A U.N. report released on Tuesday accused Israeli security forces of abuse and deliberate killings of Palestinian children eight months after Israel and Hamas reached a truce in the Gaza Strip.
The report was compiled by an independent commission of three senior international jurists who investigated the violence. It concluded that the killings were part of a strategy to destroy the future of Palestinians in Gaza and said that this amounted to genocide.
The commission also documented killings of Palestinian children by Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank, which it said were war crimes.
The report considers anyone under 18 to be a child, “consistent with article 1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” While the report did not address the possibility that older minors could have been combatants, it assessed that the high number of boys killed “reflects a policy of targeting boys due to their perceived threat as terrorists and ‘future terrorists.’”
It did not provide any figures for the death toll of children since the cease-fire was reached.
“Even after the October 2025 cease-fire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the cease-fire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,” the commission chairman, Srinivasan Muralidhar, said in a statement.
“The protection, care and survival of Palestinian children are inseparable from the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” he added. “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.”
Israel’s U.N. mission in Geneva dismissed the report in a statement as a “libelous sham” and condemned the U.N. commission as a “fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel.”
The Israeli foreign ministry also criticized the commission, saying on social media that it “completely erases Israeli children who were brutally murdered, kidnapped, and targeted by Hamas, while ignoring Hamas’ cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war.”
The investigators’ findings underscore increasing alarm among U.N. and other international humanitarian agencies over the failure of the October cease-fire in Gaza to deliver peace.
One Palestinian child has been killed on average every day since the start of the cease-fire, the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, said last week.
“They were killed in their homes, in their schools, playing football, fishing. They were shot, bombed and hit by airstrikes,” said James Elder, a UNICEF spokesman. He called the truce a “cruel and deadly illusion.”
The commission of inquiry reported in September 2025 that Israeli forces had conducted “extensive and deliberate” targeting of children. It said this was a key factor in the commission’s establishment of Israel’s genocidal intent in the two-year Gaza war, which was set off by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza, where Hamas is in control, has estimated that more than 21,000 Palestinian children were killed during the Gaza war.
The report said at least 5,031 children under 5 years were killed during this period, 1,029 of them under the age of 1, and about 420 were newborns.
The commission said its report drew on information from health care workers, lawyers, academics and journalists as well as interviews with minors, when possible, and other sources. It said it had sent 13 requests for information to Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, but had received no reply.
The Israeli foreign ministry said the commission of inquiry “lacks any credible verification mechanism for its claims.”
The report said Israel has targeted Palestinian children in Gaza in two ways. One is by directly shooting and also “through use of high-impact weapons causing widespread and systematic attacks on residential buildings, schools and displacement camps crowded with children.”
It also criticized Israel for failing to protect Palestinian children in the West Bank from being targeted by Israeli security forces and Jewish settlers.
The report included an account of the death in 2025 of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in the West Bank’s Al-Faraa refugee camp. It said he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he left his house to play with a cousin and friend.
According to the commission’s report, Israeli soldiers were seen on a video standing around the boy for 45 minutes watching as he bled to death, shooting at his mother to stop her from coming to his aid and preventing an ambulance from reaching him.
Asked about that incident on Tuesday, the Israeli military said “a terrorist” was identified who attempted to attack soldiers during an operation in the Faraa camp. The soldiers fired at him and wounded him, then provided him with initial medical treatment, the military said.
The report said Israeli forces have continued to detain Palestinian minors, particularly adolescent boys, holding them in prisons and detention centers where they were “routinely subject to torture and physical violence,” including some cases of sexual violence.
The Israeli authorities denied them access to lawyers and parents and withheld information on their whereabouts, according to the report.
Israel’s attacks on hospitals in Gaza and the destruction of neonatal and maternity facilities had a particularly severe impact, the commission said, systematically dismantling children’s access to essential care. That led to increased and preventable mortality — challenges amplified by Israel’s siege tactics leading to hunger and chronic malnutrition.
“Over two years, the birthrate in Gaza has decreased, undermining the continuity of the Palestinian population,” the commission said.
Although food supplies to Gaza have increased since the cease-fire, U.N. and international humanitarian agencies say aid efforts continue to be hampered by Israeli restrictions on supplies of fuel, spare parts and equipment.
“Restrictions on essential medicines mean wounded children are enduring greater pain and face an increased risk of infection, complications and more amputations,” Mr. Elder of UNICEF said.
The commission’s report identifies 11 Israeli military units linked to the killing and injury of Palestinian minors.
