CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

When the Children Become the Target

A 6 ⁄ 16 More details A wounded Palestinian infant at Al-Shifa Hospital, October 2023. Photo: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa). CC BY-SA 3.0.

On June 23, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel released one of the most devastating reports ever produced by a UN investigative body on the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Its title is almost unbearable to read: The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed. Behind the title lies an accusation of extraordinary gravity. The Commission concludes that Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children and that these actions amount to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, alongside war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

The report is not an emotional appeal. It is a painstaking legal document built upon witness testimony, forensic evidence, satellite imagery, military analysis, medical records, and years of documentation. What it presents is not merely another catalogue of civilian casualties. It argues that the killing, maiming, starvation, detention and psychological destruction of Palestinian children cannot be explained as collateral damage. Rather, the Commission concludes that children themselves have become deliberate targets of Israeli military policy. The implications of such a finding reach far beyond Gaza. They raise fundamental questions about the future of international law itself.

A Report of Extraordinary Gravity

The Commission estimates that since October 2023, at least 20,179 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 44,000 injured. Approximately thirty per cent of all Palestinians killed have been children. These figures alone place the Gaza war among the deadliest conflicts for children in modern history. Yet the report’s importance lies not simply in the numbers but in its conclusions regarding intent.

It documents repeated instances in which children were shot by snipers, attacked by drones, struck while seeking food or water, or killed despite posing no military threat – as should have been obvious. It examines the repeated use of high-yield explosives in densely populated civilian areas long after the predictable consequences for children had become undeniable. It details attacks on maternity hospitals, neonatal wards, schools, orphanages and shelters. It also examines the blockade of food, water and medicine, showing how starvation, disease and the collapse of medical services have become instruments of war directed against an entire civilian population whose youngest members are the most vulnerable.

The Commission investigates Israeli detention practices involving Palestinian minors. Children arrested in Gaza and the West Bank describe torture, sexual violence, degrading treatment and disappearance into detention facilities without information being provided to their families. Such abuses, the report........

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