There is a line in the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry report, released on June 23, 2026, that ought to stop the world cold. The commission’s chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, stated without qualification, “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.” This is not the language of diplomatic reprimand. It is the language of genocide and the commission uses that word deliberately, having already concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. The June report adds the unbearable specificity: it is the children who are the primary instrument and target of this genocide.

Between October 7, 2023, and March 31, 2026 – a period spanning two years and five months – at least 20,179 Palestinian children were killed, with a further 44,143 injured. Children constituted approximately 30% of the total death toll, a proportion higher than any previous conflict involving Israel and higher than the comparative averages from the 2008-2009 and 2014 Gaza wars, when children made up approximately 24% of the fatalities.

These are not deaths attributable to the general chaos of urban warfare. The commission documents a pattern of individual children being killed by single sniper or drone shots, typically in the head or upper torso. According to doctors on medical missions, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers appeared to be engaged in what they described as a “game” of target practice, with “different body parts being targeted on different days.” The commission concluded, on the basis of forensic evidence and military analysis, that there are reasonable grounds to believe some children were deliberately attacked.

Palestinian children receive donated food at a community kitchen in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, Photo: AP/PTI.

The targeting was not only individual, but also infrastructural and existential. The report records the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, orphanages and neonatal care centres – all facilities that enjoy special protection under international law and that in Gaza collectively constituted the entire material basis of Palestinian childhood. Starvation, imposed through blockade and siege, caused deaths among children and severely impaired the development of those who survived.

Immunisation rates collapsed as the healthcare system was dismantled. The commission noted that nearly all children remaining in Gaza require psychological support; it identified a condition it calls the “occupied psyche,” an intergenerational mental state in which the freedom to play, to imagine, to hope and to construct an identity has been structurally eroded. “Even if the bombs and guns fall silent,” Muralidhar said, “Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight. The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible.”

Read this and then ask yourself: What exactly is the international community doing? And before that, ask something harder: How did we arrive at a world in which this question is required asking?

The architecture of impunity

The answer to the second question has a long history and a very specific institutional architecture. Israel has operated, for over seven decades, under the assumption, validated repeatedly by events, that it is above international law. This assumption was constructed by the United States veto in the UN Security Council and deployed without exception to block accountability for Israeli actions since 1967.

It was enforced by the peculiar grammar of Western political discourse in which any criticism of Israeli state policy is immediately labelled anti-Semitism, a charge whose moral authority derives from the Holocaust and whose political function has rendered Israel uniquely immune to the standards applied to every other state. It was promoted by decades of unconditional arms transfers, diplomatic protection and intelligence sharing that have taught successive Israeli governments that no action – not the settlement programme that international law has declared illegal for over........

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