At least 20,179 children were killed and 44,143 wounded in Gaza between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2025, according to a report published on Tuesday by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The report said that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting children and could be committing genocide.
The commission, which operates under the UN Human Rights Council, said children account for 30 percent of all those killed and 26 percent of all wounded in the conflict. It found that an average of one child death per day has been recorded since a ceasefire took effect in October.
Seventeen medical workers at Gaza hospitals told commission investigators that children's bodies showed single gunshot wounds, a pattern the experts said is consistent with deliberate targeting.
"In such cases, this pattern indicates the intentional targeting of a child," the report said.
The commission also cited accounts suggesting Israeli soldiers competed with one another by targeting different parts of teenage boys' bodies on successive days.
The report also documents sexual violence against children, which it described as "a systemic, state-supported attack on their bodies and dignity, applied deliberately to humiliate."
One unnamed boy reported being raped multiple times by different guards.
The report also describes a hazard posed by Israel's so-called yellow line—a movable boundary marked by yellow-painted concrete blocks placed every 200 meters, crossing which can result in death.
The commission cited the case of two brothers, aged nine and 10, shot while gathering firewood near the line, which Israeli forces said they had crossed.
"The Commission finds that there are reasonable grounds to conclude that Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces continue to commit the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem," the report said.
The commission said it found three of four criteria for genocide to be met: destruction in whole or in part of the Palestinian community, killing of group members and inflicting serious physical and psychological harm, and deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction.
A previous commission report in September also concluded that Israel was committing genocide.
The Israeli foreign ministry dismissed the findings as "an equally scandalous propaganda piece as its predecessors," saying the report aimed to "vilify" Israel.
"It completely ignores Israeli children who were brutally murdered, kidnapped and attacked by Hamas, while ignoring Hamas' cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war," the ministry said, added that the Commission of Inquiry (COI) "has no credible mechanism to verify its claims."
(jh/gs)
Source: Polish Radio