Transcription
A 10-day-old baby was shot in the head while being breastfed by his mother. A tank ran over a 16-year-old boy, mutilating his body. Israeli soldiers deliberately shot teenage boys in a game of target practice. Just three quotes from a horrific new UN report that describes Gaza as the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.
Produced by the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, the report accuses the Israelis of deliberately targeting children as part of an ongoing campaign of genocide. I'm going to read parts of that report to you. I'll warn you, this is not an easy listen, but remember this is being done with American weapons and with the complicity of the wider Western world. Britain in particular has flown daily surveillance flights over Gaza to support the Israelis. Remember that as you read the fatuous political obituaries for Kamba that describe him as a fundamentally decent man who was simply too high-minded for the sordid world of British politics.
The 24th of January 2024, Alamal in the central Gaza Strip. A 15-year-old boy is shot dead by snipers as he emerges from a house holding a white cloth after residents are ordered by the Israeli military to evacuate. As he rushes to help, his 20-year-old brother is also shot dead. As the mother tries to signal for an ambulance, she is shot and injured. The father is forced back by gunfire every time he tries to reach the bodies.
August 2024, Carunis. Two 16-year-old female cousins are both killed by single shots to the head from a quadcopter while attending a wedding.
24th of August 2024, Kunis, a 4-year-old girl is shot in the head by a quadcopter while eating dinner with her family.
10th of December 2024, Borage refugee camp. An 8-year-old boy is shot in the buttock by a sniper while playing outside the family's dwelling.
29th of November 2025, Bani Sua after the supposed ceasefire. Two brothers aged nine and 10 are killed in a drone strike while collecting firewood for their wheelchair-bound father. Their crime: to have crossed Israel's arbitrary and constantly shifting yellow line.
Doctors interviewed by the commission say they received a steady stream of children with direct gunshot wounds to their head and upper body. "Based on the clustering of injuries and the targeted body parts, I assess that the Israeli soldiers have been deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice. A different body part being targeted on different days," one doctor tells the commission.
Even when not specifically targeted, children suffer appallingly from indiscriminate attacks and bombardment.
20th of December 2023. Shake Radwan. Without warning, Israeli soldiers throw four hand grenades into a house containing 30 family members. A 5-year-old boy is badly injured, suffering abdominal evisceration. The soldiers enter the house and shoot dead eight people, including the boy's pregnant mother, shot in the abdomen and the breasts, and father shot in the head. The child is later treated by a doctor who reinserted his exposed intestines by using diapers and taped his stomach.
19th of December 2023, a 17-year-old girl is badly injured in an air strike. The house is surrounded by Israeli military. Unable to get her to a hospital, the girl's uncle, a doctor, amputates her leg using household implements and without anesthetic.
21st of July 2025, the Aljinan kindergarten in Gaza City is indirectly hit when classes are in progress. A number of children are injured.
23rd of May 2025, KH Ununice, while pediatrician Allah al-Naja is at work. An air strike kills her husband and nine of her 10 children. Gaza's three main pediatric hospitals have been repeatedly attacked.
10th of November 2023, staff at the Al-Nasa Hospital in Gaza City are forced to hurriedly evacuate under fire. When television cameras reach the hospital two weeks later, they find the decomposing bodies of four babies in the neonatal intensive care unit.
And then, of course, there's the story of 5-year-old Hind Rajab, who spent hours sitting alone in a bullet-riddled car after her four cousins and aunt and uncle were killed. Yeah, she eventually died of her wounds. The two medics sent to rescue her, having been killed by the Israelis.
Children in Gaza are routinely detained and are not spared the humiliation of forced nudity imposed on adults. One witness described how a female Israeli soldier in Gaza ordered two teenage boys who'd been stripped to their underwear to dance in front of other detainees and recorded a video of them dancing while she was laughing.
In detention, children are often subjected to the same brutality as adult inmates. A 15-year-old boy taken to the notorious Sedate Man prison told the commission, "Israeli soldiers made him stand with his hands raised for hours as punishment on multiple occasions. His legs were shackled with metal chains and hands cuffed so tightly that they would bleed. He was allowed to sleep for only four hours on a thin mattress with only a thin blanket during winter. Israeli soldiers entered his cell with dogs made him and other detainees lie on their stomachs and released the dogs on them."
Videos and photos posted online by Israeli soldiers show them reveling in the mutilation of childhood. According to the report, in the two years after October the 7th, 2023, at least 20,179 children were killed in Gaza, including 420 newborn babies. In addition, more than 5,000 children are thought to lie dead under the rubble. There are more child amputees per capita than any other place on the planet.
The Israelis make little pretense that they seek to spare children. The deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vati, has said, "Erase Gaza. Do not leave a child there. Expel all the remaining ones at the end so that they will not have a resurrection. Every child born there is already a terrorist from the moment of his birth."
The UN report then turns to the West Bank, which played no part in the events of October the 7th and is not run by Hamas. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed there since October the 7th, including more than 200 children.
25th of January 2025, Muellath al-Shuhara, south of Janine, a 2-year-old girl is shot in the back of the head while having dinner with her family.
8th of January 2025, Tamoon, 8-year-old Raider Ali Basharat and 10-year-old Hamza Amar Basharat are killed by a drone along with a 23-year-old while sitting in front of their home. The Israelis accused them of "messing with the ground," a catch-all charge intended to prevent planting explosives, but which can also cover someone simply stooping to pick up a stone.
28th of January, 2025, Tulcarum. 10-year-old Saddam Rajab is shot outside his home. The Israelis detained the ambulance for half an hour. "I am the one who shot your son. God willing, he will die," a soldier tells the boy's father. He does two weeks later. Again, the accusation is "messing with the ground."
16th of November 2025, Al Farra refugee camp. 14-year-old Jad Jadala is shot by Israeli soldiers while playing outside with his cousin and left lying on the floor for 45 minutes as he bleeds to death. The soldiers place a stone next to him to suggest he'd been throwing stones. They then take a picture.
Palestinian children face violent assaults by Israeli settlers, the report says. In April 2025, two settlers abducted two siblings, a girl and a boy under five years. While they were playing outside their village home, the settlers dragged the children at knife point to an olive grove while covering their mouths. They tied the children to a tree using plastic hand ties. The family arrived at the scene some 5 minutes later, untied the children, and released them.
In another incident on the 18th of October 2024, a 16-year-old boy with hearing impairment was beaten by around 15 Israeli settlers carrying sticks and knives while he was working alone in his farm in Salit. The settlers took turns kicking him.
The report describes teenage girls being sexually assaulted at checkpoints. It describes bands of young settlers attacking primary schools. Terrified children cower in the classrooms.
Again, the Israelis make little pretense. "Children deserve protection." Earlier this year, Knesset member Yitz Croza declared, "We back our soldiers at any cost, regardless of the outcome. In Janine, there are no innocent children."
The conduct of the Israelis does not constitute mere incidental harm or collateral damage done to Palestinian children. The report concludes, "On the contrary, Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers have directly and intentionally targeted Palestinian children. It's a key element in the Israeli authorities' genocidal intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza."
This is not complicated, as Western news editors love to tell us. It is genocide, and we are complicit.
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