Nouakchott: A UN commission has concluded that Israeli occupation forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, amounting to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. A report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Al Quds (Jerusalem), detailed violations against Palestinian children since the war began on 7 October 2023.
According to Oman News Agency, the report found that children accounted for about 30 percent of the fatalities in the Gaza war. A previous commission report in September concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and that senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had incited such acts.
The UN commission stated that Palestinian children were deliberately targeted during the war and after the ceasefire took effect in October 2025. This, it said, constitutes a key element proving genocidal intent on the part of the Israeli occupation and its security forces to destroy the Palestinian community, in whole or in part, in Gaza.
'The evidence shows that Palestinian children were deliberately targeted by Israeli security forces,' commission chairperson Srinivasan Muralidhar said in a statement accompanying the report. The report found that the proportion of child victims was higher than in previous conflicts. Between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025, at least 20,179 children were killed - about 30 percent of the total number of fatalities.
By comparison, the report noted that children accounted for about 24 percent of conflict-related deaths in Gaza during the 2008-2009 and 2014 military operations. The commission reported that Israeli forces continued to use large-explosive munitions and wide-impact weapons in densely populated residential areas, despite the rising number of child fatalities.
'This indicates that such attacks, which resulted in the deaths of large numbers of children, were deliberate,' the commission said. It expressed its belief that children were targeted collectively because the Israeli occupation forces considered the civilian population to be linked to Hamas and other armed factions.