An International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory report says the essence of childhood has been destroyed in Gaza.

Most people probably won’t read the United Nation’s 94-page report released on 23 June because it’s very long and written in formal legal and investigative language. Like many reports about serious human suffering, it may end up being stored away, occasionally referenced but not actually read by the general public, in whose name politicians make decisions about the situation described.

However, this report must be read, not because it tells us something we didn’t know, but because it records, in painstaking detail, something we already knew and have watched unfold for three years.

For months and years, images emerged, are still emerging, from Gaza that required no interpretation and no legal expertise: images of parents carrying the bodies of their children through shattered streets; of hospitals overwhelmed by casualties; of schools reduced to rubble; of families living in tents after being displaced again and again; of children........

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