A devastating UN report details Israel’s killing and abuse of
Palestinian children while corporate media
continue to amplify official denials.
Gaza’s Most Documented Genocide
— and the Media Still Help Israel Deny It
Robin Andersen / Common Dreams
(July 11, 2026) — In a Double Down News (DDN) video report, British filmmaker Richard Sanders begins a summary of a “horrific new [United Nations] report” with a listing of three atrocities committed by Israeli forces against Palestinian children. Sanders tells of an infant who was shot in the head while breastfeeding in his mother’s arms, a 16-year-old boy whose body was mutilated by an Israeli tank, and teenage boys deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers in a game of “target practice.”
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry released the report on June 23. Titled “The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed,” it was the first to focus on crimes and violations against Palestinian children in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Vijay Prashad at CounterPunch called it an “accusation of extraordinary gravity.”
In 100-pages, the investigation documents Israeli security forces’ direct killing, degrading, and inhumane treatment of Palestinian children, including sexual and gender-based violence and torture. The report also documents the destruction of schools and civilian infrastructure and amounts to a gruesome compendium of how Israel is destroying Palestinian childhood and denying the Palestinian people a future and self-determination. As the human rights lawyer Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chaired the UN commission and led the press conference that announced its findings, bluntly summarized, “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.” This is genocide.
The UN report flatly contradicted the claims made by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace that conditions in Gaza were improving. The UN report stated that the amount of available aid is woefully inadequate to meet the needs of hungry, wounded people, living in appalling conditions, who are being squeezed into 30 percent of what was once the Gaza Strip. The UN report further noted the admission of one Israeli soldier: “It feels like a game. You can sit in some basement of a house, safe, with your helmet off, scratching your balls, half-dressed, and kill Palestinians.”
The new report sits atop an ever-expanding mass of documentation of Israeli war crimes committed since October 7, 2023. This trove consists of journalistic documentation, investigations compiled by the UN and other aid agencies, and by human rights lawyers who have corroborated the testimonies of victims of sexual torture with forensic evidence of their broken bodies. It includes damning evidence from Israeli soldiers themselves, who have recorded their crimes as they committed them and subsequently posted those recordings online.
The combined record of evidence includes visuals of massacres, satellite footage, and audio recordings of specific events such as the January 2024 killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, as documented by Forensic Architecture. Journalists bear witness, with corroborating evidence, to seeing their colleagues killed by targeted Israeli strikes. Compilations of detailed refutations of falsified Israeli “pseudo-evidence” produced to deny its crimes must also be considered a significant part of this trove. In short, as many have observed, the genocide in Gaza is the most well-documented in history.
The Most Well-Documented But Contested Genocide in History
And yet, in the face of all the evidence, Israel’s genocide remains the most contested in history. Israel simply denies what it’s doing. As Ramzy Baroud wrote, Israel’s enemy is not merely its armed adversaries; “it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the UN investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.” Israel relentlessly claims that all these agencies are lying to make Israel look bad, and that all criticism of the state of Israel is based on antisemitism.
A look at the New York Times coverage of the UN’s June 23 report illustrates how the media amplify Israeli denials by dutifully replicating them. Amid details of the carefully documented horrors that lie within the report, the New York Times announced that Israel’s UN mission in Geneva dismissed it as a “libelous sham” and condemned the UN commission as a “fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel.”
Another quote from the Israeli foreign ministry sandwiched in the article claimed that the UN report “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.” The Times let this statement stand without qualification, even though most of it is false. The UN report does include incidents of Hamas killing Israeli children during and since the October 7 attacks—which it also noted were the focus of two prior reports, made to the Human Rights Council in June 2024 and the General Assembly in October 2024—though they pale by comparison to Israel’s subsequent atrocities. Hamas killed one infant on October 7, 2023. In the two years since then, Israel has killed more than twenty thousand children, including 440 newborn babies.
But US media have never fully covered what actually happened on October 7. Israeli civilians and children were killed that day by Israeli security forces who were ordered to fire on everyone, employing the Hannibal Directive, to prevent hostages from being taken.
Additionally, the claim that Hamas used “human shields” during the genocide was always a fabrication. In a May 2025 article titled “One Side Routinely Uses Human Shields in Gaza—But Not the Side That’s Usually Blamed,” FAIR’s Gregory Shupak wrote that Israel and its backers “have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality.” Scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon are cited to explain how the human shield discourse has been misapplied in Gaza: “Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield.” This misdirection “has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.” Shupak added that the “corruption of the meaning of ‘human shields’ has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide.”
Another example from the commission’s report describes BBC reporting of a CCTV videotape of soldiers shooting a boy, then standing around for forty-five minutes watching him bleed to death. They shot at his mother to stop her from coming to his aid. They also blocked two Palestinian ambulances from reaching him, and they were seen planting a rock next to him as “evidence” that Israeli security forces had acted in self-defense.
