The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed

A displaced Palestinian girl sleeps in the street after the Israeli army ordered them to evacuate the Abu Areif and Al-Mazra'a areas in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip, 21 August 2024 -- Ashraf Amra, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO, via Wikimedia Commons

By Guillermo Barreto

It is 19 April 2025. A 12-year-old girl and her 3-year-old brother are playing in front of their house in the village of Bert-Furik. A group of Israeli settlers kidnaps them. At knifepoint, they drag the children to an olive grove where they are tied to a tree and gagged. Fortunately, the family manages to arrive and untie them. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. A report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, dated 8 May 2026, and identified by the acronym A/HRC/62/22, reveals a bleak picture.

Violence by settlers (Zionist occupiers) against the Palestinian population is not a recent phenomenon. The same report reveals that the number of Palestinians killed or wounded at the hands of settlers has been steadily increasing since 2008, although it acknowledges that such violence has been present since before that year. It is a fact that, even before the founding of the State of Israel, the Zionists used terror to expel the native inhabitants of the land of Palestine. One example is the murder of more than 100 Palestinians—including the elderly, boys, and girls—on 9 April 1948, when squads from the Irgun (a Zionist terrorist organization) entered the village of Deir Yassin and committed that atrocity.

The report mentioned here lists verified cases of violence, including harassment by masked groups against communities and crops, attacks on individuals who are beaten or killed, and the systematic use of sexual and gender-based violence. On 13 March 2026, for example, a group of settlers arrived in the village of Khirbeit Humsa, where they beat women and girls while threatening to rape them if they did not leave the village. At the same time, a man was stripped naked and dragged through the street while being beaten by the settlers. It is noteworthy that these actions by settlers take place under the passive gaze of Israeli occupation forces and, on occasion, with the participation of soldiers.

There is not enough space here to mention the numerous examples provided in this report, but these are documented cases that demonstrate the extent of violence against the Palestinian population—violence that involves not only soldiers of the occupying army but also groups of civilians protected and supported by the State of Israel itself, whose goal is to completely take over Palestinian land.

The violence goes even further. Another report by the same commission, dated 18 June of this year (A/HRC/62/CRP.2) and titled ‘The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed,’ reveals how the Zionist entity has deliberately targeted children in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. In Gaza, more than 21,000 children have been killed—not only in airstrikes against urban areas but also by targeted headshots fired by snipers from the occupying army. More than 44,000 have been wounded, some with lifelong consequences.

Another 58,554 children lost one or both parents. Since 1 October 2025, 151 children have died of starvation. This situation is not limited to Gaza. In the West Bank, at least 213 children have been killed, and 1,665 have been arrested, tortured, and severely mistreated in prisons. A separate chapter would be required to address the treatment Palestinians receive in these Israeli prisons, where basic standards of respect for human rights and dignity are violated. The Commission was unable to obtain data on this situation in Gaza.

The impact on surviving children includes severe trauma that impairs their mobility, loss of vision or hearing, severe psychological trauma, and cognitive impairments with long-term consequences. The Zionist entity has destroyed 97 percent of Gaza’s schools and affected 95 percent of its universities, 22 of which—out of 38—were completely destroyed. This was an attack designed to prevent the education of an entire generation. The ‘final solution’ implemented by the Zionist apparatus with the sole objective of exterminating not only the living population (genocide) but also its culture, knowledge, and history (epistemicide).

The numerous acts of violence described in the report are not a list of isolated incidents committed out of indiscipline or on a whim by a few settlers or soldiers, as has sometimes been claimed by the son of Mr. Benzion Mileikowsky—who adopted the surname Netanyahu and is now Prime Minister of the Zionist entity. The murder of boys and girls is a deliberate and planned act. These are trained snipers who aim for the heads of boys and girls. Soldiers who harass children and make videos of themselves smiling over corpses or terrified boys and girls. The report itself makes it clear that this is part of a state policy. State terrorism is reflected in attacks on the streets, in schools, in hospitals, in the countryside, and in cities—attacks that the perpetrators themselves record and celebrate on social media.

The conclusions of the report A/HRC/62/CRP.2 to which we have referred are a list of horrors to which all of humanity bears witness. It is the final act of a supremacist and genocidal colonial project that prepared an entire population for its execution. Hitler seized power in 1933. He created the Hitler Youth, where thousands of young people were indoctrinated in Nazi supremacist ideology. When the war began in Europe in 1939, the German army already had soldiers prepared to carry out the extermination of those they considered inferior and expendable. It is the same Zionist project trained from school age to hate Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Raised in a culture of hatred that prepared them to dehumanize the ‘other’ and commit, without remorse, the atrocities detailed in this and other reports by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel for the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The great imperial powers have financed and promoted the Zionist supremacist project since its inception. They possess unparalleled media, financial, and military power, as well as the ability to pressure other nations into staying on the sidelines. Never before, however, has the rejection of the Zionist entity by the peoples been so widespread. This is the hour of the peoples. Perhaps times of change are on the horizon. Let us only hope that it happens quickly, because the Palestinian people cannot wait.

Guillermo R. Barreto is Venezuelan and holds a Ph.D. in Science (University of Oxford). He is a retired professor at Simón Bolívar University (Venezuela). He served as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, President of the National Fund for Science and Technology, and Minister of Ecosocialism and Water (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela). He is currently a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Transformations-IVIC.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.