UN commission of inquiry says Israel committing genocide in Gaza by deliberately targeting children

Israel is also legally responsible for failing to protect Palestinian children from being targeted by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank, it adds.The report also says that children in Gaza and the West Bank, especially adolescent boys, have been "arrested, tortured, and ill-treated in Israeli prisons and detention facilities", and that it has documented "incidents of sexual and gender-based violence targeting Palestinian children, often during arrests or in detention".Israeli attacks on neonatal and paediatric hospitals in Gaza have meanwhile "systematically dismantled children's access to life-sustaining care, undermining their survival as a protected group", according to the report.It also accuses Israel of using starvation as a method of war, and warns that restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza have "produced acute and chronic malnutrition among children in Gaza, removing the basic conditions necessary for their survival".And it alleges that through attacks on schools, mass displacement and enforced closures, Israeli authorities have "systematically disrupted children's ability to learn, thereby sabotaging the intellectual and social foundations of Palestinian society itself".The Israeli foreign ministry condemned the report, saying the commission was a "fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel rather than seek the truth"."It completely erases Israeli children who were brutally murdered, kidnapped, and targeted by Hamas, while ignoring Hamas' cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war," it added. It accused the commission of lacking "any credible verification mechanism for its claims".Israel's leaders have consistently rejected allegations of genocide, and say its military's operations in Gaza have been conducted in self-defence, to defeat Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, and to secure the release of Israeli hostages.