U.N. Report Says Israeli Killings of Gaza Children Post-Truce Amount to Genocide

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.”

- Author: Nick Cumming-Bruce, The New York Times