Israel 'deliberately' killed Palestinian children, resulting in Genocide - JPost

Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023,” was released by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Tuesday, covering up to March 31 of this year.

It purports to examine alleged violations and crimes against Palestinian children by the Israeli security forces since October 7, 2023, resulting in the death of “at least 20,179 and injury of 44,143 children.”The paper refers to the killing of Palestinian children as “deliberate,” and also claims Israel uses “torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children.”

It is worth noting that the UN reports consider a “child” to be “every human being below the age of 18 years.”

Until 2025, IDF officials told The Jerusalem Post that at least around 40% of those killed in Gaza were Hamas, which is not a historically poor percentage in wars.

This is especially true when taking into account that Hamas systematically used human shields, with some areas like Rafah having boobytraps in nearly every home, and hospitals and schools regularly used as command centers.

A significant portion of “children” killed have been Hamas fighters aged 16 and 17 years old, wielding arms and posing an equal danger to IDF troops as Hamas operatives over the age of 18.

The report did not address that Israel has over 3,000 preliminary probes and over 100 criminal investigations into its own conduct.

Due to the war continuing almost non-stop since October 7, Israel still has not had the capacity to release its full narrative regarding various specific incidents, but likely will over the next year or years.

Many legal experts find that the reports that make final judgments before knowing the Israeli side are premature.

Israel has admitted serious errors in the World Central Kitchen, Palestinian Red Crescent, Reuters journalists, and other cases. Top Israeli legal officials also acknowledged that by virtue of this war being longer and much larger than past wars, the IDF made more mistakes.

But many legal experts argued that this means that when Israel rejects other allegations, it should be viewed as credible.

Many legal experts said that the term ‘genocide’ does not apply when a military makes errors, but rather only when it is proven that a military purposefully commits mass killings.

Throughout the invasions of Gaza, the IDF always used several methods to try to evacuate (often successfully) the general civilian population from areas it was about to attack.

The Post has seen examples where these warnings often cost the IDF by allowing Hamas to escape among the masses of civilians who fled.

Other than in July-August 2025, when the IDF admitted an emergency in food insecurity, for most of the war, while food supplies were sometimes down in Gaza as compared to pre-war, there was no evidence that mass starvation ever took place.

And in summer 2025, a food surge by the IDF ultimately prevented any large-scale starvation. For significant portions of the war, the number of food trucks entering Gaza was even significantly higher than pre-war. Since fall 2025, food supplies to Gaza have been multiple times higher than pre-war.

The report claims that multiple sources of information were consulted, including thousands of open-source items and remote and in-person interviews and group discussions with victims and witnesses.

However, it said that “where the risk of re-traumatization was high, the Commission did not contact the family [of children] directly but relied on information already collected by independent national and international organizations as well as open-source published photographs and videos assessed as ‘credible’ and used for the purposes of analysis and corroboration.”

It did not state what these “independent national and international organizations” are.

The statistics used in the report, such as “between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025, at least 20,179 children were killed, and 44,143 children were injured as a direct result of the hostilities in Gaza,” seemingly all rely on data provided by the Hamas-run Health Ministry.

The framing of many of the case studies is also noteworthy.

For example, the report spoke of an incident on November 29, 2025, when two brothers, aged 10 and nine, were killed in an Israeli drone strike near Bani Suheila, east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

The boys were said to be “gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father when the strike occurred.”

Israeli security forces stated that soldiers spotted two suspects crossing the yellow line, acting suspiciously and approaching their forces, so a drone eliminated the “immediate threat.”

The report then writes that “the soldiers should not have classified the boys as ‘suspects’ in the first place since they were clearly involved only in collecting firewood.

“By maintaining that the children killed were ‘suspects,’ the Israeli security forces have deflected responsibility to Palestinian children, portraying them as terrorists rather than casualties.

“Such tactics by the Israeli security forces serve to distort the factual narrative and further marginalize affected children and their families.”

The IDF appeared to indicate to the Post that it does not have a standing investigation of this incident; however, the report took a specific incident and created a general assertion about Israeli policy.

The two boys are extrapolated to “Palestinian children” in general, which works to undermine cases where under-18 Palestinians have, in fact, been shown to be terrorists.

The above section was about Gaza, but similar assertions are made about Israeli actions in the West Bank.

