On June 18, 2026, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released its most harrowing findings yet: a nearly 90-page accounting of what Israel has done to children in Gaza since October 7, 2023: The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed.
The report takes its title from the words of a doctor who worked in Gaza — “the essence of childhood has been destroyed.”
Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.
By the time you reach the end of the Commission’s evidence, that sentence reads less like grief and more like a legal finding.
This is not a press release built on estimates.
The Commission interviewed victims, witnesses, and 17 medical workers who served in Gaza’s hospitals, and it consulted two independent forensic pathologists who reviewed CT scans, X-rays, and autopsy material.
Israel was given 13 separate requests for information and access.
It answered none of them.
The mental and emotional harm the genocide is inflicting on children in Gaza is also devastating.
A video recorded in the aftermath of an Israeli strike on a refugee camp in Gaza shows a young boy breaking down as he tells a reporter how he helped to carry a body ‘without a head.’
The Scale
Between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2025, the Commission documents at least 20,179 Palestinian children killed and 44,143 injured.
Roughly 30% of the people killed from 2023 to 2025 were children in Gaza.
Among the dead were 5,031 children under the age of five, 1,029 babies under one year old, and around 420 newborns.
Save the Children estimates that another 5,160 children remain buried under the rubble, their deaths never formally counted.
UNICEF has called Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”
In the report, there’s the story of a 10-day-old who was shot in the head by a sniper as the mother breastfed the newborn in their tent.
The baby survived with brain damage.
Before the genocide, 90,000 children in Gaza lived with a disability.
Photo credit: Courtesy of HEAL Palestine
The Commission reports that at least 21,000 more were newly disabled, and that Gaza now holds the highest concentration of child amputees per capita anywhere on earth.
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Mohammed was breastfeeding with his mother inside their tent when a nearby bombing changed his life forever. His mother was killed, and Mohammed lost his leg before he was even old enough to understand the world around him.
His case is one of the most heartbreaking examples of why HEAL Palestine’s Amputee Program exists. For a baby like Mohammed, the road ahead will require years of medical follow-up, rehabilitation, prosthetic planning, psychosocial support, and continued care as he grows.
Killing of Children in Gaza Not Accidental
The Commission’s central conclusion is that the targeting of children in Gaza was intentional.
It finds a deliberate, repeated pattern of Israeli forces targeting children directly — newborns to teenagers — during evacuations, in tents, at food sites, and after the ceasefire.
The case of five-year-old Hind Rajab is one the Commission investigated in detail: she and six relatives were killed in their car in Gaza City, and the ambulance sent to rescue her was shelled, killing the two paramedics inside.
Resist Hate covered Hind Rajab’s killing in an exclusive article about the release of a documentary telling her story — including audio of the phone call between the five-year-old and an emergency services operator who was desperately trying to find her.
The Commission concludes Israel’s claim that no troops were present is false.
In fact, the IDF Commander responsible was reportedly killed in southern Lebanon a few days ago.
In another case, a 15-year-old boy stepped outside holding a white cloth and was shot; when his brother ran to him, he was shot too.
The symbol of surrender was similarly “ignored” when Israeli forces in Gaza shot and killed three hostages as they were waving white flags.
Doctors volunteering in Gaza described a recurring signature — children arriving to the hospital with a single, precise gunshot wound to the head or chest, often while the adults beside them were untouched.
Resist Hate wrote about IDF snipers targeting children when doctors first spoke out about it in 2024.
Children in Gaza were killed by snipers or quadcopter drones operated by a unit Israeli officials themselves have compared to “watching a video game.”
A child killed with one clean shot, the Commission notes, is not a child caught in crossfire.
Childhood Under Siege
The report moves methodically through every part of a child’s life and shows how each was attacked:
- Detention and torture. Boys as young as 12 were pulled from their families, held with adult men, beaten, and in some cases sexually abused. A 17-year-old from Ramallah died in Megiddo Prison after months of starvation and untreated illness — conditions the Commission says amount to the war crimes of torture and wilful killing.
- Starvation. In August 2025, famine was officially confirmed in Gaza for the first time ever recorded in the Middle East. By October, 151 children had died of malnutrition. Every one of those deaths, the Commission stresses, was preventable.
- Hospitals and newborns. All three of Gaza’s paediatric hospitals were forced to shut down in the first two months. At Al-Nasr, four newborns were found decomposing in their incubators after staff were forced to evacuate without them. At least 15 babies later froze to death from preventable hypothermia.
- Schools. Of 564 school buildings, 459 were directly hit. Soldiers filmed themselves demolishing them, one video captioned, in the soldier’s own words, that blowing up a school was “fun.”
- Mockery. The Commission documents at least 35 instances of soldiers filming themselves desecrating the symbols of childhood — posing with children’s toys, hanging a teddy bear by its neck from a tank barrel — and concludes these are not personal acts but a culture of dehumanization.
The Crimes, Named
Most reporting stops at describing the suffering. This report does not. It names the crimes.
Consistent with its earlier work, the Commission finds on reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities and security forces have committed genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes against Palestinian children.
The list is specific: extermination and wilful killing; persecution based on age intertwined with Palestinian identity; enforced disappearance and unlawful deportation of children out of Gaza; torture and collective punishment; sexual and gender-based violence; the intentional targeting of hospitals, schools, and orphanages; the deliberate deprivation of food, water, and medicine; and the genocidal act of inflicting on the group “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”
The Commission also did something rare: it named the units it holds responsible — among them the Kfir Brigade, the 401st Brigade, the 98th and 99th Divisions, and the drone unit known as “Refaim,” the Ghost Unit.
It found that the killing did not stop at the October 2025 ceasefire, with children shot near the vague, shifting “yellow line” that Israel drew inside Gaza.
What the World is Being Asked to Do
The report records that Israel continues to defy the binding orders of the International Court of Justice.
Its recommendations to the rest of the world are blunt: a full arms embargo, targeted sanctions on officials and violent settlers, the arrest of anyone under International Criminal Court warrant, and a demand that the ICC Prosecutor make crimes against children a priority.
It asks the UN Secretary-General to expand Israel’s listing on the “list of shame” for grave violations against children.
A mother in Gaza told the Commission that she and her children learned to close their eyes while drinking because there were worms in the water.
A boy who survived the airstrike that killed his mother and two sisters repeated the last thing his mother asked of him — that he grow up to do good for others.
The Commission has now placed all of it on the record.
The only question it leaves for the rest of us is whether the record will be enough to make anyone act.
Read the full UN Commission report. It contains many details and cases not included here.
