There is a line in the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry report, released on June 23, 2026, that ought to stop the world cold. The commission’s chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, stated without qualification, “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.” This is not the language of diplomatic reprimand. It is the language of genocide and the commission uses that word deliberately, having already concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. The June report adds the unbearable specificity: it is the children who are the primary instrument and target of this genocide.Between October 7, 2023, and March 31, 2026 – a period spanning two years and five months – at least 20,179 Palestinian children were killed, with a further 44,143 injured. Children constituted approximately 30% of the total death toll, a proportion higher than any previous conflict involving Israel and higher than the comparative averages from the 2008-2009 and 2014 Gaza wars, when children made up approximately 24% of the fatalities. These are not deaths attributable to the general chaos of urban warfare. The commission documents a pattern of individual children being killed by single sniper or drone shots, typically in the head or upper torso. According to doctors on medical missions, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers appeared to be engaged in what they described as a “game” of target practice, with “different body parts being targeted on different days.” The commission concluded, on the basis of forensic evidence and military analysis, that there are reasonable grounds to believe some children were deliberately attacked.Palestinian children receive donated food at a community kitchen in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, Photo: AP/PTI.The targeting was not only individual, but also infrastructural and existential. The report records the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, orphanages and neonatal care centres – all facilities that enjoy special protection under international law and that in Gaza collectively constituted the entire material basis of Palestinian childhood. Starvation, imposed through blockade and siege, caused deaths among children and severely impaired the development of those who survived. Immunisation rates collapsed as the healthcare system was dismantled. The commission noted that nearly all children remaining in Gaza require psychological support; it identified a condition it calls the “occupied psyche,” an intergenerational mental state in which the freedom to play, to imagine, to hope and to construct an identity has been structurally eroded. “Even if the bombs and guns fall silent,” Muralidhar said, “Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight. The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible.”Read this and then ask yourself: What exactly is the international community doing? And before that, ask something harder: How did we arrive at a world in which this question is required asking?The architecture of impunityThe answer to the second question has a long history and a very specific institutional architecture. Israel has operated, for over seven decades, under the assumption, validated repeatedly by events, that it is above international law. This assumption was constructed by the United States veto in the UN Security Council and deployed without exception to block accountability for Israeli actions since 1967. It was enforced by the peculiar grammar of Western political discourse in which any criticism of Israeli state policy is immediately labelled anti-Semitism, a charge whose moral authority derives from the Holocaust and whose political function has rendered Israel uniquely immune to the standards applied to every other state. It was promoted by decades of unconditional arms transfers, diplomatic protection and intelligence sharing that have taught successive Israeli governments that no action – not the settlement programme that international law has declared illegal for over half a century, not the collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population and not the killing of journalists, aid workers and UN personnel – will produce material consequence.This history of impunity is not incidental to the present atrocity, but is its precondition. The sniper who fires at a child in Gaza in 2026 does so within a political culture shaped by 40 years of Israeli governments doing what they wanted without repercussions. The minister who advocates for erasing Gaza operates in an ideological environment, in which, the Israeli state has learned empirically, the international order will do nothing substantial despite expressing concern, convening commissions of inquiry and passing resolutions. Benjamin Netanyahu is not a monster who arrived from nowhere. He is the end product of a system of immunity so thoroughly institutionalised that even the unprecedented step of issuing International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants against a sitting head of government has produced no action, no interruption of arms supplies and no cessation of killings.Unenforced warrantsThe answer is humiliating. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024, the first such warrants issued against the leader of a Western-backed democracy, for the war crimes of using starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder and persecution.Israel’s response was to reject the warrants, describe the ICC as anti-Semitic, refuse to cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry (which notes explicitly in the June 2026 report that Israel did not respond to its requests for information, while both the State of Palestine and Gaza Ministry of Health did) and lobby the US to sanction the court. The US Congress obliged, passing a bill imposing sanctions on the ICC through its Republican-controlled House, though Senate Democrats blocked it from advancing – not, it should be noted, because they disagreed with protecting Israel, but because many believed the ICC had acted unfairly. This is the political universe within which 20,000 dead children constitute a contested question.Palestinians inspect the rubble of homes destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Jabalia, northern Gaza Strip, on Wednesday, May 14, 2025. According to local hospitals, 48 people were killed in the strikes, including 22 children, Photo: AP/PTI.Israel’s campaign of legal obstruction has been sophisticated and sustained. It has filed multiple motions to cancel the warrants. It has delayed International Court of Justice evidence-gathering rounds repeatedly. It has kept the details of its legal submissions in both the ICC and ICJ proceedings classified, making the very material it uses to defend itself against genocide charges hidden from public scrutiny. Netanyahu vetoed a proposal from his own legal advisers to conduct an internal inquiry, a mechanism that would, under the ICC’s complementarity principle, have rendered him immune from international prosecution. He did so due to a strategy built on defiance, rather than innocence: the calculated projection of absolute impunity. The ICC has so far held firm. Its Appeals Chamber rejected Israel’s legal challenges in December 2025, maintaining both the warrants and the investigation. Yet the warrants remain unexecuted, Netanyahu remains in office and children continue to die.Dehumanisation as state policyEven after the October 2025 ceasefire – imprecisely named, since it has functioned less as a termination of hostilities and more as a rebranding of the occupation – over 1,000 people have been killed in Gaza, of whom at least 265 were children. The commission documents children being shot while approaching what Israel designates a “yellow line,” a boundary so vaguely marked and so devoid of clear warnings and safe corridors that the commission stated it constitutes a death trap rather than a demarcation of conflict. Israel’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the June 2026 report by stating it “utterly rejects” the findings, claiming the report failed to mention Israel’s role in facilitating vaccinations. This is the moral register of a state that has killed thousands of children and whose primary rebuttal is that it helped vaccinate a few of them. Also read: Full Text | Justice S. Muralidhar on Israel’s ‘Systematic Way of Ensuring Living Children Are Killed’Furthermore, the report notes something that deserves to be named directly: dehumanisation as state policy. Political leaders, military commanders and public figures in Israel have systematically deployed rhetoric that strips Palestinian children of their human status. Ministers have spoken of Gaza’s civilian population as “human animals.” Senior officials have proposed that Gaza should be “erased.” Soldiers have filmed themselves mocking children’s toys and books lying amid the rubble of the homes they destroyed, a phenomenon the commission explicitly said raises “ethical, disciplinary and legal questions.” This dehumanisation normalises within Israeli military culture what would otherwise be recognised as atrocity.What we are witnessing is not a mere military campaign that has regrettable civilian consequences. It is a deliberate, documented and forensically evidenced attempt to destroy the conditions under which a people can reproduce itself – its children, its hospitals, its schools, its orphanages, its reproductive capacity and the psychological foundations through which a future generation acquires identity and hope. This is exactly what the Genocide Convention of 1948 aimed to prohibit. This is what the “never again” referred to.Here is where the indictment must widen, because Israel could not sustain this project without the systematic complicity of the international order that claims to have built the institutions to prevent such a reality. International community’s moral failureThe US has vetoed multiple UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire. It has continued to supply Israel weapons throughout the period, as covered by the commission’s report, including high-payload munitions that the report specifically identifies as evidence of intent, noting Israel’s persisting use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated residential areas, despite mounting child casualties, indicating that “such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional.” When the ICC issued its warrants, the American response was not to honour the international legal obligations of a state party to the Rome Statute’s fundamental principles, but to legislate sanctions against the court itself. When the Commission of Inquiry produced its reports, the American political class characterised the body as biased. The architecture of accountability that the post-World War II international order constructed – the ICC, the ICJ and the UN Human Rights Council – is being dismantled in real time by the most powerful state on earth, in specific service of allowing the hostilities to persevere. Dusk falls as children play at a temporary tent camp for displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, Saturday, October 6, 2025, Photo: AP/PTI.Europe’s record is barely less damning. The same governments that in 2022 mobilised extraordinary speed and solidarity behind Ukraine, supplying weapons, opening borders and initiating ICC prosecutions of Russian officials within months, have spent two and a half years performing the geometry of concern about Gaza without interrupting the arms transfers that make the genocide possible. France and the United Kingdom have both said they would comply with the ICC warrants if Netanyahu entered their territory. Nevertheless, neither has taken any steps to restrict the military cooperation that has made the warrants necessary in the first place. This discrepancy requires an explanation. The most parsimonious one is that international humanitarian law, in its actual practice rather than its formal commitments, is racially differentiated: Ukrainian children trigger one response; Palestinian children trigger another.India, too, has said nothing of note. A country that presents itself to the Global South as the voice of the oppressed, that based its entire post-independence international identity on solidarity with colonised peoples and which was among the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement signalling that the weak must not be abandoned to the strong, has watched children die in silence, while expanding its defence cooperation with Israel and offering nothing more than the occasional diplomatic formula of “both sides exercising restraint.” This formulation when applied to a nuclear-armed, occupying power and a stateless, besieged and starving civilian population is not neutrality. It is complicity with the grammar of the oppressor. There is also the uncomfortable truth that India’s current political establishment has ideological affinity to Israeli ethnonationalism, making its silence something more specific than strategic calculation. In the language of genocide, silence is a statement. But, India has not remained entirely silent. During his recent visit to Israel, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stunned many by his logorrhoea declaring that India would always stand by Israel, described it as a “fatherland.” India’s position is now part of the record. Also read: Full Text | October 7 and Beyond: Palestinian Ambassador to India Highlights the Many UnknownsThe Global South’s response has been less uniformly ignominious. South Africa filed the ICJ case. Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey and others have either formally supported the court’s proceedings or imposed arms restrictions. Ireland, Spain and Norway have recognised Palestinian statehood in a political act of solidarity. These are meaningful gestures, insufficient in material terms but significant in their refusal to participate in the consensus of abandonment. They also demonstrate that the moral failure demonstrated in this column is not universal – it is concentrated, specifically and consequentially, in the centres of global power that claim to speak the loudest in the name of human rights.A world that documents but does not actThe June 2026 UN report will, as it happens in the ordinary course of international affairs, be cited in future legal proceedings, referenced in academic literature and remembered by historians. It will not, however, stop a single sniper from firing at a child in the head. This gap between documentation and action, between finding and consequence, between the forensic precision of “reasonable grounds to believe some children were deliberately targeted” and the political willingness to act on that finding is precisely the measure of what the human race has become.Photos of Palestinian children killed during the Israeli air and ground operations in the Gaza Strip are displayed during a pro-Palestinians protest, in Istanbul, Turkey, Saturday, Sept. 27, 2025, Photo: AP/PTI.We have built the institutions. We have written the law. We have developed the forensic capacity to document atrocity with clinical precision. What we have failed to do is consolidate the political will to enforce what we claim to believe. The result: the most meticulously documented genocide in human history is unfolding in real time, with its primary victims being children and its chief perpetrator holding an unexecuted arrest warrant, while the primary guarantor of this impunity is the most powerful democracy on earth. Netanyahu is not an aberration. He is the logical conclusion of a world order that decided, sometime around October 2023, that Palestinian children’s lives were negotiable. Every government that has continued to supply weapons, vetoed ceasefire resolutions, condemned Hamas in one breath and then abstained on accountability for Israel in the next and reached reflexively for the phrase “Israel’s right to self-defence” in response to footage of children’s bodies being pulled from rubble is a participant in what the Commission of Inquiry has now formally documented as genocide.“The essence of childhood has been destroyed,” reads the report’s title. This destruction was not accidental. Instead, it was chosen, facilitated and protected by a world that will have to live with its choices. The question is whether it will.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.