5 min readJul 10, 2026 07:07 PM IST
First published on: Jul 10, 2026 at 06:57 PM IST
The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, chaired by Justice S Muralidhar, recently released its report on the killing of children in Palestine. International humanitarian law has long depended on a language that tries to maintain distance — civilians, proportionality, collateral damage, military action. It is a vocabulary designed to describe violence without looking it in the eye. Perhaps this is necessary, because if the language of international law allowed itself to truly feel the grief it governs, it might become impossible to function at all.
But for those of us who have heard Justice Muralidhar reading from his report, that distance — with due respect — be damned. This article refuses it.
The Commission’s findings include deliberate targeting, killing, starvation and torture of Palestinian children. It describes the systematic destruction of infrastructural and psychological spaces that make childhood possible. Hospitals, schools, playgrounds, homes, and their own little bodies.
It also records testimony of Israel Defence Forces soldiers describing the use of high-precision quadcopter drones and thermal image cameras to identify children by the size of their bodies on screens. In the now-famous words of an anonymous Israeli soldier, “(Using drones in Gaza) 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 precision of these tactics is extraordinary. A 10-day-old infant was shot cleanly through the head while being breastfed, and an unusually high number of children have been found with single gunshot wounds to the head or neck. More than 20,000 children have been killed and 44,000 injured. Children make up nearly 30 per cent of the dead in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
There is little here that can still be tucked into the language of distance.
These findings, now part of public record, will predictably provoke arguments over facts, law, jurisdiction, and politics. Supporters will cite the findings as overdue recognition of a humanitarian catastrophe. Critics will dismiss them as biased. The debate will be loud, familiar, and, frankly, beside the point.
For much of the 20th century, shame functioned as a form of power. States feared military defeat, certainly, but they also feared international disgrace. To be branded an aggressor, a violator of human rights, or a perpetrator of atrocities carried tangible costs — diplomatic isolation, domestic criticism, historical condemnation.
But we live in different times. Israel has already demonstrated that it will not be affected by soft power. It has rejected the report, insisting that IDF soldiers are acting within the boundaries of international law. Testimonies from their own soldiers saying the opposite have not moved that position.
Fine.
But the conversation has changed. Even if the Commission’s report never produces a single prosecution, it has narrowed the space in which governments can continue speaking about Gaza while keeping the brutality at arm’s length. Because once these stories enter the official record of the United Nations, language falls away. What remains are images of children running, hiding, and finally appearing on a thermal screen as the outline of a body small enough to identify as a child.
In that sense, the report’s real achievement may already be complete. We can no longer pretend we do not know. And history rarely asks us when we knew. It asks what we did once we could no longer say that we did not.
The question was never how Israel would react. We already knew the answer to that. It is how everyone else will. Europe, the United States, India, the Global South — and every government that has spent the last several decades invoking a rules-based international order will now have to decide whether they can ignore the mass elimination of children in one part of the world while insisting that international law and human rights are the bedrock of modern civilisation everywhere else.
And if, ultimately, the systematic documentation of children being killed, starved, tortured and sexually assaulted still fails to move the conscience of states, then perhaps the crisis is no longer confined to Gaza.
Every international commission leaves behind two records. One is a record of what happened. The other is a record of how the world chose to respond after it knew. History tends to remember both.
Vahanvaty is the author of The Fearless Judge: Life and Times of Justice A M Ahmadi
In the now-famous words of an anonymous Israeli soldier, “(Using drones in Gaza) 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.” 
Share
