Dan Steinbock Informed Comment
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 my book, 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 since the October 2025 ceasefire, at least 265 children have been killed by Israeli military fire, and 400 more injured, many of them with “catastrophic” wounds.
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 supress 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.
Photo by Hosny salah: via Pexels
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.
Dan Steinbock is the author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, . He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
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