Israel’s ‘deliberate targeting’ of children part of Gaza ‘genocide’: UN probe
GENEVA
Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children in what has become a key factor in an ongoing “genocide” in Gaza, United Nations investigators charged on June 23, in a report slammed by Israel.
The U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry said it had found evidence that “Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli security forces.”
This, it said, was a key factor in establishing “the genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the larger Palestinian group in Gaza.”
Around 30 percent of those killed in the Gaza war were children, the report found.
The three-member investigative team, which does not speak for the U.N. itself, first determined in a report last September that Israel had committed “genocide” in the war in Gaza, a finding Israel flatly rejected.
In the June 23 follow-up report, they said the intense scale and systematic nature of Israeli military operations had continued, resulting in the “unprecedented” death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children.
There were “reasonable grounds” to conclude that Israel’s authorities and security forces “have continued to commit the crime of genocide” in Gaza, they said.
The commission, which was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2021, examined for its latest report crimes affecting Palestinian children, and how living conditions imposed by Israel in Gaza were “resulting in preventable mortality of children.”
“Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and war crimes in the West Bank,” the team said in a statement.
The commission said that severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood, separation, disability, repeated displacements, starvation, and the collapse of education and healthcare had “erased childhood” in Gaza and would continue to affect the territory’s children throughout their lives.
Israel, which has long been harshly critical of the commission, slammed the report as “defamatory” and a “libelous sham.”
The report came days after the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said at least 265 children were killed and hundreds more wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect.