Israeli Soldiers Kill Kids

Sad and sick ... For forty-five minutes, a 14-year-old boy lay bleeding on the ground outside his own home. There was no fighting that day. An Israeli patrol had simply been passing through, and one of them had shot him as he stepped out of his door. As his life drained away, according to the commissioner who recounted the case, a company of soldiers stood around him, talking among themselves, some of them smoking, until the boy was dead. That single scene, described by Commissioner Chris Sidoti at a press conference in Geneva on Tuesday, sits at the heart of what the UN's independent inquiry calls a deliberate, systematic campaign against the youngest people in Gaza and the West Bank. The commission's verdict is unambiguous. "The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces," said its chair, Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, the former Chief Justice of the Orissa High Court who now leads one of the most closely watched human-rights investigations in the world. The report carries a title that reads like an epitaph: "The essence of childhood has been destroyed." And its findings are difficult to absorb in a single sitting. Since 7 October 2023, the commission says, Israel has killed 20,000 Palestinian children and injured 44,000 more. Behind those numbers sit smaller, crueller details. Newborns who never had a chance because Israel's strikes hit the neonatal and maternity centres meant to keep them alive. Children who starved as a blockade and siege choked off food. Children arrested and taken into Israeli prisons and detention facilities, subjected to torture and severe mistreatment, their families left with no word of where they were. And, the commission states, children subjected to sexual violence as part of what it describes as a pattern of collective shaming and oppression. The destruction, the report argues, goes beyond the body. Orphanages and schools have been dismantled, severing the threads that hold a society's next generation together. The commission speaks of an "occupied psyche", a generation stripped of the freedom to play, to imagine, to hope. This is not damage that ends when the shooting stops. https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/essence-of-childhood-has-been-destroyed-un-inquiry-says-israel-deliberately-killed-gaza-s-children/ar-AA26rbtF?ocid=BingNewsSerp&cvid=6a3c50cf1e7941f0a1bf46755a4dfa4c