While the world breathed a sigh of relief as the U.S.-Israel unprovoked attack on Iran paused to negotiate a peace plan, two new reports indicate that Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza were specifically aimed at killing children and they used the Gaza war as an opportunity to squash dissent and free speech among Israel’s Arab citizens.
A June 23 United Nations report says Israel continues to “deliberately target and kill” Palestinian children. The world body says Israel’s actions amount to “genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Gaza and war crimes in the occupied West Bank.
A June 22 report by the Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights accused the Israeli government and state institutions of using the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israeli concert goers to suppress freedom of expression among its Arab population. The Zulat is an Israeli policy think tank.
Both reports focus on Israeli atrocities even as the settler colonial state intentionally seeks to upend peace negotiations between Iran and the U.S.—who have published a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for peace talks—by continuing to bomb Lebanon. Iran has made a total ceasefire in Lebanon a requirement in the MoU.
The UN report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory documents Israel’s intentional targeting of neonatal and maternity care centers during its war on Gaza that began immediately after the Oct. 7 attack that resulted in approximately 1,200 deaths and about 250 people held hostage.
Israel’s assault on Gaza amounted to deliberate attacks on populated areas that “wiped out entire families across two or three or even four generations, with the Israeli security forces fully aware that children would be present and that children, with their small, fragile bodies, have a higher chance of death and serious injury in such attacks,” the report said.
Thirty percent of people killed in Gaza since the war started have been children, the report said, adding Israel’s daily bombings “endangered Palestinians’ reproductive future and the survival of newborns—driving a rise in miscarriages, birth defects and lasting vulnerabilities among newborns, resulting in the destruction of Palestinian newborn life and the population’s continuity.”
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), at least 21,289 Palestinian children have been reported killed in the Gaza Strip between the start of the conflict in October 2023 and early February 2026. Additionally, over 50,000 children have been injured, with tens of thousands more missing or trapped under the rubble.
An average of one child a day has been killed in the eight months since the October 2025 Gaza “ceasefire,” the UN noted.
“Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the Commission, in a UN release concerning the report. “Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured.”
A doctor visiting a Gaza medical center noted in the report: “Children brought into the emergency department were seeing around them the chaos of mass casualty, with people screaming, limbs blown off, blood … these children were sitting in a corner, staring blankly, not talking and observing all that, without any adults helping them to process or offer any sense of security. Mental health of children has been completely jeopardized.”
Forms of severe mistreatment of children by Israeli soldiers include extrajudicial arrests, torture, and sexual violence. In addition, information has been regularly withheld from parents about their child’s whereabouts.
Last year, the Commission concluded Israeli authorities and its military have committed and continue to commit genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, defined as killing members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
“Everything in Gaza was a target,” Imad Hadad, director of the American Human Rights Coalition, told The Final Call. “The Israeli Army killed children as they walked to school or to get water. They have created an unstable and disabled Palestinian community. Many children are without arms or legs.” Mr. Hadad described Gaza as “a new version of the Holocaust” and convicted the U.S. as a direct participant in the genocide.
The bombings of schools and orphanages in Gaza and East Jerusalem have obstructed cognitive, social and emotional care and development and “disrupted the foundations of Palestinian society,” the report notes.
“The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible,” Mr. Muralidhar declared.
Silencing Palestinian citizens of Israel
The Zulat report on suppression of free speech indicates that since October 7 and throughout the Gaza war, “a widespread perception has taken hold that the exercise of freedom of expression and demonstration among the Arab public constitutes a security threat that must be thwarted in advance, or at the very least significantly restricted.”
Titled “If You Speak, a Policeman Will Come—The Silencing of the Arab Public During the War,” the report said the entire Arab public was viewed as “an enemy” regarding the exercise of freedom of expression and the right to protest. The report describes the systematic silencing of the Arab public, including political persecution, from the beginning of the Gaza war in 2023 until the signing of a ceasefire agreement in October of 2025.
The report said the “silencing policy” had the support of the Israeli police, the Knesset (Legislative branch), the government (Executive branch), the State’s Attorney’s office and the Supreme Court. Arab Israeli citizens were labeled as supporting terrorism or treason and experienced social ostracism, job loss, suspension or expulsion from universities and subject to unwarranted criminal investigations.
The message: “It is forbidden to oppose the war, voice grief over the killing and starvation in Gaza, question the version of events of the government and security forces, or express solidarity with Palestinian victim,” the report noted, adding, “This policy effectively silenced the Arab public.”
Showing support for Palestinian victims or showing solidarity with their cause was viewed by the Israeli government as supporting terrorism or being traitorous. Severe restrictions were placed on Arab demonstrations and protests, as well as social media comments, the report said.
The contention over Arab Israeli rights has further called into question the label of Israel as a democratic state. The report highlights the government’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Arab participation in elections, criminalizing the display of the Palestinian flag, threatening and detaining Arab journalists and falsely accusing Arab politicians of being terrorist operatives or supporting terrorism.
“It is a cliché that Israel is ‘the only democracy’ in the Middle East,” said Mr. Hamad, a Palestinian whose parents and grandparents were exiled to Lebanon, where he was raised, during the first Nakba (catastrophe). Arab citizens of Israel “have citizenship but they are not treated equally.” “Israel is a racist country, and racism is the core of Zionism,” he said.