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Israel Continues to Target Children – UN Report

CrossFireArabia
June 23, 2026

Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children, a UN report said on Tuesday.

“Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank,” read the report published by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.

The commission said it had concluded last year that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and found that the intense scale and systematic nature of the Israeli military operations have continued, causing unprecedented death, injury and trauma among Palestinian children.

“The deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza,” the commission said.

“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the commission.

“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,” he added.

“Palestinian children have been arrested and subjected to torture and other severe forms of mistreatment in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, with no information on their whereabouts,” the commission said.

“Israeli security forces have also used sexual violence against children as part of the collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered, and intergenerational pattern of Israeli occupation and hostilities,” it added.

The report said Israel’s targeting of neonatal and maternity care centers in Gaza directly harmed the survival of newborns and Palestinians’ reproductive future, including increases in miscarriages, birth defects and lasting vulnerabilities among newborns.

“Starvation imposed by Israel through blockade and siege have further caused the death of Palestinian children and severely impacted the health of many others, depriving them of essential nutrition and increasing disease risks amid reduced immunization, food insecurity and destroyed health services,” it also said.

“Even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight,” Muralidhar said. “The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible.”

“The protection, care and survival of Palestinian children are inseparable from the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” Muralidhar said. “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.”

The commission said it had identified Israeli military units responsible for killing and injuring Palestinian children and made recommendations to Israel and UN member states to ensure accountability.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Israeli attacks have killed 1,021 Palestinians and injured 3,249 others since late 2025 in daily violations of the ceasefire in effect.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza since October 2023 has killed 73,032 people, injured over 173,300 and caused massive destruction to about 90% of the enclave’s infrastructure, with the United Nations estimating reconstruction costs at about $70 billion.

Since October 2023, West Bank cities and towns have seen near-daily Israeli raids, including arrests and home searches. The escalation by the Israeli army and occupiers has killed 1,173 Palestinians, wounded 12,666, led to the arrest of about 23,000 and displaced 33,000, according to official Palestinian figures. Anadolu

News

At 71,000 Killed: Finally Israel Accepts Gaza’s Health Ministry Stats

CrossFireArabia
January 31, 2026

The Israeli military has accepted the accuracy of the Palestinian Health Ministry’s death toll in Gaza, confirming that about 71,000 Palestinians have been killed in the genocide, after years of refusing to acknowledge the ministry’s reports.

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Thursday, the army said the death toll of around 71,000 killed is largely correct, adding that it did not include those missing and buried under the rubble.

Israel had for years refused to accept the death tolls reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry, even branding it “misleading and unreliable”.

For over 2yrs, most of my pro-Israel guests have angrily denied the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and said they were wildly exaggerated. Now, the IDF has accepted they’re accurate. https://t.co/xE0glY8Sfk
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) January 29, 2026

The military said it was analysing the data, which also does not include those who died of starvation or from diseases exacerbated by Israel’s years-long genocide in Gaza.

While accepting their accuracy, the military said it was looking to distinguish civilian and military deaths in the enclave.

The data published by the Health Ministry regarding the dead and wounded in the Gaza Strip have been used since the beginning of the genocide by many international organizations, including UN agencies, governments, media outlets, and researchers, and there is broad agreement that they are reliable.

Also, several studies have even raised the possibility that the death toll in Gaza is even higher than the Health Ministry reports. In June 2025, a study was released concluding that, as of January of that year, some 75,200 Gazans were killed during the war. At the time, more and more international experts concluded that the Health Ministry’s data is reliable, and may even be very conservative.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry this week, over 71,660 Palestinians have been killed during the genocide in Gaza and 171,340 others wounded according to the Quds News Network.

Culture

‘Yes, it is Genocide,’ Leading Israeli Author Says

CrossFireArabia
August 1, 2025

David Grossman, one of Israel’s most prominent authors, told Italian daily La Repubblica he has decided to start using the word “genocide” to describe the situation in Gaza.

“For years, I refused to use the word ‘genocide.’ But now I can’t hold back from using it, after what I’ve read in the newspapers, after the images I’ve seen and after talking to people who have been there”, he said in the interview published in the paper’s print edition on Friday.

Grossman said coming to the realization that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was an extremely painful process on a personal level, but that he now found such conclusion inescapable.

“I want to speak as a person who has done everything he could to avoid having to call Israel a genocidal state. And now, with immense pain and a broken heart, I have to say that it is happening before my eyes. Genocide,” he said.

The Israeli writer went on to say he now feels a moral obligation to speak up. “I feel an inner urgency to do the right thing, and now it is the time to do it,” Grossman said.

Asked by the journalist about the spiraling death toll in Gaza, he said: “I feel sick. Even though I know that those numbers are controlled by Hamas and that Israel cannot be solely responsible for all the atrocities we are witnessing. Nevertheless, reading in the newspaper or hearing in conversations with friends in Europe the juxtaposition of the words ‘Israel’ and ‘hunger’; to do so starting from our history, from our supposed sensitivity to the suffering of humanity, from the moral responsibility we have always claimed to have towards every human being and not only towards Jews… all this is devastating”, he said.

Grossman’s words come amid growing condemnation of Israel for its actions in Gaza on the international stage, and as several countries, including France and Britain, have pledged to recognize a Palestinian state in the near future.

Palestinians receive food at an aid distribution hub in Gaza City, Friday.

The use of the word genocide to describe Israel’s war in Gaza is also becoming more common in international intellectual circles.

In mid-July, an opinion piece titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” in the New York Times by Professor Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, made the case for the use of the word genocide.

Grossman, who is one of Israel’s most well-known writers abroad, has long been a vocal critic of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, recently described him as “the only [living Israeli] novelist with comparable moral authority” to that of the late Amos Oz. In the interview in La Repubblica, he reiterated that he considers Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the Six-Day War as a key watershed moment in the country’s history.

“I am absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Perhaps people are tired of hearing about it, but that is how it is,” he said.

Grossman also noted it is critical to ensure those harboring antisemitic sentiments do not “use and manipulate” the word genocide. He also criticized Hamas for turning Gaza into a base for launching rockets into Israel in the aftermath of Israel’s withdrawal in 2005.

“The Palestinians’ big mistake is that they could have turned the Strip into a thriving place, but instead they gave in to fanaticism and used it as a launching pad for missiles against Israel”, he said.

“If they had made the other choice, perhaps this would have prompted Israel to also give up the West Bank and end the occupation years ago”, he said.

Grossman also added that many around the world still fail to understand the magnitude of the trauma of October 7 for Israelis.

“Many people still don’t understand what it meant for us. Many people I know [in Israel] have abandoned our common left-wing values since that day; they have given in to fear, and suddenly their lives have become easier, they feel accepted by the majority, they no longer need to think,” he said.

Grossman considers resettling Gaza, as some Israeli ministers advocate, wrong and self-defeating. “I hear people like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir saying that we must rebuild settlements in Gaza, but what are they saying? Don’t they remember what happened when we were there, with Hamas killing hundreds of Israeli civilians, women and children, without us being able to protect them? We did not leave Gaza out of generosity, but because we could not protect our people”, he argued.

Looking forward, Grossman said he remains a believer in the two-state solution. As such, he praised French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, that was followed by similar statements by other leaders. “I don’t understand the hysteria it has provoked here in Israel”, he said.

Finally, Grossman rejected accusations that Israel’s cultural elites should have taken a stronger stance on what is happening in Gaza a lot faster. “I believe that targeting those who have fought the Occupation for 70 years, who have invested most of their lives and careers in this battle, is unfair”, he concluded.

Haaretz

Features

Starvation in The Gaza Genocide

CrossFireArabia
July 20, 2025

Gaza is starving. There has never been like it in this Israeli-induced and enforced genocide that has now been going on for about 19 months and counting.

People are literally falling in the streets and in front of the television cameras because of the biting hunger that doesn’t seem to end at the hands of a merciless Israeli enemy.

Of the people who manage to get to the dilapidated and destroyed hospitals they are dropping off on the doors of these institutions with many losing consciousness and even shrieking the last breath of death. And people die while the people in the world looks on with lavish feasts.

UNRWA says Israeli is systematically and willfully starving the Palestinian population into submission; they want them either dead or expel from their ancestral homes in the Gaza Strip. The UN refugee organization says that up to 1 million children are threatened with death through starvation. These figures are given as they are the most natural thing in the world.

This is one of the worst periods of the genocide as Arab and Israeli makers meet in Doha and elsewhere try to end this nightmare but to no avail as politics over-rides common sense and decency.

Dr Mohammad Abu Salmiyah, director of the Al Shifa Hospital says that neither patients nor medical staff nor ancillary personnel in the whole of the Gaza hospitals, which number 36 in total, have had anything to eat in the last 24 hours.

Al Jazeera correspondent Anis Alsharif says neither him nor the other anchors have had a bite to eat since Saturday afternoon because there isn’t any. People around here walk aimless until their last breath of death. Yet people, except for the frail seems to go on, as if their is an ordained hand telling, forcing them to go on.

The Israelis have refused to let anything into Gaza since last March when they realized that there was a possibility that Palestinians would flourish again; and this is after they threw on them around 100,000 tons of bombs, facilitated by their American benefactors – a situation that begun soon after, 7 October, 2023.

There is simply no food into the strip thanks to Israel. Even animal fodder, which Gazans had been reduced to eating in order to survive in the first period of starvation in 2024 and early 2025, has run out. Then fodder like wheat and barely was eaten to survive, but this appears to be the end game.

In this brave new world of starvation and famine, food has become a scarce, nay, non-existent commodity because of Israeli policies to beat the Palestinians with but they will not win despite the evil intentions.

UNRWA continues to appeal to the international community to force Israel to lift its tight and claustrophobic siege on Gaza and let the aid, food and medicine into the strip. Meanwhile, it says it has its cargoes lying in the Sinai Peninsula waiting to be delivered to the starving people of Gaza. It says in its storehouses, it has three months of supplies but it’s waiting for the might of Israel to upon up the borders.

Meanwhile people are continuing to die starting from Rafah, in Khan Younis in the center of the Strip to the far-northern areas in Jabalia, Biet Lahia and Biet Hanoon where fighting is still going on between Palestinian resistance fighters and the Israeli army.

In comes the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which has since last May tried to provide food parcels at distribution centers run by US and Israeli personnel and which is today turning into a “free-shooting killing field” of starving Palestinian that has young been denounced by the United Nations as “weaponizing food” with very sinister connotations that include depopulating Gaza of its original inhabitants.

Seeing is believing. Palestinians, and on a daily basis, and under the eyes of the world are shot fatally on a daily basis. Take Sunday for example, the number of those that have killed is already in the 60s. As they run to get their food parcels they are shot by Israeli soldiers guarding the distribution centers. They are shot with no compunctions but with a sense of hellish deliverance.

And it is the social media who are narrating, nay “dancing” on the graves of the Palestinians. This war is probably the most documented set of atrocities, but people, the international community, gaze on with a sense of helpless, frustration and complicity. Professor Amos Goldberg, who teaches Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, doesn’t mince words. He says this is a “disgusting genocide”.

News

US Sanctions UN Official For Exposing Genocide

CrossFireArabia
July 12, 2025

The US State Department’s decision to sanction UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, is deeply alarming. It reflects the official US stance against any independent effort to expose the genocide and systematic violations committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

This decision marks a dangerous shift away from the core principles of international law and human rights. It directly targets the United Nations and its mechanisms, undermining the independence of special rapporteurs, who should be protected and supported in carrying out their impartial mandates, not punished for fulfilling them or for recognising crimes as such.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions last Wednesday evening against the Special Rapporteur, citing her efforts to “prompt action against US and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.

Euro-Med Monitor stresses that Francesca Albanese was among the few who demonstrated the moral and professional courage to call events in Gaza what they truly are: a genocide unfolding in full view of the world. She spoke openly about the complicity of major powers, led by the United States, in arming and covering up this crime, and criticised states that failed to act on the arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he transited through their territory or airspace.

Albanese’s work is legitimate and fully aligned with her official mandate from the Human Rights Council, which tasks her with monitoring violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Her documentation efforts and calls for accountability lie at the heart of that mandate. Calling for accountability is not “warfare,” as Rubio claimed, but an act of upholding international law.

Furthermore, recommending sanctions or an arms embargo is consistent with the peaceful measures permitted under international law to address international crimes. It is entirely unreasonable to treat advocacy for upholding international law as a crime.

The US sanctions violate the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which grants UN officials, including special rapporteurs, immunity from legal or administrative action for acts or statements made in their official capacity.

Albanese’s reports and statements fall squarely within her official duties and mandate, making her legally protected from any retaliatory or punitive measures, including economic or political sanctions imposed in response to her official work.

As a party to the Convention, the United States is legally obligated to respect the functional immunity of special rapporteurs and refrain from taking any action against them in response to their official work.

Instead of reviewing its harmful policies regarding Israeli crimes, the US administration chose to punish those who exposed its complicity. Sanctioning Albanese is a desperate attempt to suppress the truth and a warning to anyone who dares to defend the victims of Israeli crimes.

Beyond the United States’ blatant double standards and constant use of sanctions as a political tool, this move signals explicit and official opposition to the foundations of international law, including the principle of accountability and the mechanisms for its protection and application. It amounts to a direct assault on international law and a systematic effort to undermine its framework, revealing a clear intent to subordinate the legal order to power and hegemony rather than justice.

The US decision is a clear expression of deepening official complicity in the genocide, not only through military and political support, but also by targeting anyone who seeks to expose or stop it, even through speech or legal means, as seen previously with sanctions against International Criminal Court judges who issued arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals.

Euro-Med Monitor fully supports Francesca Albanese and her principled stance based on international law and moral conscience. These sanctions should provoke widespread international condemnation and genuine solidarity, as they aim to intimidate independent voices and silence witnesses to ongoing crimes.

The United Nations, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, all UN Special Rapporteurs, and the international community must act urgently to safeguard the independence of the international human rights system and prevent it from being held hostage to political blackmail by major powers.

Justice is not a crime, and speaking out about the genocide in Gaza is not a crime; silence and complicity are. The world now faces a crucial test of its commitment to values, the rule of law, and justice.