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, the chair of the commission.

The panel found that Palestinian children had been arrested and subjected to torture and other forms of mistreatment in detention facilities, and said that there had been no information about the whereabouts of some detainees.

It also alleged that sexual violence had been used against children as part of the “collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered, and intergenerational pattern of Israeli occupation and hostilities”.

The commission said that while the damage to neonatal and maternity care...

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