A Retired Indian Judge Told the UN: Gaza's Children Were Hunted, Not Just Killed

A number too large to feel

Twenty thousand children killed. It is the kind of figure that is almost designed to be unfelt — repeated so often in the coverage of the Gaza war that it risks becoming background noise rather than an atrocity. Reporting on the latest United Nations findings on the war's impact on Palestinian children forces a pause on exactly that numbness: does a statistic like this still stop anyone, or have such figures simply become normal enough that they no longer register at all?

Last week in Geneva, that number returned to the centre of international attention. Presenting before the United Nations Human Rights Council, Justice S. Muralidhar, chair of the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, laid out what may be the most detailed investigation to date of what the war has done to Palestinian children. The Commission's report — spanning roughly 94 to 100 pages depending on the count — documents violations and crimes committed by Israel against Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory from October 2023 through March 2026. Its central finding is distilled into a single line: "the essence of childhood has been destroyed."

The scale of the findings

According to the Commission, more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed between October 2023 and October 2025, with over 44,000 more injured. Thousands remain missing or buried under rubble, and 97 percent of schools in Gaza have been either destroyed or damaged. Crucially, the Commission found that none of this stopped with the ceasefire — it documented child deaths continuing in the months that followed. As the report puts it, the Commission "found indisputable evidence with regards to the deliberate targeted killing of Palestinian children," including incidents after the October 2025 ceasefire.

Many of these deaths clustered around a shifting military boundary that has come to be known as the "Yellow Line." The Commission's account of what happened there is where the findings turn from statistical to specific. In November 2025, near Khan Younis, two brothers aged 10 and nine were gathering firewood for their wheelchair-using father when an Israeli drone struck and killed them both. Israeli security forces later said they had spotted two "suspects" crossing the Yellow Line toward military positions and treated them as an imminent threat. The Commission's investigation found the children were more than 300 metres from the soldiers' rifles at the time — a distance that undercuts any claim of immediate danger from two young boys. Addressing the Council, Justice Muralidhar said the Commission found evidence pointing to a clear pattern: Palestinian children were being deliberately targeted, not caught in isolated incidents but subjected to a repeated pattern for which accountability must be established under international law.

One name among thousands

One case from the report drew international headlines: a five-year-old girl named Hind, trapped in a car with her family as gunfire surrounded them. For hours, she pleaded for help over the phone with an emergency dispatcher, describing her injuries and the shooting around her. An ambulance was dispatched to reach her — it never got there. Her body, and those of her family and the rescue team sent for her, were found twelve days later. The Commission states there are reasonable grounds to believe that both Hind's family and the rescue team sent to save her were deliberately targeted. The report documents many similar cases: children shot while trying to reach safety, schools, hospitals and shelters struck, thousands of children left permanently disabled, and survivors carrying psychological trauma that will last a lifetime.

The man delivering the findings

Justice Muralidhar is not new to this kind of reckoning. In India, he was part of the bench that, decades after the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, convicted Sajjan Kumar. He reopened the Hashimpura massacre case, delivering convictions against police personnel who had escaped accountability for years. In February 2020, as Delhi riots raged, his court asked the Delhi Police why no action had been taken against hate speeches — a query that was followed by his transfer. Three years after retiring from the bench, that same judge is now telling the UN Human Rights Council what he found in Gaza. Closing his address to the Council, he said that even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight. In a subsequent interview with the Indian Express, he put the stakes more starkly: "If we don't act on the evidence against Israel, we can't redeem ourselves."

The economics behind the war

The report raises a further, uncomfortable question: what happens after the world knows? War is not fought with weapons alone — it is sustained by politics, business and money. Research by the Campaign Against Arms Trade, drawing on Israeli customs data reported by Al Jazeera, found that 51 countries supplied military goods to Israel between October 2023 and October 2025. The largest supplier was the United States; India ranked second. The findings are being described by campaigners as evidence of an "economy of genocide" — profits accruing to companies and states connected to the violence, killing, maiming and destruction in Gaza and other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Whatever view one takes of that framing, the report leaves one question difficult to avoid: the next time a purchase is made, or a brand associated with this war is chosen, whether that choice would look different if the children being counted were one's own.