The world must stop Israel’s unprecedented assault on Palestinian children
Noam Peleg writes in Middle East Eye on 18 July 2026:
The UN commission report released last month found that Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children in its ongoing campaign of genocide. It details and demonstrates Israel’s genocidal intent to destroy Palestinians, in whole or in part.
The report makes for sobering reading. It details the slaughter of more than 20,000 Palestinian children, and the wounding of 44,000 others, since Israel’s assault on Gaza began in October 2023. The findings present a damning indictment not just of Israel, but also of the global community that has actively enabled the destruction of a generation by failing to prevent genocide as mandated by international law, and to enforce the International Court of Justice’s set of provisional measures issued in early 2024.
The report is grounded in international children’s rights law, which was born in the aftermath of World War I, with the League of Nations adopting the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924. The declaration recognises children’s vulnerability and imposes obligations on states and the international community to protect them in times of peace and war.
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Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children is not new. For decades, human rights groups, UN bodies and scholars have documented Israel’s ongoing violations of the rights of Palestinian children. Organisations such as Defence for Children International, Al-Haq, Unicef and Unrwa have tracked these abuses and issued explicit calls for states to intervene.
In October 2023, days after Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza, UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese published a report covering the preceding period, detailing decades of killing, maiming, jailing and orphaning of Palestinian children of all ages, resulting in personal, generational and collective trauma.