By Rachel Rosen, UCL and Mai Abu Moghli, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
(The Conversation) – A fresh round of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza which has killed more than 400 Palestinians has destroyed any hope that the ceasefire negotiated in January would hold. A statement from the child rights group Defence for Children Palestine claimed that 174 children had been killed in the bombing, claiming: “Today is one of the deadliest days for Palestinian Children in history.”
The renewed bombing follows repeated violations of the ceasefire terms by Israel and comes days after a report commissioned by the United Nations said Israel is “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group”. The March 13 report from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory examines what it calls Israel’s “systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence
since 7 October 2023”.
The report alleges deliberate acts have been aimed against mothers and children, including the destruction of Gaza’s main fertility clinic, Basma IVF clinic, which it said amounted to “a genocidal act under the Rome Statute and Genocide Convention”. It concluded that “this was done with the intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, in whole or in part, and that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question”.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has yet to rule on a case brought by South Africa in December 2023 accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. In January 2024 it issued a ruling saying that Palestinians in Gaza had “plausible rights to protection from genocide” and set out provisional measures that Israel should follow to prevent genocide. There is no evidence that Israel has heeded this advice.
Addressing the UN human rights committee in October 2024, special rapporteur Francesca Albanese said she believed it is important to “call a genocide as a genocide”. While noting the legal position according to the ICJ, we agree with her on the grounds that a post-hoc judgement of genocide does nothing to prevent it from occurring.
The commission’s report is not the first time that international organisations and lawmakers have called attention to Israel’s violence against Palestinian mothers and children. In March 2024, Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency Unrwa, wrote on X: “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.” The numbers are “staggering” he said. More children had been killed in Gaza in four months than in all global conflicts in the previous four years.
This has continued throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza. Between October 7 2023 and January 15 2025, children made up at least 18,000 of the 46,707 Palestinians killed in Gaza, according to data collected by the Gaza health ministry. Both figures are likely to be underestimates, as so many bodies remain buried under the rubble.
Most children have been killed by direct military strikes. Israel has dropped an estimated 85,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, killing Palestinians through direct hits, building collapses, fires and inhalation of toxic substances. Doctors have also reported evidence of children being killed in drone attacks and by snipers, including by shots to the head and chest.
On March 2 Israel blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, using starvation and dehydration as military strategy. On March 15 a Unicef report claimed that 31% of children under two years of age in the north of the Strip were acutely malnourished. There has also been a “dramatic increase in child deaths due to acute malnutrition”.
Israel’s destruction of medical and other infrastructure in the strip has resulted in “indirect deaths” by communicable illness and noncommunicable conditions. In April 2024, a report published in science journal Frontiers found that more than 90% of children in Gaza were affected by infectious diseases. There have also been multiple infant deaths from hypothermia as displaced families attempt to survive winter conditions.
Killing the future
The abnormally high child death rate is partly down to demographics. About 47% of Gaza’s population was under 18 years of age at the end of 2022. Children are generally more “susceptible to dehydration, diarrhoea, disease, and malnutrition” according to Unicef which says the nutritional needs for infants under 23 months “are greater per kilogram of bodyweight than at any other time of life”.
“Children 2,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2025
But the problem with these arguments is that they make child mortality rates in Gaza appear as a simple reflection of natural factors. They are not. They are a direct consequence of Israel’s military aggression in Gaza.
Israel has systematically used powerful explosives in densely populated areas and, through AI tracking systems such as “Where’s Daddy?”, deliberately targeted Palestinians in their family homes. Given the deep evidence base about childhood health, the logical outcome of using starvation as a method of war, actively denying aid, and destroying infrastructures that enable life is that children will die disproportionately.
Palestinian children are being killed by design. This has been explicitly articulated by the Israeli state.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was this week reappointed to the Netanyahu government as police minister, has publicly defended the army’s “open-fire” directive declaring: “We cannot have women and children getting close to the border … anyone who gets near must get a bullet in the head.” In January, MP and deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, said every child born in Gaza is “already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth”.
But children represent their community’s dreams for their futures. Killing large number of children in Gaza is not simply forcible depopulation. It is an effort to destabilise communities and crush their hopes for liberation and the right of return as mandated by the UN.
Palestinian children in Gaza have been telling their stories to a global audience. The killing, injury and starvation they are testifying to has proved a powerful counternarrative to the idea that Israel is simply “defending itself”. International humanitarian law states that: “Children affected by armed conflict are entitled to special respect and protection.”
But in Gaza, children are being killed in their thousands.
Rachel Rosen, Professor of Sociology, UCL and Mai Abu Moghli, Assistant Professor, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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