The Commission assessed that the high number of boys killed reflects a policy of targeting boys due to their perceived threat as terrorists or future terrorists. There is no acknowledgment of the possible veracity of Israel’s claims.

Some of the data in the report cannot even be corroborated. For example, the report said, “Prior to October 2023, 90,000 children were living with a disability in Gaza,” but the link provided was invalid.

Some of the more extreme case studies, especially those in Part E, cannot be corroborated because they are anonymized.

Two of these involve highly-disputed claims about Israel’s use of dogs to commit violent acts against Palestinians.

“Children reported facing extremely abusive treatment when arriving at military detention facilities, including being forced to make confessions, being forced to strip to their underwear in front of others, being blindfolded and handcuffed while forced to kneel on gravel or asphalt, being beaten with weapons and kicked in the head and other body parts, and being terrorized by dogs.”

The report then said “a 15-year-old boy detained at Sde Teiman facility told the Commission that [...] Israeli soldiers entered his cell with dogs, made him and other detainees lie on their stomachs, and released the dogs on them.”

There is another case study of another 15-year-old boy who reported being electrocuted through a needle inserted into his shoulder.

The report echoed previous conclusions from a March 2025 report, where the Commission concluded that Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the “reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare, including the destruction of the Al-Basma In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Center, Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, in December 2023.”

The UN report also seemingly blames Israel for child marriage rates in Gaza: “As the situation in Gaza has sharply increased child marriage and early pregnancy... It has, in turn, severely impacted the mental health of girls, exposing them to physical, psychological, and sexual violence.”

There was also significant focus on Israel’s alleged targeting of schools and hospitals, with no acknowledgment or discussion of Hamas’s use of hospitals, schools, and humanitarian zones for military purposes.

The Commission concluded that, based on the evidence reviewed, and consistent with its previous reports, there are “reasonable grounds that the Israeli authorities and the Israeli security forces have continued to commit the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

Elliot Malin, who specializes in International Law, said the report’s assertion that Israel “deliberately” targeted Gaza children in acts of genocide is “not a legally available conclusion.”

“Targeting children as a form of genocide would require demonstration either: (1) that a substantial portion of the children of Gaza, relative to the whole child population of Gaza, was destroyed with the intent to destroy the group as a whole; or, (2) that the intent was to destroy a substantial portion of the child population in Gaza with the intent to destroy the group as a whole,” he said.

“To do that, you’d have to factor in the total population of minors in Gaza, which is 50% or 1.115 million. 20,000 alleged children being killed in Gaza is 1.7% of the children in Gaza. That’s not substantial enough to constitute genocide,” he concluded.

Salo Aizenberg, of UN Watch, said the report fails to provide corroborating evidence of any incident of IDF soldiers targeting children.

“In none of the cases can the COI definitively establish that a civilian Palestinian child was identified by an IDF soldier and intentionally targeted for death. That conclusion is speculative throughout,” he said.

“The COI’s methodology effectively assumes that a child killed in Gaza was both killed by the IDF and intentionally targeted merely because the child died,” he added.

He also noted how the UN presumes no military presence:

“Throughout its incident-by-incident assessments, the COI repeatedly makes comments such as: ‘The Commission could not find any indication of a threat towards members of the Israeli security forces’ (g., para. 58).

“But the COI has no way of knowing whether Hamas or PIJ operatives were present, engaged in combat, or operating from the area at the time of an incident, especially given Hamas’s exclusive use of civilian clothes for combat and its operations from apartments and concealed tunnel shafts beneath civilian areas.”

Aizenberg also noted, as did the Post, the failure to acknowledge that not all minors in Gaza or the West Bank are innocent civilians.

Anne Herzberg, Legal Advisor for NGO Monitor and author of a book on UN fact-finding, told the Post, “The real issue is not that the Commission of Inquiry has issued yet another report erasing Hamas and blood libeling Israel. The actual issue is that this UN Human Rights Council Commission, dedicated to demonizing Israel and which costs millions of dollars in taxpayer funds annually, operates in total secrecy."

"There are nearly 20 staff at this Commission, and the UN has refused to disclose their identities, backgrounds, or what they do. We have no idea if the people manufacturing these reports are qualified for their jobs or their ideological priors. Its claims are almost entirely based on unverified hearsay.This is in violation of UN rules and international law, which this Commission claims to uphold."

"As a result, none of its work can be deemed credible and would never stand up in a real court of law that exercises actual due process and evidentiary standards.”

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