In the raw aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Israel, one could argue that use of extreme and dehumanizing language by Israeli officials was, if not justified, at least predictable. Trauma of that magnitude can go some way toward explaining what came next: then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s characterization of Gazans as “human animals,” or Knesset member Yitzhak Kroizer’s claim that no Palestinian in Gaza is innocent and that “the Gaza Strip should be flattened, and there should be one sentence for everyone there — death.”However, that rhetoric has not receded even after tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, Gazan infrastructure and housing reduced to rubble and the displacement of 90 per cent of the territory’s residents. The persistence of such hate speech marks the presence of a moral and empathetic vacuum.How else can more recent statements be understood? Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called it “just and moral” to starve two million Palestinians. Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Aryeh King declared that “we will drive out, annihilate, kill and eliminate all the people of UNRWA” (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees). Retired Brigadier-General Ofer Winter told Israeli military cadets that “there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”Such hatred and indifference to civilian welfare raises an important question: Do Israel’s government and military, along with those who support them without reservation, remain committed to universal human rights and to jus cogens, the body of legal norms considered fundamental and universally binding to the proper functioning of international justice? Read more: A UN report details the ‘overwhelming’ scale of children killed in Gaza. It raises grave legal questions What the UN commission foundThe pattern of this kind of rhetoric goes some way toward explaining pro-Israeli reaction to a report released in June by the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. Its title alone signals its findings: “‘The essence of childhood has been destroyed:’ Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since Oct. 7, 2023. The report itself is harrowing to read. Covering the period from Oct. 7, 2023 to the end of March 2026 — and drawing on interviews, medical records, satellite imagery, forensic pathology and open-source material — it makes three central arguments. The first is that Israeli authorities and security forces contravened international humanitarian law by deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children. The second is that Israel inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians designed to bring about their physical destruction. The third is that Israel has deliberately sought to make it unsafe for Palestinians to give birth.The report supports these arguments with numbers and testimony. It documents the killing of more than 20,000 Palestinian children by Israeli forces and the injury of 44,000 more. It uses specific cases — in some instances footage soldiers themselves posted to Israeli text messaging groups and shared on social media. It describes Palestinian children subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture, sexual and gender-based violence and prolonged detention, often cut off from family contact or access to lawyers. This has left many with severe psychological trauma.It also details Israeli attacks on hospitals, neonatal and maternity-care facilities and other child-related health infrastructure. While Hamas did in fact hide and deploy weapons in some of these facilities, itself a war crime, these attacks have virtually eliminated Palestinians’ access to essential care and contributed to preventable deaths and long-term harm to newborns and children. All of this, the commission argues, sits within a broader pattern of Israeli state coercion, humiliation and oppression.On that basis, the commission joins a growing number of critics in concluding that Israel has perpetrated genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza, as well as war crimes in the West Bank. Israel disputes these conclusions, deriding what one commentator has called "a case study in institutional imbalance.” It has refused to co-operate with the commission and ignored 13 requests for access or information relating to the report. Instead, the response from Israeli officials and supporters has been limited to questioning the objectivity of the UN commissioner. They accuse the UN of selective and disproportionate focus on Israel’s wrongdoing and criticize the report’s neglect in examining the atrocities perpetrated against Gazans by Hamas.Will anyone act?The commission itself concedes in the June report that more work is required to document Hamas’s crimes against Gaza’s children. That gap is real, although it’s already been addressed in a previous commission report that stated: “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including against Israeli children and child hostages.” The bias claim, then, perhaps holds more water than other criticisms of the report, though not as much as imagined. It is empirically true that the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council have been disproportionately critical of Israel over the years. However, that point doesn’t disprove the commission’s findings on Israeli state violence against children. Nor does it protect those who try to downplay or excuse those crimes from being accused of bias themselves. Read more: Canada’s response to the war in Gaza raises questions about its commitment to human rights and justice There is no view from nowhere. To insist that objectivity requires the absence of all perspective is to misunderstand what objectivity means. And it opens the door to what’s known as the genetic fallacy: the logical error that holds we err when judging the truth of a proposition because of some feature(s) of the person uttering it.Ultimately, the meaning and significance of this recent UN report will depend on whether people care enough about the suffering of Palestinian children to act decisively to stop it. So far, Israel has refused to accept its obligations under jus cogens, and the international community has failed to insist meaningfully that it does so. Which means, for now, that this suffering has no end in sight.Senior Research Associate, U of Manitoba’s Centre for Defense and Security Studies. Board member: American Council for Justice and Conflict Resolution; The Education University of Hong Kong’s Research Centre for the Arts and Public Value; and the Canadian peacebuilding NGO the Group of 78 (G78).