By Dr Dan Steinbock
From Gaza and beyond, Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children. It is in line with the new Obliteration Doctrine and the topic of a new UN report.
When I was working on The Fall of Israel (2024) and particularly The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), what I found most repulsive was the targeting of children in the Gaza Strip.
By late 2024, the testimonies of health professionals on location indicated that the deaths of many children in Gaza were not just collateral damage, but outcomes of deliberate, targeted actions.
The testimony of Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a young American trauma and general surgeon who had volunteered in Palestine including the European Hospital in Khan Younis, was particularly compelling.
“I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones,” Sidhwa said. “But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die.”
The statement of Dr. Sidhwa, who subsequently became one of the endorsers of The Obliteration Doctrine, was supported by dozens of other remarkable and courageous medical volunteers in Gaza. And these testimonies, in turn, have been supported by many reports of multiple international NGOs and multilateral organizations.
So, the latest report of the UN Independent International Commission is hardly new. Nonetheless, it is among the most consequential documents to emerge from the Gaza war. Its conclusion is stark: Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, actions that the Commission argues constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The Commission’s findings
The Commission’s report concludes that the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children is not incidental collateral damage but part of a recurring pattern of conduct. In line with the Genocide Convention, it argues that such actions are a key indicator of genocidal intent because they strike at the future existence of the Palestinian people.
According to the inquiry, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed between October 2023 and October 2025, representing roughly 30 percent of all fatalities, while over 44,000 were injured. Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children reportedly continue to be killed and maimed.
The Commission cites cases involving sniper fire, quadcopter drones, precision-guided munitions, and high-yield bombs used in densely populated civilian areas. It argues that the nature of these weapons systems often allowed operators to identify their targets, including whether they were children.
Israel has rejected the findings as biased and defamatory.
Regardless of political positions, the significance of the report lies in its accumulation of evidence, legal analysis, forensic testimony, and witness accounts. It represents one of the most comprehensive international investigations yet conducted on the impact of the war on children.
It is a condemnation that casts a long dark shadow over the entire Israeli war government and its international collaborators, arms suppliers and financiers.
Children and the logic of genocide
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I showed that modern warfare in Gaza evolved beyond traditional military objectives toward the destruction of the social foundations of Palestinian existence. The Commission’s findings reinforce this interpretation.
Historically, genocide scholars have emphasized that attacks on children occupy a unique place in genocidal campaigns. The 1948 Genocide Convention identifies not only direct killing but also the infliction of conditions calculated to destroy a protected group. In Gaza, famine served the same genocidal function as starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.
Children embody demographic continuity, cultural reproduction, and collective future. Consequently, systematic violence against children has appeared repeatedly in cases later recognized as genocide, from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda.
The Commission explicitly states that targeting children attacks “the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and determine their future.” Its findings connect killings to broader patterns: destruction of schools, hospitals, pediatric facilities, neonatal care units, food systems, and water infrastructure.
That’s the ultimate objective: the genocide and ecocide of Palestine, its culture and children. Israel’s devastation of Lebanon follows in the footprints.
From an empirical perspective, the cumulative effect is measurable. Public-health research consistently demonstrates that childhood exposure to mass violence produces lifelong deficits in physical health, educational attainment, psychological resilience, and economic productivity.
Israel did not triumph in Gaza. Moral darkness did.
Human cost beyond death statistics
Death tolls alone understate the catastrophe. The Commission reports more than 44,000 wounded children.
Gaza now reportedly has one of the world’s highest concentrations of child amputees. Thousands face permanent disability from burns, blast injuries, spinal trauma, vision loss, and neurological damage. Worse, Israel has often denied treatment to thousands of Gazans who lost limbs in Israeli attacks.
Research from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia demonstrates that severely injured children often experience decades of adverse outcomes.
Rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, and developmental impairments can remain elevated throughout adulthood. Educational interruptions reduce lifetime earnings. Family structures collapse under caregiving burdens.
The Commission also documents starvation, disease outbreaks, displacement, and collapse of medical services. Such conditions affect not only present survival but the health of future generations through malnutrition, impaired fetal development, and maternal health crises.
The result is not merely a humanitarian emergency. It is the systematic destruction of human development on a societal scale.
Hind Rajab, the voice that refuses to disappear
This tragedy is symbolized by the short life and unwarranted execution of six-year-old Hind Rajab.
Trapped in a vehicle with relatives during military operations in Gaza, Hind’s desperate phone calls became known worldwide. Audio recordings captured a terrified child trapped in a car in Gaza, pleading for rescue while surrounded by the bodies of family members.
The story is depicted by a Venice-awarded 2025 docudrama by Kaouther Ben Hania about the young girl, whose desperate calls for help to the Red Crescent were recorded and went viral.
Rescue efforts reportedly failed, and Hind was later found dead. The Commission specifically references the case as emblematic of broader patterns under investigation.
Historically, certain victims become moral symbols because they crystallize a larger reality. During the Vietnam War, the photograph of Kim Phúc became such a symbol.
Hind Rajab has become one of the defining voices of Gaza because her case transforms abstraction into human reality.
Statistical discussions of thousands of deaths become impossible to separate from the image of a frightened child waiting for help that never arrived.
High technology and moral decay
One of the most troubling aspects of the Commission’s report is the relationship between technological sophistication and ethical collapse.
Israel possesses some of the world’s most advanced military technologies, including AI-assisted targeting systems, drones, surveillance platforms, precision-guided munitions, biometric monitoring, and integrated battlefield intelligence.
In theory, such capabilities should reduce civilian casualties by improving discrimination between combatants and noncombatants.
Already in The Fall of Israel, two long years ago, I showed that precisely the reverse has taken place. Despite all the official rhetoric of “targeting,” the Palestinians in Gaza were hammered for months by indiscriminate bombing, as even the U.S. intelligence community acknowledged already in late 2023.
In line with the Obliteration Doctrine, modern technology – AI-amplified bombing, or alcocide – was not deployed to optimize precision-targeting. Rather, it was used to maximize deaths. The execution of innocent civilians, particularly children, was no longer just collateral damage, but the tacit objective.
Even as these realities became known, that did not halt bombing, which prevailed over months despite official indignation. The maximized mass atrocities slowed only when the arms transfer supply chains could no longer satisfy the demand.
The Commission concurs. It points to incidents in which advanced systems allegedly enabled more precise killing rather than greater protection. Precision technology does not inherently produce ethical outcomes; it amplifies the intentions guiding its use.
In The Fall of Israel, this was one of the central themes. Technological superiority cannot compensate for moral deterioration. States may achieve unprecedented operational efficiency while simultaneously eroding the ethical restraints necessary for legitimate military conduct.
That’s the rotting moral swamp where the international community stands today.
The cost to Israeli society and soldiers
The consequences do not end with Palestinian victims. When perpetrators are done with their victims, they act out their moral ambivalence on themselves and their loved ones, one way or another.
A growing body of clinical evidence from military psychology demonstrates that participation in, witnessing of, or exposure to violence against civilians, especially children, can generate profound psychological injury among soldiers themselves.
This is what trauma centers in Israel know only too well (and what the government struggles to suppress from the media). The men who return from the indiscriminate killing fields of Gaza – and increasingly Lebanon – are no longer men. They are walking time bombs.
When you are expected to kill without any moral consideration, you continue killing: if not others, then yourself. Research on U.S. veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan has identified high rates of PTSD, depression, substance abuse, suicide risk, and what clinicians increasingly term “moral injury” – psychological damage resulting from participation in, failure to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate deeply held moral beliefs.
Studies consistently show that moral injury can be more persistent than fear-based trauma because it attacks personal identity and ethical self-understanding.
Prolonged occupation and repeated campaigns of collective punishment have contributed to a process of extraordinary social brutalization within Israeli society. The concern is not merely political polarization but normalization of violence. When civilian suffering becomes routine, moral thresholds shift.
History offers sobering parallels. Colonial wars in Algeria, Indochina, and elsewhere often left lasting psychological scars not only on the colonized but on the societies conducting the campaigns.
That’s what happens when the living dead return home.
If Gaza becomes the new norm
The broader international implications may be even more alarming. If the deliberate targeting of children becomes normalized, the consequences extend far, far beyond the Middle East.
International humanitarian law depends fundamentally on protecting civilians, especially children. If powerful states can openly disregard these norms without meaningful accountability, the deterrent effect of international law weakens everywhere.
Empirical evidence suggests that impunity encourages repetition. The failures to prevent atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur contributed to future violations by signaling weak enforcement. Conversely, successful accountability mechanisms have historically reduced recurrence.
The risks include greater regional radicalization, transnational terrorism, refugee flows, intensified great-power rivalry, erosion of international institutions, and the spread of increasingly unrestricted warfare.
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I warned repeatedly that what happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. The Strip became a laboratory for new forms of warfare later exported elsewhere.
The Commission’s findings raise precisely that concern. If the systematic destruction of children, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure becomes accepted in one conflict, future belligerents may invoke the precedent.
The ultimate question raised by the report is therefore not only what happened to Gaza’s children. It is whether the international community is willing to preserve the principle that children remain beyond the reach of war itself.
For if that principle fails in Gaza, it will not survive elsewhere.
This article was originally published on Informed Comment (US) on June 26, 2026
Dr Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). He is also the author of The Fall of Israel and The Obliteration Doctrine. For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
Also by Dr Steinbock
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Several sources in 2025 claimed that IDF shooters were targeting the genitals of teenage boys.
Here’s one source The Middle East Eye:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/international-doctors-gaza-says-palestinian-teens-being-shot-genitals
Tell me, why am I not surprised at these reports?
It’s a blood libel, the IDF is the “world’s most moral army”, according to the butcher Netanyahu.Zionist nazis are putting Hitler in the shade.
There are days when an article turns up (not this one) where the finger hovers over the mouse and thoughts turn to ‘I just can’t look today.’
‘I can’t take yet another horror story’.
‘I don’t want to know’.
‘I just don’t want to know what other sadistic, depraved, deginerate treatment Israelis have come up with to brutalize Palestinians.’
I could never of concieved half the psychopathic shit that Israelis dish out, whether it be making two Palestinian boys sit opposite each other, mouths open and spit into the other’s mouth before they can pass a checkpoint, or tearing a Palestinian prisoner’s rectum by shoving a mobile phone up his arse to see if they could make it ring, or tearing the clothes of a Palestinian woman, tying her naked to a metal table and gang raping her, then leaving her there bleeding overnight in the cold, only to repeat the ordeal the next morning, all while filming it so that they could try to blackmail her into spying for Israel.
If there are angels walking amongst us, then surely Francesca Albanese and Nora Barrows-Freidman are amongst them. They never stop, never shirk the wearing responsiblity of reporting the heinous crimes of Israel in the most gruesome detail. All while being relentlessly persecuted by Zionists.
The Pew Research Center did surveys of Israeli attitudes towards the genocide. I don’t know the very latest one, but not so long ago the percentage of Israelis in favour of the genocide was well above 90%. Norman Finkelstein describes Israel as an insane society.
I don’t like Russians. I have not met many, but they are soulless creatures. Dead behind the eyes, with no thought of anything much beyond the now. Rape, torture, murder and mayhem are what they seem good at. “We are Russians. It is what we do…”
In the Ukraine conflict, the russian military take the Ukraine children away. For reprogramming. The actions of the Israelis in Gaza , the West Bank and now Lebanon, (or wherever else the IDF deploy) make the Russians appear human and moralistic.
“….severely injured children often experience decades of adverse outcomes.
Rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, and developmental impairments can remain elevated throughout adulthood. Educational interruptions reduce lifetime earnings. Family structures collapse under caregiving burdens.”
If it was only this simple.
Israel’s objective is not just destroying the lives of the survivors of its slaughter of the Palestinians, and now the Lebanese. Its objective is to prevent the next generation from ever being. And the the one after that. And the next.
That is pure evil.
Appalling the number of victims including women and children, but where is the ethical and moral leadership to ameliorate this suffering, past, present and future?
Some indie outlets intensely focus on victims, but transfer to themselves as victims? They correctly criticise Israel, but not Israeli allies including Trump, Putin, UAE, Kushner et al; nor supposed allies &/or local neighbours of Gazans who are mute?
However, plenty make Albanese, Wong, Marles et al the target and blame them for the same victims? Risible and what one expects of the RW MSM…. symptom of far right Heritage/Evangelicals Project Esther to pummel the centre and suppress Harris/Dem vote?
Ukraine is related, where one indie outlet, drawing on their US linked ‘expert’ and guess acting on audience feedback ie. why they’ve only reported on Gaza, obsessively, but ignore other conflicts eg Myanmar, Sudan and Ukraine (trying to not to embarrass Putin?).
Response was disgusting, first a rushed insincere apology that it was an illegal Russian invasion, then did a analysis between two points in time comparing Ukraine with Gaza, Lebanon or Iran, quantitatively on victim numbers. Between the cherry picked points in time fewer Ukraine victims*, therefore they are not real victims…..
*Egregiously ignoring deporting 10k’s of children to Russia, Russia’s attitude towards its own Muslim and other minorities as ‘cannon fodder’, three amigos Putin, Netanyahu and Trump, with their Kushner and Murdoch in the background?
When are actual responsible perps and leaders going to be highlighted for their ethical and moral bypasses; conversely a sole focus on victims does not change anything?
New Bruce, I take it from your comment that you’ve never read Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Leo Tolstoy, or Anton Chekhov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Ivan Turgenev, Boris Pasternak… just to name a few out of the many great Russian writers whose insights into the psychology of the human condition have gifted the world with depth and wisdom with respect to this common experience shared by humanity?
You can’t have, with an opening statement that said “I don’t like Russians. I have not met many, but they are soulless creatures.” For those familiar with Russian literature, those authors are the exemplars of the most expressive and exquisite descriptions of the human soul and its travails.
To describe a nation on the basis of an army that’s comprised in part of released convicts – murderers & rapists and god knows what else – is akin to peering through a crack in a door and endeavouring to give a complete description of the room within. It just isn’t possible, and any effort falls far short of reality.
Andrew Smith has been corrected in the past for spreading false US propaganda about Russia kidnapping Ukrainian children, but nothing gets in the way of a servant of The Empire.
This sorry tale began with a report from an organisation funded by the US State Department, specifically a unit set up to implicate Russia in criminal activity.
Yale HRL’s work was funded and guided by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, an entity the Biden administration established in May 2022 to advance the prosecution of Russian officials.
The kidnapping allegation pops up every 2 or 3 months, so it’s worth repeating the following.
This allegation when first made created an outcry in the West, it resulted in a charge against Putin by the ICC, and it was based on nothing.
Even The American Conservative cautioned against the hype — It is common in Ukraine for single mothers or impoverished families to send their children to orphanages hoping one day to reclaim them when their circumstances improve. This makes it difficult for Russian authorities who want to place war orphans in new homes; they don’t know which ones still have parents in Ukraine who might want them back.
The second thing is that child trafficking in Ukraine is a real problem. The U.S. State Department, the European Union, and UNICEF have all named Ukraine as a hotspot for “institution-related trafficking.” Children in orphanages have been sold to American parents by unscrupulous adoption agents or taken away on false pretenses by criminal gangs, who then use the children in any one of their various money-making enterprises. For a fictional treatment of this issue, based on real stories, see the 2014 novel Orphanage 41 by Canadian investigative journalist Victor Malarek, an expert in human trafficking and author of the non-fiction expose The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade. (Yep, this is the wonderful Ukrainian democracy we support.)
In other words, there are good reasons why Russian authorities will not release a child simply because someone in Ukraine claims to be his rightful guardian. The desire to reunite children with their relatives must be balanced against the need to protect children from bad actors. Those concerned with the welfare of these children should put their effort into meeting the criteria the Russian authorities have set for reunification in order to bring them home as soon as possible—and leave charges of “genocide” out of it.
In an interview with Grayzone, Yale HRL’s director Nathaniel Raymond further contradicted allegations he made in a CNN interview about a massive “hostage situation” underway in Russia, acknowledging that most of the camps he researched were “teddy bear”-like cultural programs.
He also disclosed his collaboration with US intelligence.
Yale HRL’s report acknowledges that most of the camps it profiled provided free recreational programs for disadvantaged youth whose parents sought “to protect their children from ongoing fighting” and “ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live.”
Nearly all of the campers returned home in a timely manner after attending with the consent of their parents, according to the paper. The State Department-funded report further concedes that it found “no documentation of child mistreatment.”
Yale HRL Report summary.
https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/russias-systematic-program-for-the-re-education-and-adoption-of-ukraines-children/
Israel will not, of course, accept the UN report and traditional Western media sources are banned from Gaza by Israel.
Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at least 263 journalists and media workers have been killed, dozens have been injured and others are missing. Additionally Israeli military forces have killed at least 1,722 healthcare workers in Gaza.
The Board of Peace was established by Trump to replace UN efforts to oversee the welfare of Palestinians in Gaza and commence the rebuilding of infrastructure: nothing has happened which may well have been the reason the UN were excluded. The Board of peace is led by self appointed Chairman-for-life Donald J Trump and includes key figures such as Jared Kushner, his son-in-law who is anxious to develop the real estate of Gaza for commercial gain.
What do we expect?
Terry,
it is timely that you raise the Board of Peace and its key figures.
The Cradle has an article that if I were to summize, with all my biases, would be that the board is moving to grant itself immunity from prosecution so that it can finally make its naked grab of Gazan land for real estate.
https://thecradle.co/articles/trumps-board-of-peace-claims-right-to-confiscate-palestinian-land-in-gaza-immunity-from-prosecution-report
The UN security council has often and long been a stain on the UN itself. The council’s rubber stamping of Trump’s Board of Peace surely stands as one of the worst stains.
“The broader international implications may be even more alarming. If the deliberate targeting of children becomes normalized, the consequences extend far, far beyond the Middle East.
International humanitarian law depends fundamentally on protecting civilians, especially children. If powerful states can openly disregard these norms without meaningful accountability, the deterrent effect of international law weakens everywhere.”
Immediately raises the hairs on the back of my neck. Labor’s turning of a blind-eye, only to raise meek, tepid protests as an Australian aid worker is murdered, or when a fleet of ambulances ambushed, the paramedics executed and buried with their ambulances, when mainstream media is awash with pictures of emanciated children, or when a cohort of Australians come back telling of their rape at the hands of the Israelis.
That is, only when the media is awash with a story so bad and to such an extent it becomes politically expedient to say something.
That is normalization of violence.
That is tacit support for the undermining of International law, the ICJ and the ICC.
That is detrimental to the future of Australian grandchildren, who will grow up in a crueller world, where any thought of ‘might is right’ being the wrong approach is ridiculed and instead a dog eat dog mentality promoted.
But, this time guilt was also raised, as I thought where was this anger towards either our ongoing genocide of our First Nations people, or at best our attempts to bury the genocide in the same way the Israelis tried to bury those paramedics and ambulances.
For I’d recently read an excellent article on The Shot by Dave Milner, that outlined Uncle Robbie Thorpe’s stance against the burying of our genocide. I think uncletimrob may have alluded to the article, or at least Uncle Robbie Thorpe’s battle earlier.
https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/uncle-robbie-thorpe-and-the-truth-vs-king-charles-and-the-law/
Is the consequence of the normalization of violence, or at least discrimination, towards our First Nations people the rejection of a voice to Parliament, whilst blindly accepting – how did Dr. Klein put it – Zionists not needing to petition government, they run it?
Are we the consequences, not just of some twinkle in the eye, but also of our grandparent’s normalization of violence and discrimination towards First Nations people.
The facts of the matter are, I suggest, that humanity is undergoing a slow slide towards barbarism. For all the fine words, thoughts and deeds of those who are sensitive to such phenomena, and I salute & support your efforts, but the reality is that the dark forces currently in play will continue until their energy is exhausted. This planet has been kicking along for more than 4 billions years, aeons & eras & ages have come and gone, arisen and fallen, both geologically, organically, and in the context of successive human communities, and the processes continue, such is the way of things. It’s our fate, unfortunately, to be born and to live in these times and be witness to the barbarities and atrocities that plague the planet – wars, ecosystem decimations, the scourge of inequality and the consequent sufferings of those who are unable to access an even deal in the game and more. By all means, never give up, fight the good fight… it’s the better way to be, even if it feels at time a bit like that line in Neil Young’s song from his 1974 On the Beach, Ambulance Blues, where he sang You’re all just pissin’ in the wind.
For what it’s worth, the great psychologist and seer Carl Jung prophesised this state of affairs in his seminal Red Book, a vision that’s been well discussed and developed by Peter Kingsley in his extraordinary Catafalque, subtitled Carl Jung and the End of Humanity.
I recommend watching this item from ‘Politics Joe’ in which Chris Sidoti who is the Australian member of the Independent Commission which investigated and reported on the crimes of Israel against children speaks powerfully. He speaks at 10. 25 of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-tONvJ7-pMw