The attacks by Israel on Gaza show a targeted annihilation of children that should be punished, the head of a UN panel that probed the excesses told RT India.
The violence unleashed by Israeli forces was “unjustified and disproportionate… in considerable terms,” Justice S. Muralidhar, the chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, said in an exclusive interview.
“The excuse that Hamas could be using hospitals and schools as bases to carry out its attacks will not justify completely demolishing 97% of all of Gaza’s schools,” he said.
The Gaza war began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent military operation devastated much of Gaza, killing over 73,000 Palestinians and injuring more than 173,000, according to the local health authorities.
Muralidhar presented the findings of the UN panel on Tuesday and discussed the Israeli violations against children.
Citing a pattern of targeted attacks on children, he said: “When you shoot a 10-day-old baby breastfeeding on his mother… through his head, you can by no means label such a baby as an enemy of the State of Israel and justify these kinds of attacks.”
Israeli quadcopters with thermal imaging cameras can clearly distinguish a child from an adult, he said.
That children were specifically targeted is clear from the number of “instances of babies with gunshot wounds to their head and neck to cause maximum damage.” He added that babies were aimed at with “tiny cube-shaped pellets” that “spread like a cluster of ammunition and destroy all the internal organs.”
“So it became very clear… that babies were special targets,” Muralidhar, who once served as chief justice at the high court in the eastern state of Odisha, said.
He noted that Israeli soldiers recounted on TV how they targeted children with quadcopters, claiming that “their commanders complimented them for doing that.”
Muralidhar said the pattern was clearly revealed “by a collection of all the forms of evidence,” including forensic and medical.
Israel carried out airstrikes on the most densely populated areas, knowing that children would constitute a sizable proportion of the population, he said, adding: “The demolition of the hospitals is [done] with patients still... in the hospital.”
Muralidhar noted that “one of the elements of genocide is to prevent childbirths,” claiming that for Israeli forces, “mothers who are pregnant are targets, and they are denied any nutritious intake, so the mothers are malnourished.”
He added that hospital equipment was destroyed, while doctors were prevented from bringing in new equipment and emergency medication.
“So one can clearly see a pattern that reproductive health is being targeted. Newborn babies are targeted,” he said, while also claiming that “Israel targets the orphanages” and noting that the report cites “over 58,000 orphaned children in two years.”
Muralidhar lamented the “failure of all UN member states… to prevail upon Israel to comply with the three provisional orders of the International Court of Justice, [which] weakens the international legal order.”