“Childhood has been erased.” It is in black and white in the report that the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry made public on 23 June 2026, entitled The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed: Israel’s Deliberate Attack on Palestinian Children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023. With this glacial and administrative formula, the United Nations certifies what the whole world has now learned to name without hesitation: a genocide. Not a war. Not a conflict. Genocide.
In twenty and a half months, from the onset of October 7, 2023, The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have killed more than 21,000 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip. The number comes from the Palestinian health authorities and is recognized as reliable by the United Nations itself. Another 44,143 were injured. These are not neutral statistics: there is a strategy behind these numbers.
According to the Commission chaired by the Indian jurist Srinivasan Muralidhar, the deliberate attacks on minors are part of a broader plan, that of “destroying the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian group”. In short, it is what the 1948 Genocide Convention defines as genocide: the systematic killing of a people.
The architects of this massacre operate from a position of almost total impunity. The truce of October 10, 2025 did not stop the violence; he simply transformed her. The report documents that «Even after the ceasefire, Palestinian children continue to be killed». With the typical precision of international legal language, UN investigators have cataloged the methods of this massacre: The IDF shoots minors with precision weapons and drones during attacks on residential compounds, schools and overcrowded refugee camps. They targeted the maternity and neonatal departments, thus causing an increase in spontaneous abortions and genital malformations which would undermine the very biological reproduction capacity of the Palestinian population.
Added to this are torture. The report states that in the West Bank and Gaza, children and adolescents were “arrested, tortured and ill-treated” in Israeli detention centers, where they suffered “episodes of sexual and gender-based violence.” He who does not die from weapons perishes from famine. The Israeli blockade, constantly maintained, has meant that Gaza has become a dead-end trap, where children die of malnutrition, where the collapse of health services exposes minors to endemic diseases, where the absence of clean water has itself become a weapon. Those who survive this hell are not saved: faces “a lifetime of disability”now “a decisive demographic reality” among minors in Gaza.
Jerusalem’s response was immediate and predictable. Israeli authorities called the report a “slanderous farce”accusing UN investigators of ignoring “the brutal tactics of Hamas”, of not considering how the Palestinians would use children as “human shields”. It is a narrative that is punctually repeated after every international condemnation: the victimization of the strongest State in the face of witnesses of its own violence.
In last September’s report, the same Commission had already certified that Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts sanctioned by the Convention: systematic killing, serious injury to physical and mental integrity, the imposition of conditions aimed at total or partial destruction, measures to prevent births.
What the UN documents fail to fully capture is the scale of moral collapse, the fact that an entire Palestinian generation was deliberately attacked in its childhood, in its ability to dream, to grow, to become. «The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible» warns Muralidhar. The wounds will not heal with medicine. Traumas do not heal with time. This is what the world has chosen not to stop.
