The United Nations commission of inquiry did something remarkable in its latest report. It took a sentence spoken by a doctor in the wreckage of Gaza’s health system – “the essence of childhood has been destroyed” – and made it the title of an 89-page indictment against the state of Israel. The report, published on June 18, concludes that Israeli authorities have committed genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children.
The numbers are almost beyond comprehension: at least 20,179 Palestinian children killed and 44,143 injured between October 2023 and October 2025. More than 5,000 of the dead were under five years old. Save the Children estimates a further 5,160 lie buried beneath the rubble, uncounted. Commissioner Chris Sidoti has said the true toll is far higher – “tens of thousands more children who have died as a consequence of this fighting”.
These are not statistics. They are children. They are the future of a people. And they were chosen.
The report’s central finding is that “much of the harm suffered by Palestinian children was not incidental, but intended to destroy the existence of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group”. Because children embody the biological and social continuity of a people, killing them is a way of killing the people’s future. That is the architecture of the charge.
But here is what I want to talk about: the response.
Israel’s foreign ministry called the report a “libellous sham” and “a propaganda piece.” The usual playbook. Dismiss, deflect, deny. But the usual playbook is wearing thin. Because what we are witnessing is not a war. It is not even a genocide in the abstract sense of international law. It is something older and more terrible: the systematic erasure of a people’s capacity to exist.
Consider what the report documents. The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s three specialist children’s hospitals. The fall of working incubators from 178 to 54. Babies laid three and four to an incubator, or dying of cold because the hospitals could no longer keep them warm. A forty-one percent fall in births. A tripling of maternal mortality. A generation of newborns arriving premature, underweight, or with congenital defects.
Consider the precision. Seventeen doctors described to the commission a consistent stream of children shot “one shot only to the head or the upper torso”. Quadcopter drones with thermal imagery and infrared cameras – weapons that can distinguish a child’s body shape from an adult’s – used to target the young. Soldiers describing the killing as “like a video game”.
Consider the cruelty. A fourteen-year-old boy bleeding to death on the ground for forty-five minutes while Israeli soldiers stood around him, kicking his cap back when he pushed it out to signal he was still alive. His mother shot at when she tried to reach him. An ambulance prevented from approaching by a laser targeted at the driver’s head.
Consider the unborn. In December 2023, the Israeli military struck the Al-Basma IVF Centre, Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, destroying over 4,000 embryos. The erasure of a generation that never had the chance to be born.
And consider the silence. The commission took the extraordinary decision not to name the Palestinian children whose deaths it documented, for fear of Israeli reprisals against their families. The UN – the United Nations – had to strip away the identities of dead children to protect their loved ones from further harm.
What are we supposed to do with this?
The Security Council, as Sidoti has said, is “totally dysfunctional” and will not act. The legal machinery grinds on – the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court – but accountability, if it comes at all, will take years.
In the meantime, the killing continues. The starvation continues. The destruction of schools continues – 459 of Gaza’s 564 school buildings directly hit. An entire cohort of children has now missed three years of formal education.
And our governments – the governments of the West, the ones that arm Israel, that fund Israel, that shield Israel from accountability at every turn – continue to look away.
This is not a partisan point. It is a statement of fact. The weapons that kill Palestinian children are Western weapons. The diplomatic cover that allows Israel to continue is Western diplomatic cover. The arms embargoes that are not imposed, the sanctions that are not applied, the arrests that are not made – these are choices. Active, deliberate choices.
The report’s recommendations run in a clear direction: an arms embargo, targeted sanctions on ministers, officers and violent settlers, the arrest of anyone the ICC indicts, and Israel’s listing among the world’s persistent perpetrators of grave violations against children. These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum of what international law requires.
And yet, as I write this, British citizens are being arrested and imprisoned for holding placards. For speaking the truth about what their government is enabling. For demanding that the killing stop.
The state that arms and shields Israel has made it a crime to protest against that arming. Let that sink in.
Sidoti, who has investigated genocide in three different contexts – the forced removal of Indigenous children in Australia, the violent expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar, and now Gaza – said something that should haunt us. In Myanmar, children died alongside their parents; there was no sign of children being singled out. In Gaza, the commission found they were – “the specific targeting and killing of children in the way that we have in Gaza”.
This is not collateral damage. This is not the fog of war. This is selection. Deliberate, systematic, state-directed selection.
The report’s title was spoken by a doctor in Gaza, reaching for words to describe what he was treating. The essence of childhood has been destroyed. What the doctor meant was not just that children were dying. It was that childhood itself – the possibility of growing up, of learning, of dreaming, of becoming – had been extinguished.
A generation of Palestinian children is growing up without limbs. Without parents. Without schools. Without homes. Without a future.
And the world is letting it happen.
The hardest crime in international law to prove has, in the judgement of the three jurists who investigated it, been proven. Its victims are children. Its architects sit in government. Its enablers sit in Westminster, in Washington, in parliaments across the West.
We have run out of words. “Genocide.” “Crimes against humanity.” “War crimes.” These terms have been deployed so often, in so many contexts, that they risk losing their power to shock. But they should not. They must not.
Because what is happening in Gaza is not abstract. It is not distant. It is the deliberate, systematic destruction of a people’s future, carried out with Western weapons and Western impunity, broadcast on our screens, documented by our institutions, and denied by our governments.
The commission’s report is a document of record. It is evidence. It is a judgment. But it is not an end. It is a beginning – or it should be.
The question is not whether we have the evidence. We do. The question is not whether the law has been broken. It has. The question is whether we have the will to act.
Sidoti said something else in his interview. He said that in a hundred years of this conflict, “there has never been a period of such uncontrolled violence”. He said that “all the natural sympathy that Israel had has been destroyed” by the actions of the Israeli government and military. And he said that there is no going back.
He is right. There is no going back. The world that existed before October 2023 is gone. The question is what comes next.
Will we continue to look away? Will we continue to arm the killers and imprison the protesters? Will we continue to treat the systematic murder of children as a political disagreement rather than a crime against humanity?
Or will we finally, finally act?
The essence of childhood has been destroyed. The essence of our humanity is on the line.